DGS: Tasmanian Wine Night

On Friday night, after a few rounds of endlessly debating what to do with the evening, a group of five of us found ourselves in my living room, too lazy to join the crowds milling around downtown. It had been raining the entire day, so the toads in my ponds were happily frolicking in the fresh water, and loudly mating. So it seemed fitting to pop open the bottle of Barking Frog Pinot Noir that Jeff brought for me from Oregon, particularly also because I was curious to see how it matched up with the Tasmanian Pinot Noirs were we going to try at DGS the following night. Well, I loved the glass cork – super fun! Other than that, I must admit being a little disappointed with the wine. To be sure, it was very smooth, with just the thinnest layer of tannins coating my tongue. The color was a nice, light red. But there wasn’t much of a nose, and it tasted a little watery without a kick at the end. Still, it was a nice enough wine to drink and we spent a pleasant evening chatting and laughing about movies.

With the taste of Oregon still fresh in my mind, I was excited to re-try the Tasmanian wines we had lugged back. DGS was a cozy affair – about a dozen people, just enough to squeeze around the dining table. For food, we prepared cheese and chocolate fondue, along with chicken and steak, tons of fruits, bread, and mum-made walnut brownies. Very nice (and affordable) spread, if I say so myself.

We kicked off the evening with the bright and refreshing Riesling from Stefano Lubiana, the Stefano Lubiana Alfresco Riesling 2008. Everyone really enjoyed the slight tinge of sweetness and the fizz on their tongues. Wonderful way to get the taste buds alive.

We opened the Bay of Fires Chardonnay 2008 next. In comparison to the Riesling, this was heavy, but with enough acidity to make it lively and not dumb. Now this is a nicely balanced Chardonnay – just a touch of butter and lemon.

We moved on to the Moorilla Estate Praxis Pinot Noir 2008 from Hobart next, and I was struck by the stark contrast with the Barking Frog. Now this one had a lovely nose – fruity, with some earth, just the way I like my Pinots. It had a thicker body too, more solid, but just as smooth.

Our next wine, the Pipers Brook Tamar 2004, elicited mixed responses. Everyone fervently agreed that it did smell like ketchup, but some, like RX, was not a fan. Where’s the fries, she asked.

We then went back to Stefano Lubiana, for the Stefano Lubiana Merlot 2006. Now, I remember that it wasn’t my favorite wine from the trip; we just felt like we had to buy at least two bottles from that winery, since we were getting Lubiana to help us ship a case of wine back to Singapore. Nonetheless, it was a solid wine, and RX expressed her enthusiasm for it.

At this point, people were starting to flag a little from the hearty food and wine. So I broke out the Delamere Blanc de Blanc 2004, a beautifully made sparkling that had just the right touch of yeast, bubbles, and sweetness. Loved it!

We sat around chatting and laughing for a while more, about all things irreverent, and then I decided to open another bottle, the Frogmore Creek Ruby Pinot Noir Port NV. I loved this port. The Frogmore Creek tasting was our last winery tasting, and I had resolved not to buy any more. However, the port was so delicious I couldn’t help it. So it was a delight to drink it again, and a bonus when RX decided she had had enough and gave me the rest of her glass.

Fun times, great wines. I didn’t check, but I do hope that everyone went away with similarly favorable impressions of Tasmanian wines.

Connecting the dots

WW reminded me of Steve Job’s excellent commencement address he made at Stanford back in 2005:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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Weekend with the girls

I love Chicago, but not for the lack of close girl friends to hang out with. Singapore’s great in this aspect, especially since RX, TPR, and J have also moved back to town. Plenty of chances to just chill out and gossip – although none of that thrilling Sex and the City variety. Our conversations tend to revolve around food, food, food. Even when we do stray to the topic of sex, somehow it ends up going back to food. Case in point – TPR: “Oh the other day, I learnt that you could reduce the size of your boobs post-pregnancy by placing heads of lettuce on them.” Or, “Did you know that if you castrate a pig, the pork won’t have that funky smell?” “Hmm, I wonder if they castrate sheep then… mutton still has that weird, off-putting taste.”

Anyway, this afternoon, it was off to lunch with these three of my favorite girls – dim sum at Imperial Teochew. The food was quite delicious, especially the salty egg yolk steam bun, which was slightly salty, slightly sweet, very buttery, and according to TPR, had the texture of a Reese’s peanut buttercup. But even in the face of all that food, the conversation kept going back, despite our best attempts, to other types of food that we wanted to eat. We even plotted a pilgrim-themed Thanksgiving meal for the end of the month (scary how we’re already into September. Eight more weeks to year end!).

Afterwards, stomachs bulging and loathe to head straight home to watch the rest of Sunday pass aimlessly by, we sat ourselves down at a cafe for some coffee and tea.

Altogether, a super pleasant way to pass the Sunday, and a great follow-on to what was already a super fun Saturday. Quick recap of that: Denise wine tasting with the girls (RX, Janice, Harn, Jacq, JH); a movie with Jacq and JH followed by a long dinner at Ikea where we feasted on meatballs and fried chicken wings.

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WSJ: Slump Sinks Visa Program

There’s hope yet. WSJ reports on the glut of H1-B visas this financial year:

By MIRIAM JORDAN OCTOBER 30, 2009

A coveted visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier U.S. technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

The program, known as H-1B, has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, where many companies have come to depend on securing visas for computer programmers from India or engineers from China. Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of Sept. 25 — nearly six months after the U.S. government began accepting applications — only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

In addition to the weak economy, companies have curbed applications in the face of anti-immigrant sentiment in Washington and rising costs associated with hiring foreign-born workers.

Usually, all visas are allocated within a month or two from April, when applications for the following fiscal year are first accepted. But this year, six months later, “you can still walk in with an application and you’re still highly likely to get approved,” said R. Srikrishna, senior vice president for business operations in North America for HCL Technologies Ltd., an Indian outsourcing company.

The sagging economy, which has pushed U.S. unemployment to 9.8%, has crimped expansion in the technology sector, traditionally the biggest user of the H-1B program. Julie Pearl, a corporate immigration lawyer in San Francisco, said that at least a third of her clients have cut their hiring of H-1B visa holders in half from a year ago.

“Most companies just aren’t hiring as many people in general,” Ms. Pearl said.

For Indian outsourcing companies, historically the largest recipients of H-1B visas, the economy as well as political pressures have prompted a cutback in applications. The recession has trimmed technology budgets at their U.S. clients; at the same time, Washington has scrutinized hiring from abroad more closely amid high unemployment at home.

Instead of bringing over Indian engineers, HCL has been hiring American employees who otherwise might have been let go by clients switching the work to HCL, Mr. Srikrishna said. Last year, HCL hired more than 1,000 employees from clients and received just 87 H-1B visas, he said.

Political pressures have come to bear among other applicants as well. Companies that receive federal bailout funds must prove they have tried to recruit American workers at prevailing wages and that foreigners aren’t replacing U.S. citizens. That regulation caused Bank of America Corp., among others, to rescind job offers to dozens of foreigners.

In addition, would-be immigrants from India and China are finding new career opportunities at home as those economies grow relatively quickly while the U.S. economy sags and its political climate appears less welcoming.

Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied H-1B visas, said that trend has been compounded by what he sees as rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. “The best and the brightest who would normally come here are saying, ‘Why do we need to go to a country where we are not welcome, where our quality of life would be less, and we would be at the bottom of the social ladder?’” Mr. Wadhwa said.

The cost and bureaucracy of applying for H-1B visas is another deterrent. Lawyers’ fees, filing fees and other expenses can easily reach $5,000 per applicant.

And immigration lawyers say some would-be employers are put off by a crackdown on fraud. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the H-1B program, has been dispatching inspectors on surprise company visits to verify that H-1B employees are performing the jobs on the terms specified. The fraud-detection unit in coming months is expected to inspect up to 20,000 companies with H-1Bs and other temporary worker visas.

“It’s an invasive procedure that is both stressful for the employer and the foreign national employee,” said Milwaukee lawyer Jerome Grzeca, whose employment-visa business is down 40% since last year.

The numbers represent a sharp turnaround for a program that many companies had complained was too stingy with its visas. Year after year, U.S. businesses braced for “visa roulette,” as applications to bring in highly skilled foreign workers far outstripped demand, forcing the government to hold a lottery to award them.

High-tech companies, such as Microsoft Corp., have been lobbying Congress for years to raise the cap. At the same time, some U.S. legislators have been calling for restrictions on the program, which they say displaces American workers.

Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote a letter this month to the new director of citizenship and immigration services, urging tighter controls on H-1B visas. In April, Mr. Grassley and Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin introduced legislation to require companies to pass more stringent labor-market tests that would ensure they make a bigger effort to hire U.S. workers.

Companies that use H-1B visas argue the market, rather than Congress, should dictate the number of visas issued. The fact that the 65,000-visa cap hasn’t been reached this year shows that the market will temper demand when necessary, said Jenifer Verdery, director of work-force policy at Intel Corp., who represents a coalition of companies that use the visas.

“Contrary to the claims of H-1B critics, if importing cheap labor were the goal of H-1B visa employers, these visas would have been gone on the first day applications were accepted last spring,” Ms. Verdery said. “In slow economic times, such as today, the demand decreases and the market takes over, which is as it should be.”

In 2008, 44% of approved H-1B visa petitions were for foreigners working as systems analysts or programmers. The second-largest category consisted of professionals working in universities. Indians account for about half of all H-1B visa holders.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the U.S. work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft’s patent applications in the U.S. came from new inventions by visa and green-card holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

Google Inc. also says that the H-1B program allowed it to tap top talent that was crucial to its development. India native Krishna Bharat, for example, joined the firm in 1999 through the H-1B program, and went on to earn several patents while at Google. He was credited by the company as being the key developer of its Google News service. Today, he holds the title of distinguished research scientist.

—Niraj Sheth, Geoffrey A. Fowler, S. Mitra Kalita and Pui-Wing Tam contributed to this article.

Quiet Weekend

Tone of the weekend was chill – no sweating under the hot sun, no feeding of mosquitoes = no climbing. I had deliberately set aside the entire Sunday to stay in to read, and think about stuff. Honestly, I wasn’t all that productive. All I have to show for it are some pages of reading (not nearly enough; not by half, bleah), and several more stages cleared for Bejweled on the iphone. It’s been ages though, since I’ve given myself that kind of time out to catch up on sleep and just nua.

Not to say that I cooped myself up the entire weekend. Friday night, a bunch of us gathered at Ruoxi’s, ostensibly to exchange photos and videos from our Redang dive trip. Instead, we just tucked into mounds of delicious food – nasi lemak, curry chicken, otah etc. And then, bellies full, we spontaneously decided to sing some karaoke. What a trip – in the next two hours, we revisited all the popular songs from way back. Anyone walking by our tiny little room could have instantly pegged our age group. I’d quite forgotten how delightlfully cheesy the Grasshopper MTVs were.

Somewhat spontaneously again on Saturday evening, another bunch of us gathered at Palex’s, to admire his enormous LCD TV and humungous collection of movies. Because it was the DGS group, we brought along some wine, including a bottle of Meadowbank Henry James Pinot Noir from Tasmania (absolutely delicious, and impossibly smooth!). Peirui and I, the two girls in the group of five, overruled the boys’ preference to watch Surrogates. So we saw The Ugly Truth instead, and we thought that the boys secretly preferred that choice as well, judging from their awws, and so sweet at various points in the movie. Fun and relaxing evening though; should have gatherings like that more often!

Chifun: Celebratory Dinner at Xiyan

Again lifting from Ruoxi’s page over at Chifun – her review of Xiyan when the DGS crowd and Jeff went a couple weeks ago now. Like she mentioned, the wine was sadly unremarkable. I should have brought my wines from Tasmania – but at $30 a corkage, a little hard to digest. Nonetheless, well fed and lubricated (four bottles), we were a noisy bunch. Hopefully, we weren’t too loud for the two love birds at the table next to us (and their scary bouquet of balloons):

This was my second trip to Xiyan, a boutique Chinese restaurant helmed by HK celebrity chef Jacky Yu. Started in Hong Kong, it popularized the private dining concept, making humble regional dishes high-brow yet still comforting at the same time. Both times I ate there at the behest of PS, who after our first wine tasting dinner thought so favorably of the restaurant that she would gather 12 of us this time to fill up an entire table, amongst them Jeff who was visiting and many of the wine-sipping folk from DGS. Ironically, the wines we picked were at best undistinguished and even worse corked (though the waitress changed immediately with apologies), but the conversation was definitely interesting and got more raucous as the night went on.

We went through a gut-busting 12 courses that evening. If I were to ever visit Xiyan again, I would prefer not to repeat that, for 12 courses were just too much food to bear, even with a few champion eaters in the house (ww, i’m looking at you).

Momo-tomato

I would be more selective, and save the bulk of my stomach for their specialties which I could and would order over and over again, for each of the three star dishes did not disappoint. An appetizer of gorgeously sweet and ripe momotaro tomatoes slick with liquid sesame and wasabi cream was gone in no time whilst we settled down and sipped our first bottle of wine.

Salivating Chicken

While the name of salivating chicken course was inelegant, there was definitely no false advertising since we were definitely salivating over the punchy flavors of the fermented bean paste and chili oil that forms a sludgy sea around a whole poached chicken. The dish is further supplemented by ingenious addition of century eggs to provide added earthier flavors and konnyaku noodle threads to mop up the addictive sauce in place of rice.

Fish with Pomelo Salad

The last no-fail signature dish is a whole fried seabass perched on a thai style pomelo salad. The flesh is just cooked through even though the shrimp-paste coated skin and fins were fried to such crispiness that we in fact treated them like chips. The pomelo salad’s sweet and tart flavors added flavor to the otherwise unseasoned fish, the pearly pulp contrasting with the silken quality of the fish.

Carnivores can eat really well at Xiyan, for while the other meat dishes were not as satisfying as the three signatures, each dish was quite tasty on their own.

grilled thai pork cheek with thai style dressing

There’s a plate of grilled por served with a fish-sauce and lime juice based dip resembling Vientamese nuoc nam. The thinly sliced pork is sweet like char siew with a nice char, the level of tastiness elevated with the tiny dice of fresh lime, which when popped into the mouth with the pork and a swish of sauce provided additional pops of tang and savoriness.

Drunken prawns in Shanghainese marinade

A big plate of cold prawns, steamed then steeped into a wine marinade was highly addictive. We tore into the flavorful prawns, sucking at the shell and head, our tongues growing numb from the lethal szechuan peppercorns that are invariably thrown into the marinade. A basin filled with beef was another good dish, texturally perfect with the efforts of slow braising evident in the moist chunks of meat and slippery soft tendons. Flavorwise it boasted the spicy and heavy profile similar to the chicken, and the spicing of the prawn, unfortunately leading a flavor fatigue. Perhaps a different treatment, a sweeter soy-based sauce ala cantonese stewed beef would fare better.

Tofu in golden yolk sauce

Vegetarians however are somewhat out of luck at Xiyan, most of the vegetable focused dish clunkers. The best in the mix was a dish of cubed silken tofu in a yellow-tinged sauce, the color derived from undoubtedly more than a healthy number of salted-egg yolk, the broth taking on a chowder-like consistency. Simple, but very original. Then there were the medley of very blah dishes, the DIY lettuce wrap with stir fried vegetables with dried oysters reminded me of a skinless popiah, the stir fried spinach there for the sole fact of providing vitamin a and c into our diet, and the intermezzo of simply pickled green mangoes, while a welcome palate cleanser after a series of heavy dishes, could hardly qualify as a dish. Perhaps some more thought could be applied towards creating more inventive food for herbivores.

rice dumplings

Our epic dinner ended with a bowl of multi-colored rice dumplings in sweet ginger soup, the filling not your typical peanut or black sesame but an intriguing mix of ingredients not usually linked with tang yuan. Its both sweet and savory, largely tasty and most definitely quirky, not unlike the personality of Xiyan the restaurant. Try guessing what’s inside. And no, I’m not telling!

The Bao Man

Over coffee with an associate, he shared with me the story of a mutual acquaintance, M.

M was his primary school classmate. At a recent class gathering, everyone was catching up after years of absence. One by one, they introduced themselves. Oh, I work in a fund now, said one. I’m a lawyer, said another. Someone else arrived, in a big, fancy car; banker dude. Then they turned to look at M, who shrugged and said, “Oh, I boh tak chek one. I sell baos” (I am not educated. I see steamed Chinese buns).

There was an awkward silence, to be sure, and people started to tactfully change the subject. But then M shared his story.

His family was rich. I vaguely remember him, at events in school which his mom sponsored, because yes, they were that wealthy. When he went to secondary school, his chauffeur dropped him off and picked him up after.

Then one day, when he was in junior college, M received a call. It was his father. I need you to come home immediately, he said, quit school and come home now. I will explain later. So M went home, perturbed and confused.

His father shoved a letter into M’s hand, sign it, he commanded. It was a letter declaring that he, M, was voluntarily pulling out of school because his parents were now bankrupt. They each owed the bank millions and millions of money. Now, the details of what happened are unclear, at least to me, but senior M was shuffled off to jail.

M was left to fend for his family. He took on all kinds of odd jobs. He went to China, invested in fake branded bags and peddled them. He got caught. He became a bookie. He got caught again. After many such starts and stops, M decided to go to cooking school. With the skills he learnt, he opened up a bao shop, selling buns.

Today, he owns four bao shops across Singapore, each shop easily netting him profits that eclipses anything that his other high flying classmates make. Sometimes, when the bug bites, he buys a one-way air ticket to wherever exotic destination catches his fancy, where he wanders around until he gets lost (and then pays someone to guide him back).

Chi Fun: Delightful evening at Ember

Totally lifting this off Ruoxi’s page over at Chi Fun – her review of our evening at Ember when Jeff was in town. Totally delicious meal; and still memorable, even though it was my third trip there.

PS has been raving about ember for a while, so on her third trip to this restaurant, I made it a point to tag along, with Dawn as a late substitute for WW.

It is just as well that Dawn’s there because I’ve been meaning to treat her to foie gras for her birthday, and Ember has not one, or two, but 4 different versions on their menu, all pan seared as per my preferences too. The two versions we ended up ordering were devoured in no time, the high quality liver, creamy without any grainy-ness of mediocre foie melting soft, the organ’s unctuousness tempered by the stewed apples and chutnied and spiced pears.

oyster poppers

Of course, one shouldn’t, even if one could, make a meal solely out of foie gras, so we also ordered oyster poppers for an aquatic source of cholesterol, fat oysters lighted battered and tempura-ed, their juices squirting outwards as we bit into them. A series of sauces accompany the oysters but I prefer them naked, with a hint of lemon. The standout appetizer turned out not to be the foie gras, but a spicy pasta dish littered with sakura ebi shrimp, its taste an uncanny proxy for hae bee hiam, many times more refined.

Chilean Seabass

PS is a consummate saleswoman, convincing both PR and Dawn to order her favorite main course, the chilean sea bass. Environmentalists would probably throw a fit on the inclusion of this endangered by overfishing species on Ember’s menu. But we are weak, and choose not to confront the moral dilemma but instead just fully enjoy the fish, its pristine white flesh that simply melts in the mouth (a rather unusual sensation when talking about fish), the creamy bacon infused mushroom ragout providing an added savory dimension to the dish. Bacon appears again tucked amongst a bed of lentils on which my slab of duck confit laid. The duck was cooked a point, a crisped but grease-less exterior that gives with the slightest pressure of the knife to reveal flavorful, juicy meat. A little salty, but very correct, very french.

Rack of lamb

As yummy as my dish was, it suffered after a while from monotony, after which I turned my attentions to P’s lamb chops. P almost always orders lamb when he has the opportunity to, thus it is with good authority that he declares it to be very delicious, particularly when that view was validated by our entire dinner party. What makes it special was the south east asian spices that encrusted the generous portion of pink lamb, imparting a thai inspired flavor and would be what I consider fusion done well. And I just kept swiping the sides off his plate whenever P was not looking, enamored with the caramelized eggplant (only my favorite vegetable) and the more traditional potato gratin, a delicious and sinful side even though it did not necessarily add anything to the dish on a whole.

Compared to the fireworks encountered for the mains, dessert was comparably tame though uniformly executed. The apple tartin and banana tart both possessed buttery and crisp shells, and the lavender ice cream that accompanied the banana tart successfully imparted a restrained note of lavender without tasting like potpourri. It’s possibly the only version of lavender flavored food that I’ve ever tried and actually liked. Last dessert of the night was the ubiquitous molten chocolate cake with a candle for dawn to blow out for her day.

All that, along with a bottle of Cab Sauvignon named “No Regrets” (and not memorable) set us each about $75 poorer, our dinner partially subsidised by a Citibank discount. Not a bad price for a solid meal, and like PS– shall be returning to Ember soon.