From Singapore’s oldest family-run restaurant to the ‘holy grail of yakitori’, HBO Go’s Food Affair with Mark Wiens pours out its love for Lion City fare
- In six-episode HBO Go series Food Affair with Mark Wiens, the vlogger scours Singapore’s high-end restaurants and hawker centres for its best food
- Meanwhile, in Apple TV+’s Super League: The War for Football, the beautiful game’s dirty tricks and manoeuvring are brought to light
“Vlogger” Mark Wiens loves food. So much so that the title of his HBO Go series, Food Affair with Mark Wiens, accurately suggests a visceral passion for what’s on his plate as he scours Singapore for unbeatable victuals.
Devoting six half-hour episodes to a “food paradise”, where “the obsession with food is real”, Wiens tackles with equal gusto the fanciest fine-dining creations in the most refined restaurants and the heartiest staples offered in Singapore’s inimitable hawker centres.
Wiens, of Chinese antecedence, wades gamely into roast chicken with hand-mashed prawns at Spring Court (Singapore’s oldest family-run restaurant, established in 1929) and braves the smoke and flames at Kazu Sumiyaki to find the “holy grail of yakitori” (so authentic it’s prepared over charcoal imported from Japan).
He enjoys a scoop of sublime Scottish scallop at the three-Michelin-star Zén, but is equally delighted by the famous fare at Adam Food Centre stall Selera Rasa Nasi Lemak, the original outlet of what is now a 50-strong empire.
Although vegetarians won’t be appeased until Wiens visits Little India for meat-free dosa delights, distractions are available throughout the series. He (and his researchers) cram in brief histories of Cantonese, Peranakan and Malay cuisines, plus potted biographies of the major players on the city state “scene”, including Quek, “the godfather” of fine dining.
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There’s a certain artifice associated with food shows, particularly when the presenter is sitting opposite the creator of the dish he is judging, and the television producer is perched for a close-up of the presenter’s appreciative face and a sample of his happy mumbling and gurgling. And how many times, and in how many ways, really, can a host declare dishes “delicious”?
Nevertheless, what might, from other presenters, feel like gushing insincerity turned on for the cameras ultimately gives Wiens a four-out-of-five star rating, his enthusiasm for his subject proving, well, appetising.
League of their own
Super League: The War for Football (Apple TV+) is an absorbing scrutiny of four days in April 2021, during which the schism between Uefa, European football’s governing body, and new kids on the block the Super League almost destroyed the foundations of the globe’s most popular sport.
That 12 leading clubs were allegedly plotting their own competition to guarantee themselves unending riches at the expense of every other team and league across the continent is already accepted. This, however, is not the whole truth, as Super League discovers.
Although Uefa moved rapidly, as revealed here, to win the PR conflict – aided by anti-Super League English fans taking to the streets, “pitchforks” in hand like medieval peasants in revolt, as one commentator deftly puts it – the overriding impression is that the breakaway league, which admittedly bungled its own PR, was shouted down before it could make its case.
The Machiavellian manoeuvrings of football politics are laid bare, then spiced up with a hefty seasoning of bile between former friends Aleksander Ceferin, president of Uefa, and Andrea Agnelli, Super League cheerleader and former Juventus president.
Three clubs remain hopeful of reviving the project. The Super League may be a goal down, but in the battle for football hegemony it’s only half-time.
