Owing to the warm response I received from my
readers about the previous "Food for Thought" article on Potato
Chips, Cinemas and Blocked Noses, I decided to add to my new department with this
interesting discussion on how not to embarass yourself in front of the teh-tarik man...
We were pondering the countless possibilities and permutations in ordering
the simple cup of coffee/tea (or me?) and we marveled at the amazing configurability of
the simple and humble cup of coffee.
Let's face it, there are less ways to get a haircut than there are ways to
make a cuppa. The friendly guy at the coffeeshop can whip up a cup to the exact
specifications of championship coffee-drinkers that would make the guys at Spinelli's and
Starbucks look like boys with water pistols.
Let's try a simple decoding of the lingo here, for the less initiated:
Module KP101: Coffeeshop Linguistics - Basic
Kopi - Coffee of course... need I say more?
Teh - (pronounced "tay" or
"tare") This would mean tea.
Module KP103: Coffeeshop Linguistics - Suffixes
These are added to the basic orders, for example kopi-o or teh-si
O - (pronounced "Oh"
(ecstatically) or "Or") Implies that no milk has been added, accidental
or otherwise.
Si - ("see") suggests the use
of evaporated milk instead of sweetened condensed milk, which is helpful if you're on a
diet.
Gao - means that instead of diluting the
coffee/tea from the strain, the coffee is served with more power and less wimp.
Peng - ice is added.
Kosong - means that no sugar is added to the
coffee.
Module KP107: Coffeeshop Linguistics Advanced Suffixes
Halia - ("har-lee-uh") not
"hurry-up" (when will I stop being so corny, oops here I go again) means that
ginger is added to it, usually coffee.
Kappuchino - (pronounced the way it reads...) is
an advanced form of teh, in which there is a funky 2-layered glass of teh, where one layer
(approximately half) is milk and the lower half is teh. Not found everywhere, I
first saw this in A&A Restaurant (24 hours corner coffeeshop in Upper Thomson road
near Yishun), and also served in selected shops at Jalan Kayu.
Ok. So now we have the theory part cleared up, how do we go about
ordering?
Lets try a few worked examples:
Iced coffee without milk : Kopi-O peng.
(remember the peng usually comes last)
Iced tea with no sugar, evaporated milk, stronger tea: Teh-si-kosong-gao-peng.
(I'm not sure if this exists, anyone care to comment?)
OK and for the finale, try:
Tea with condensed milk, no sugar.
The answer is: Teh
Wonder why? check out the answer here.
- Yee Sze & Yuen Ho
