There's a story behind this roti prata store in singapore. Actually, after reading a post over at A Singaporean In London and I was leaving a comment about Singapore food which a Singaporean will miss when he or she is abroad, I kind of thought about this stall for a very long time.

I remembered when I was in Secondary school, back then my brother was in primary school and he always eat roti prata without fail, everyday. But we would never consider buying our roti prata from this stall. Why? This roti prata owner (the guy looking towards me in the photo) is a racist, from his heart to his bones. But how racist can he be, you would ask? If you're an Indian and ordered roti prata from his stall, he'll send it over to your seat personally. But if you're a Muslim/Malay or Chinese who ordered from him, he won't send your prata over.

He won't even have the courtesy to at least say, "Sorry, self service". He'll quietly take your order and when it is ready, he'll leave it at his stall, expecting you to go back and take the plate of prata back to where you are sitting. We learnt this the hard way but we got our revenge. How? Simple.

When we first ordered, we didn't realise or knew that he was so racist towards the race of his customers, so we had to go up and take it ourselves. But true enough, the next time we went back to that coffee shop for breakfast again, my brother insisted on eating roti prata again. So, my mother went to made her order and came back to where we were sitting. We saw him prepare, cooked and served the prata onto a plate and left it on his stall counter, waiting for us to go up and collect. But by then, my brother was too hungry to care much and simply ordered something else from another stall.

After a while, no one from our table went up to collect and he came over and told us very harshly that our roti prata is already cooked and we can go and collect it. (Seems like he has the courtesy to walk over and tell us the prata is ready, but lack the brains to realise he could have brought the prata over as well, and bitch to our face) My mother promptly said, "You crazy! When did I ever ordered any roti prata from you? We are chinese and we are sticking to our fish ball noodles and chicken rice. Forever!"

Sure enough, the roti prata stall owner was very pissed. But what could he do? He knew he was wrong in not serving the damn plate of prata to our table, but since he got snubbed unexpectedly, he had no choice but to back down and forget about asking us to collect our prata. So, the score is:


Racist Roti Prata guy: 0

Us: 1



Anyway, not every Singaporean Indian person is that nasty. Some are really very nice and friendly. It's the "naughty" ones that are giving the rest of their race a bad name, that's all.