Walking along Boat Quay the other day, I was amazed at the sheer size and collection of restaurants that served live seafood. Now when I say they served live seafood, I meant that diners can literally see their dish walking along tanks, tied with raffia string as they squirm with each other inside those plexi glass prisons as the waiters proudly show them in their ‘after' states. This has been a phenomenon to hit the eating culture in the world today, especially Singapore as more and more diners are flocking to these types of restaurants to eat their food. Call it what you want.



Many people say that it is the complete dining experience for the person who wants to be in control from start to finish. It is as good as going out in a row boat, fishing the whole day, choosing the best catch and getting a chef to cook it for you. Just put a price on this process and you can skip the first 8 hours waiting in a river for those excellent grouper fish to bite. Restaurants, especially live seafood restaurants have really reached and out grabbed the diner and told them they yes!, they can have more choice over what they eat, especially when they want to eat and pay for it. The same principle actually carried over from buying fruit in the Singapore market.

I am sure you have seen it before, people at fruit stalls inspecting the fruit, smelling it and sometimes asking from a sample of the fruit before they make a purchasing decision. Now if this is possible when it comes to just a matter of a few dollars, I think restaurants have it right when it comes to a possible, even a few hundred dollars, as a table of 5 – 10 people can have bills than run from 200 – 400 dollars. I think it is a great idea, even when you have no clue to as what makes a good lobster or a good crab. I would just choose the ones that look the healthiest and the largest, with my Singaporean mentality in mind. Others say it reaches out to the more primal urges of eating, where we become the hunter – but of course we do not do the actual killing. It is hunting from a distance, murder behind a veil to satisfy our hunger and primal urge.

Whatever the reason, it has become a dining experience within Singapore. In other parts of the world where fishing is a commodity like no other, one might be able to just go up to a live restaurant on the pier, choose the catch and sit down at the mouth of an impressive River. Singapore has managed, with some clever conjuring, to offer the same sort of experience to tourists and to the locals in Singapore. Not only limited to Boat Quay, there are plenty of restaurants, seafood restaurants all over Singapore that offer this sort of interesting and exotic live seafood experience.