- We love the sound of this! Circus Eats at Stratford Circus has a special menu for the East festival this weekend: the theme is celebrating the cultures of London’s east end with a mix of international dishes, from African, Caribbean and South American to European, Asian and traditional East London eats like pie mash and salt beef bagels. The Thursday night launch has a “modern East End seven course tasting menu accompanied by specially selected international drinks.” We hope to investigate.

- Our mission plan page is filling up. Matt, our chief geek, has designed a really clever drop-down menu you can use to easily view the countries we’ve covered, the countries we’re working on and the countries we have no idea about.

It was a sort of crab stew, with a whole crab simmered apart in tomato-based chilli sauce (though we didn’t taste much tomato), infusing it with tiny bits of crab meat. The resulting sauce, despite being a bit too gloopy and sweet, and bearing a slight resemblance to vomit, was excellent for mopping up with bits of baguette. (Another downside was the unavoidable presence of tiny, hidden shell bits that made each bite crunchy.) It was nice as fast food goes, but you’d probably get a better version if it was homemade or restaurant-cooked, and I’d love to try it that way.

Afterwards, we watched Singapore-born food author and chef Terry Tan make a Singaporean stir fry. Amid thinly disguised sales pitches for readymade chilli sauce, Tan mixed up a tasty concoction from scratch including rice noodles, egg, green chilli and, surprisingly, ketchup. He also told a few stories about Singaporean cuisine. Singaporeans, he said, will eat anything on four legs aside from a table or a dog, and palettes there are so adventurous that it’s normal to eat a leftover curry for breakfast and cornflakes for dinner. And the country has so many street food vendors that one could literally eat a different street food dish every day for ten years.

There aren’t a lot of restaurants in London serving Singaporean dishes, Tan told us, but the best is Kiasu in Bayswater. They do a very traditional Hainanese chicken rice, he said, adding that Nyonya, in Notting Hill and serving very similar Malay cuisine, is a close second. (We can also vouch for Nyonya.) He was polite but couldn’t avoid making a face while talking about the Soho restaurants that claim to serve Singaporean. Thanks for the advice, Terry!