MELAKA, June 27 -- What are we truly hungry for?

We chase after the latest opening with impossible reservation lists. We queue for menus devised by celebrity chefs.

We bookmark viral videos of restaurants hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away, convinced that the next great meal is always somewhere else.

Certainly I have been guilty of such inglorious habits (the last one, anyway: I refuse to join lines longer than half an hour; food at the second best place always tastes better when you are served without losing a substantial portion of your remaining years in the process).

Yet every so often, a meal reminds us that some of the finest discoveries are not discoveries at all.

Rather, they have been there all along.

I am reminde...