New Delhi, Sept. 26 -- What happens when a breakfast cereal is tossed with butter, curry leaves, chillies and prawns in a hot wok until everything turns golden and crisp? Some might call it experimental. But Nestum, the multigrain breakfast flake in Singaporean households, has played a key role in the making of cereal prawns-a fixture on zi char menus across the city today.

Zi char (also tze char) is the combination of two words in Singaporean-Hokkien (a Chinese dialect brought by early immigrants from China), where zi means cook and char is fry. In Singapore, zi char stalls roughly date back to 1970s-80s, drawing cues from the more common hawker-style fare and Chinese family restaurants. More than the food, the highlight of the experien...