“As long as you’re out here in the East Bay,” said Daveena, at whose place I was staying overnight, “you really have to go to Kopitiam for Hainan chicken rice.”

Hainan is in southern China (remember that plane incident?), but Hainanese chicken rice is part of the local culinary canon in neighboring Singapore, and also apparently pops up in Malaysia and Thailand. Purists value equally the chicken, slow-cooked in hot water that is never allowed to boil, and the rice infused with chicken broth and fat.

I’d tasted the dish with anthropological interest, but not much more, at L.A.’s Savoy Kitchen. (The word is that the Vietnamese Dong Nguyen gives Savoy tough competition.) The plain chicken seemed bland, desperately in need of its dipping sauce — and you know desperation is never appealing.

It certainly didn’t seem worth a 20-minute drive. But after a couple of hours of traipsing through shop after shop in chichi Rockridge reminding myself, “Don’t buy. Don’t buy. Economy! Fiscal goals!” I started to think that settling down to a comfort-food type meal with a book could be quite nice — and cheap, to boot.

So I drove to Lafayette, which in the middle of a weekday on a broad highway proved to take a painless 15 minutes (that 5-minute difference has great psychological weight) and found myself in what seemed like small-town America — rolling hills and strip malls. Not exactly where I would expect to find an authentic Asian dish, but this is California, where small-town and suburban demographics aren’t necessarily what you might expect. In L.A., there are no great Chinese restaurants outside the suburbs.

Kopitiam, a small Singaporean cafe-restaurant in one of these strip malls next to Trader Joe’s, is a contempo-chic place that manages to be attractive to Western sensibilities without making sacrifices in the kitchen. The clientele was mixed, and I noticed several tables of white people confidently ordering chicken rice or other dishes like regulars. A man who I presumed was the owner greeted me like a long-lost relative and hovered over his patrons with tender solicitude.

And the Hainan chicken rice: sublime. It’s tender, juicy and flavorful even without the dipping sauces (although I particularly liked the ginger sauce). No skin, bones or any kind of gristle — just the pure, sweet meat. I read in one of the numerous newspaper articles on the walls that they use organic chicken. The rice was savory, glossed with fat, but not heavy at all. And unlike many comfort-food meals, the modest portion didn’t weigh in my stomach afterward.

If I ever wanted to try this dish at home (which is far more than 20 minutes from Lafayette), I’d start with the recipe on Chubby Hubby’s Singapore-based blog.

Kopitiam Restaurant
3647 Mount Diablo Boulevard
Lafayette
(925) 299-1653