AMONG the 12 hawker food items I suggested for the recent Singapore Day event in New York, I threw in chwee kueh, a wild card item.

It's not one of those big league Top 10 local soulfood that we all swear by.

It was like a Sanjaya in American Idol: Folks like it, but I'm not sure if it should be on the list.

We even had a concerned (bordering on jealous) member of public questioning: 'Why you select it?'

On that warm spring day in Central Park, a 100-long queue quickly formed for the chwee kueh at the stroke of 11am, the opening hour.

The lines at the bak kut teh, roti kaya and laksa stalls were way tamer.

By 12.20pm, the chwee kueh stall was the first to sell out.

They cleared about 1,200 chweekuehs - one to a customer each, topped with chai po and sambal - and was washing up by 12.30pm, leaving at least 80 desperate souls staring at a yellow 'sold out' sign and hanging on to a hope that another 200 would magically appear.

CARROT CAKE CRAZY

By 1pm, the chwee kueh hawkers were helping the carrot cake chef dish out the first of their 1,400 portions for that day.

Even VIP guest Deputy Prime Minister Mr Wong Kan Seng, who rushed from Washington to greet the folks there and observe a moment of silence for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, could not get his favourite chwee kueh.

It was then that the crowd at Wollman Rink in Central Park swelled to about 3,000 visitors.

The intensely-charming Kit Chan came on and warmed the stage with her version of Sinead O Connor's Nothing Compares to You, but almost all there had their backs to her as it was obvious - nothing compares to having their soulful fix of nasi lemak and chicken rice, and none was prepared to lose his spot in the queue.

You see, the food stalls were facing the stage at the other end of the rink.

I helped pal Anthony Bourdain cut the entrance queue, but with one look at the crowd within, he made a quick retreat for home with his uncomfortably-bawling new baby girl in tow. Without a bite to show.

The usually gregarious Thye Hong, who often 'coo-coos' like a chicken before he cracks eggs onto his wok of char kway teow and fried Hokkien prawn mee, suddenly went sober andquiet.

Each time he looked up from his al-fresco hawker station, a hundred hungry and gentle overseas fellow citizens would be impatiently smiling at him.

'Eh, brother, these overseas Singaporeans huh, very kwai (orderly) leh, never cut queue and never tell me to faster, faster,' he whispered in the same Singlish slang that host Hossan Leong was using on stage to 'connect' with the crowd.

By 5pm, a little past closing time, he stayed on to clear the last few patient late-comers, serving his 1,600th portion.

Among them was Ms Cheryl Tan, a wordsmith at Wall Street Journal, and her husband Mike.

'This is so, so good. Please don't let them leave!' she said, as she tucked into her favourite fried Hokkien mee.

Some friends came from as far as Canada and even Jeddah in the MiddleEast.

Mr Calvin Trillin, the legendary food humourist from the New Yorker magazine, was a tad sharper. He took my advice and was there twohours before opening to speak to the hawkers and taste the samplers.

By noon, he had eaten everything at the rink and thus began his initiation for his trip to Singapore next month for more.

Even Mr Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic of Vogue Magazine, said while devouring an extra large plate, that he regretted he did not have that fried Hokkien mee in the lion's den when he visited Singapore in March.

This, although he remembered Tian Tian's chicken rice to be a notch better when he first tried it at Maxwell Food Centre.

Due to regulations and restrictions, the hawkers had to use all ingredients and equipments from NewYork.

And because the limitations and knowledge of the suppliers there (they had problems telling light from thick soya sauce, let alone sweet soya sauce), many of the hawkers had to compromise and improvise, a key criteria I had when selecting them.

Hence, the chwee kueh masters had to steam their 1,200 kuehs 39 at a time in dim sum steamers instead of the 300 each in their regular steamers.

Thye Hong had to make his own sweet soy sauce with brown rock sugar.

They managed well, but it took them each, on average, seven hours of prep work in the big but ill-equipped central kitchen.

I would say they managed to deliver about 80per cent of their original food quality.

By 4.30pm, the crowd had thinned out, as most of the stalls had already sold out.

By then, the close to 6,000 happy overseas Singaporeans had consumed tasting portions of:

1,200 chwee kuehs

1,400 plates of carrot cake

1,600 plates of char kway teow

50kg of barbeque seafood andstingray

1,300 plates of chicken rice

30kg of kaya

1,200 pieces of pork ribs in bak kutteh

1,300 bowls of laksa

1,600 portions of roti prata

4,000 sticks of satay

1,300 plates of nasi lemak

About 1,800 portions of chilli and pepper crabs.

In short, 16,000 happy meals were served to 6,000 happy (some understandably impatient) overseas Singaporeans at Singapore Day in Wollman Rink.

And it closed fittingly when Kit sang her anthem, Home.

Makansutra, founded by KF Seetoh, is a company that celebrates Asian food, culture and lifestyle. It publishes food guides in and around the region, produces a food television series, develops interactive mobile content and services, operates food courts and eateries, organises food tours and events, and consults on culinary concepts.

It operates the breezy and open-air retro push-cart hawker cepntre, Makansutra Gluttons Bay, at the Esplanade Mall. Makansutra offers its searchable listings with discounts in its 3G mobile services for subscribers to local telcos. Its 6th edition of Makansutra Singapore 2007 is on sale now. Visit www.makansutra.com.