I rated my meals during a 17-day quarantine

When life gives you boxed meals twice a day, rate them? In June 2021, I served 17 consecutive days of quarantine in a Singaporean hotel. Stuck alone in a room with windows that couldn’t open, I focused on the one thing that brought me joy: food. Combining my love for quantification, documentation, and eating, this is an exploration of patterns, of finding deviation in the mundane.

The longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere — June 21, the summer solstice — came and went.

For me, it was just another day within the same four walls. I pressed my face against the large floor-to-ceiling glass windows, staring longingly at the people on the street outside: walking, jogging, meandering, biking, various forms of forward movement. The summer solstice fell on my 14th day of quarantine, and I had 7 left to go. With the sole exception of going upstairs briefly for a COVID-19 PCR test one day prior, on the 13th day, I had not left my room, put on shoes, or had an in-person interaction in nearly half a month.

I was in Singapore, and at the time the government was requiring all incoming travelers to serve a 21-day quarantine upon arrival. Some people use the word quarantine loosely; some of my friends were baffled when I clarified that, in my case, I really was isolated in a hotel room and not allowed to leave during that period.

“Not even for walks outdoors?”

(What part of not allowed to leave do you not get?? The only times people were allowed outside their rooms at all during their 21-day quarantine were for two tests, one on the 13th day and one on the 20th day.)

Having never gone through this process before, I was very anxious in the weeks and days leading up to my travels. Luckily, the government websites were very informative and user-friendly. In Singapore, the government had designated certain hotels as “dedicated facilities” and also standardized the cost of quarantine across the country. I knew beforehand how much my stay would cost and didn’t have to consider price fluctuations, but the catch was that I would be assigned to a specific hotel (from the list of “dedicated facilities”) only after landing. It was possible to pre-select my accommodation for a higher cost, but I am just a regular potato. In a way, not knowing where I would end up and knowing that I had no control over this was comforting. It was one less thing to worry about.

Bleary-eyed, I landed in Singapore early on a Monday morning. The few passengers on our flight were staggered out so that we went through immigration, security, and post-arrival testing very far apart from each other. After completing the testing process, we were herded onto a bus — spaced out and everyone had their own row, of course. Twenty minutes later, our bus pulled into a narrow parking lot. I saw the sign with the hotel’s name and was not familiar with it; I also didn’t have internet on my phone and so I couldn’t look it up.

A man sitting in the front row turned around, fanned his fingers out, and said triumphantly to all of us, “Five stars!!!”

As far as hotels go, it appeared that we had gotten pretty lucky. Room 1013, my designated home for three weeks, didn’t have a balcony (alas), the windows couldn’t open, the bathroom was small, and the view wasn’t quite postcard-worthy. That said, everything was nice. I had a king-sized bed, an armchair, a decently wide desk, a small fridge, and a kettle.

Importantly, this place had two crucial things: firstly, the room was big, meaningfully larger than what I had expected. There was enough space for me to leave my travel yoga mat unrolled if I wanted to. Secondly, as a five-star hotel, the service was impeccable. Various front desk employees patiently dealt with my inane questions, as well as my many requests for more towels and trash bags. When I called for the fourth time in a day to ask how I could distinguish between a real fire and the hotel testing their fire alarm, the front desk employee that day gently refrained from laughing at me. Seriously, two of my very specific fears during my quarantine were (1) that I would hear the fire alarm, leave the room, and then get charged with breaking the rules because the hotel was only conducting testing, OR (2) that I would hear the fire alarm, not leave the room because I thought it was the hotel conducting testing, and then perish in a real fire.

All in all, this room fell slightly short of what the internet had told me were the best possible random assignments for quarantining in Singapore — balconies! sweeping views of the skyline! fancy bathtubs! — but if I could choose to roll the dice again, I wouldn’t.

Before going into this quarantine experience, I knew that I intended to document and rate my meals. I spend a lot of my time eating, cooking, and thinking about food. In high school, I went on a school trip to India. One day, we hiked for five hours. At night, the teacher made us go around in a circle and each state our favorite part of the day. Everyone else said that it was the hike; I said that it was the soup we had earlier that evening. The teacher thought I was being a difficult, contrarian teenager, but it was my earnest answer.

I knew that in my day-to-day life in quarantine with very little else going on and very little variation, I would always be thinking about and anticipating the next meal. All meals (as well as everything else that was requested, such as towels, trash bags, toilet paper, etc.) were dropped off in front of each person’s door, delivered by hotel employees in full protective gear — mask, hair net, protective suits, goggles, the full nine yards. Upon delivery, my doorbell would ring and, in true Pavlovian fashion, I would automatically feel hungry. The devil works hard, but these employees worked harder; I was always very prompt in collecting my meals, and yet, whenever I opened my door, they were already ten doors down. In addition to the hotel-provided meals, people serving quarantine in Singaporean hotels could use local delivery apps to order takeout, and their takeout meals were also brought directly to their front doors. Even though the standardized quarantine costs covered all meals, one front desk employee told me over the phone that some guests had chosen to forgo all hotel-provided meals for the entirety of their stay, meaning that they were ordering takeout for every single meal and/or they had family and friends who were dropping off food for them at the front desk.) The food in Singapore is phenomenal, but I decided to minimize the number of times I ordered takeout because I was curious as to what the hotel had to offer its quarantine-serving guests.

I came up with the following 10-point scale for rating my meals:

  • 10: If you re-plated this meal and told me this was from a renowned restaurant, I would have believed you

  • 9: I would pay to eat this exact same meal again at a good restaurant

  • 8: This was a joy to eat

  • 7: Tasty, exceeds expectations

  • 6: Decent, not bad

  • 5: Gets the job done

  • 4: I see what they’re trying to do, but this was a bit bland or a bit weird

  • 3: I wish I had opted for takeout instead

  • 2: I would have trouble finishing this even if I was still hungry

  • 1: This was unpleasant

  • 0: I’m filing a complaint

At this particular hotel, each meal had two options and one of them was always vegetarian. Upon my arrival on the first day, I got to select my meal preferences for the weeks ahead. I had not expected that I would be able to pick my meals. I wondered if this would skew my overall perception of the quarantine meals since I would naturally avoid meals I expected to dislike or even plan ahead which days and meals I wanted to order takeout for. I tried to avoid picking the same meal twice in an effort to lessen the impact of this skew, even if I was quite confident that I would like one option more than the other. Because of this, I ended up covering almost all of the meals in the hotel’s rotation during that period. I kept track of all meal-related information, including ratings, on a spreadsheet.

(Note: this project only covered lunches and dinners. It had been several years since I regularly ate breakfast, but I was prepared to amend my daily habits for this quarantine experience. More meals, more data points, I told myself. However, I learned early on in my stay that the breakfasts at this hotel were near-identical from day to day — yogurt, pastry, a piece of fruit, and a small bottle of juice. Relieved of my totally self-imposed obligation to maintain a false sense of project integrity, I called the front desk to opt out of all future breakfasts.)

As of my arrival in Singapore, the required quarantine for incoming travelers was 21 days. Which, I should point out, is slightly misleading: to be more precise, the requirement was 21 nights. 16 nights into my quarantine, the government reduced the requirement to 14 nights. Because I had already completed this, I got notified that I was allowed to leave the following morning. In total, I served 17 nights of quarantine, which — if you count the day I arrived and the day I left — technically spans 18 calendar days. To avoid confusion, as well as remain consistent with the government’s way of counting quarantine days, I consider the day I landed and began my quarantine as day 0, the following day as my 1st day, etc. So when I say that I ordered takeout laksa for lunch on my 4th day, that event occurred 4 nights into my stay.

During my 17-day quarantine, I consumed a total of 34 lunches and dinners, which can be broken down as follows:

Towards the end of my time in quarantine, I started to encounter meals in which I had eaten both options before. I thought it would be fun to re-evaluate meals, particularly ones that I had at the beginning of my experience, with additional perspective. Due to my truncated quarantine, I ultimately only re-evaluated 2 meals. The bulk of my observations revolve around the 25 unique hotel meals.

Observations

COMPOSITION — The quarantine meals at this hotel followed a very predictable structure: lunch always consisted of an entrée, a 3-piece pack of Oreos or Ritz crackers, and a piece of fruit. Dinner always consisted of an entrée, a soup, and a dessert. For some reason, the dessert was always (and I mean always, with just one exception) a Swiss roll. I hadn’t eaten one in years, but it was widely available where I grew up and I welcomed this sweet nightly throwback. The odd dessert out, a caramel and apricot cake, came on my 6th day of quarantine. Maybe the employee in charge of making Swiss rolls had taken that day off?

I didn’t think it was meaningful to rate the fruits or the Oreos/Ritz crackers, so my lunch ratings were strictly for the entrée itself. However, because the soup and dessert were prepared by the hotel (at least, it looked that way — these came in nondescript, unbranded containers), my dinner ratings were more holistic, taking all three courses into account.

If you thought I had nothing to say about the fruit, Oreos/Ritz crackers, soups, and Swiss rolls, you thought wrong! I leave no stones unturned. Over time, I got a sense of the range of possible offerings for each category:

  • Fruits (6): orange, fuji apple, plum, banana, green apple, and java apple (my first time trying one!)

  • Oreos (3): original, chocolate creme, and strawberry creme

  • Ritz crackers (2): lemon-flavored and cheese-flavored

  • Soups (6): leek and potato, pumpkin, mushroom, broccoli, sweet corn and pea, and tomato

  • Swiss rolls (5): plain, matcha and red bean, coffee, chocolate, and pandan

MEAL TYPES — Out of my 25 unique hotel meals, I classified 18 of them as Asian and 7 of them as Western. These descriptions came from a combination of what I could see and taste, as well as from the hotel’s own words in their selection form. (Vegetarian meals are noted with asterisks.)

The Asian meals included:

  • Kung pao squid with bell peppers and rice

  • Teriyaki chicken with rice, carrots, broccoli, and eggplant

  • Braised tofu with rice, broccoli, peas, and carrots *

  • Mee goreng with vegetables *

  • Steamed fish with soy sauce, broccoli, and rice

  • Dark soy sauce braised chicken with rice, carrots, broccoli, and mushrooms

  • Wok-fried spinach, tofu, snow peas, and rice *

  • E-fu noodles with chives, mushrooms, carrots, kailan, and vegetarian shrimp *

  • Black pepper fish with wok-fried noodles, kailan, carrots, and bean sprouts

  • Kung pao chicken with rice, baby bok choy, snow peas, and onions

  • Wok-fried egg noodles with braised cabbage *

  • White radish and beef stew with goji berries, broccoli, and rice

  • Green beans, baby corn, and carrots with egg fried rice *

  • Tom yum fish with rice and bell peppers, bok choy, and mushrooms

  • Teriyaki fish with eggplant and rice

  • Wok-fried black pepper chicken with bell peppers and steamed rice

  • Singapore roasted chicken rice

  • Chicken rendang with steamed rice

The western meals included:

  • Rosemary beef stew with potatoes, green beans, and baby corn

  • Penne in tomato sauce with spinach, green beans, snow peas, baby corn, and kalamata olives *

  • Black pepper chicken with mashed potatoes, roasted zucchini, bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes

  • Penne in tomato sauce with eggplant and mushrooms *

  • Penne with spicy tomato sauce *

  • Herb-roasted fish fillet with baked potatoes and sautéed carrots

  • Ravioli with parmesan cream *

For the most part, classifying these meals was a straightforward task to me. Notably, I classified the black pepper fish as Asian, but the black pepper chicken as Western. My impression is that black pepper sauce is present in both worlds. In these two cases, the other elements of the entrée (fried noodles, mashed potatoes and roasted zucchini) led to their respective classifications.

Out of these 25 unique hotel meals, 10 of them were vegetarian and 15 of them were non-vegetarian. Of the 10 vegetarian meals, 6 of them were Asian and 4 of them were Western.

RATINGS — Ranging from a low of 4.6 to a high of 8.8, the mean rating of my 25 unique hotel meals was 6.46/10.00, somewhere in between “decent, not bad” and “tasty, exceeds expectations”. The median rating was 6.4; its closeness to the mean suggests that the scores were quite evenly distributed. This is also reflected in the histogram below.

I developed my 10-point ratings scale before entering quarantine, not knowing what to expect or even which hotel I would be sent to. Having braced myself for mediocre quarantine food, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised with my meals. Throughout my 17 days of quarantine, nothing was inedible or came close to being so. In the end, perhaps the food was the real benefit of being sent to a five-star hotel. With just two meals scoring below 5.0 (“gets the job done”), I consider myself lucky. It is also possible that I just have low standards; I’m not a picky eater, and my standard for what constitutes a serviceable meal isn’t high.

With an overall mean rating of 6.46/10.0 across all 25 unique meals, I also calculated the mean rating for specific categories:

  • Cuisine: Asian (6.60/10.00), Western (6.09/10.00)

  • Vegetarian: vegetarian (5.94/10.00), non-vegetarian (6.80/10.00)

  • Type — I also classified every meal by its defining feature: beef (2 meals, 6.55/10.00), chicken (7 meals, 6.80/10.00), noodles (3 meals, 6.70/10.00), pasta (4 meals, 5.68/10.00), seafood (6 meals, 6.88/10.00), and vegetables and rice (3 meals, 5.53/10.00)

THE BEST, THE WORST, AND THE REDOS — In my opinion, the three best meals were:

  1. Kung pao squid with bell peppers and rice (8.8/10.0)

  2. E-fu noodles with chives, mushrooms, carrots, kailan, and vegetarian shrimp (8.5/10.0)

  3. Tom yum fish with rice and bell peppers, bok choy, and mushrooms (8.0/10.0)

The three worst meals were:

  1. Mee goreng with vegetables (4.6/10.0)

  2. Penne in tomato sauce with spinach, green beans, snow peas, baby corn, and kalamata olives (4.9/10.0)

  3. Braised tofu with rice, broccoli, peas, and carrots (5.2/10.0)

Calculating category-specific average ratings potentially offers insights into the hotel’s relative culinary strengths; it should not be surprising, then, that my highest-rated meal was a/an (1) Asian, (2) non-vegetarian, and (3) seafood dish — all three of the highest-scoring categories in their respective fields.

It is also worth noting that my highest-rated meal was also the very first meal I ate in quarantine, and that my two lowest-rated meals were on the same day (my 2nd day). Eager to see if my highest-rated meal was simply a result of excitement and novelty, I selected the kung pao squid again for lunch on my 14th day, after I had tried 21 other quarantine meals — I concluded that it really was that good in my books. The kung pao squid was one of two meals that I had more than once; the other, the black pepper chicken with mashed potatoes, received a revised rating nearly one point higher than the original. (Only original ratings were used in calculating averages.) I had a number of other meal re-evaluations lined up, but my abruptly truncated quarantine put the kibosh on those plans.

WHAT MAKES A MEAL GOOD? — Several months ago, after my trip to Singapore, I moved to a new city; since then, I’ve documented and rated every single restaurant I’ve been to in town, including ubiquitous national chain places. I didn’t want to get onto a slippery slope of having to determine that some places were not worth rating, so I’ve just been rating them all. I score restaurants on an unconventional scale: 0 to 3 stars, with the possibility of receiving an additional “highlight” designation (marked with yellow highlight). Stars — the more the better — reflect my perception of the meal’s taste and value. The highlight represents a memorable or unique dining experience. It is possible for a restaurant to get 3 stars with no highlight; it is also possible for a restaurant to get a highlight without getting 3 stars. An example of the latter case: I recently went to a very small, exclusive, 20-seat restaurant with a prix fixe menu that changes every week. Before each course, the owner came out and gave a talk about how each ingredient was sourced and almost everything was from the region. Though it was a highlight-worthy dinner and I loved the intentionality behind the restaurant’s concept, I gave it 2 stars because I thought the taste was not as outstanding as other meals I’ve had in that price tier.

If I simply assigned ratings based on my favorite foods and ingredients, this would be no fun. I consider myself very open to trying new things. When evaluating a meal, I try to consider whether it’s a good version of what it’s supposed to be. I applied the same thinking for my quarantine meals. One could argue that the hotel quarantine experience leveled the playing field, completely standardizing the price and experience of meals across the board. As mentioned, hotel-provided meals were fully included in the cost of quarantine, and the experience of every meal was identical: the doorbell rang, I picked up my meal from outside my door, and I ate all my meals while standing up over the cabinet that contained the small fridge. (I preferred to use the desk strictly for work-related things, so I never ate there.) In other words, with no consideration for value or ambiance, each quarantine meal’s score should really just reflect how good it tasted. There are other confounding variables that exist in both quarantine and regular settings, such as mood and appetite, but they are much harder to account for.

Trying to judge meals for what they were is how the wok-fried egg noodles with braised cabbage wound up with a 7.0/10.0 rating, perhaps the high-scoring meal that least reflects my personal preferences. Based on its description, it’s unlikely that I would have picked it from a restaurant menu. Nonetheless, I had to admit that I got a stellar version of the dish, perhaps even one of the best fried noodles that I’ve had in recent history. In another example, my first impression of the chicken rendang was that the sauce-to-rice ratio was off, but then I learned that rendang is actually supposed to be a relatively dry curry and thus adjusted my opinion accordingly.

This is also why the pasta dishes from my quarantine got such lackluster ratings; I am no pasta connoisseur, but I was generally not wowed by what I got. I’ll even devote a few sentences to singling out my second-worst meal, the penne in tomato sauce with spinach, green beans, snow peas, baby corn, and kalamata olives (4.9/10.0). Frankly, it was weird. I was undeterred by the green beans, snow peas, and baby corn — vegetables that don’t regularly appear in pasta — but the sauce tasted odd and the kalamata olives were awful. Sour, mysteriously devoid of any crunch, veering on mushy. I actually like kalamata olives, and had no idea how the hotel made them so unpalatable. The pasta’s saving grace (and why its score wasn’t lower) was that there were so few of these damn olives. Wanting to make sure that my initial bite wasn’t a fluke, I ate all 4 of the kalamata olives in the container and experienced regret. When kalamata olives made a reappearance 12 days later in another iteration of penne (5.9/10.0), I once again ate all 4 of them, grimaced, and lamented the personality traits that led me to consume them in the first place.

Looking back, I see that my quarantine meal rating scale also reflected whether I believed I could make a better version of the meal myself. I consider myself a decent cook (follow @greenglassheart on Instagram for cooking stories!) but of course, there are plenty of foods I’ve never made or cooked with: squid, e-fu noodles, black pepper sauce. I made tom yum soup once, and it took approximately 2 hours and 20 ingredients — I would think twice before criticizing someone else’s rendition too harshly. Conversely, it’s not difficult to cook pasta in boiling water and use store-bought pasta sauce to make a passable meal. Even though I didn’t make it part of the rating rubric, there was a strong positive correlation between my rating for a meal and my perception of how complicated it was.

Conclusion

This project added some fun and structure into my life during quarantine. It was nice to feel a sense of purpose, however self-constructed, during these 17 days in which I didn’t feel the breeze on my face or have a single in-person conversation.

Somehow, when my quarantine was cut short, I was — dare I say it? — a little upset. My precious project was interrupted! I was looking forward to re-evaluating more meals and collecting more data. To be honest, I was quite overwhelmed by the sudden news; I was excited, but also surprisingly stressed out. For 17 days, my most difficult decisions revolved around whether to get takeout or not, or which hotel meals to pick. There was no room for FOMO, knowing that there was nowhere else I could be and very little else I could be doing. I would be going back out into the real world, and I had less than 24 hours of notice to prepare for this change.

In between work, coordinating the logistics of my impending move, and poring over apartment listings, I had a lot to do during my 17 days in quarantine. I relished my break from housekeeping tasks: no cooking, and what was the point of tidying up my room if nobody else was going see it?

I was glad when it was over, but I admit that the whole experience could have been much worse. I went into it with ideas of what I wanted to accomplish during my quarantine, and I had what I needed to do so: food, water, comfortable furniture, WiFi, etc. The only noticeable long-term change sparked by my quarantine is that I now try to go outside — however briefly and even if it’s below freezing — for fresh air at least once a day. Because I can.

Also, I’d be down for another Swiss roll.

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