Welcome to "Gourmet Paradise Singapore"

This site is a trial to reconstruct the original "Gourmet Paradise Singapore" which I made between Summer 1995 and 1996 as my first internet site, thereby I received precious support from two wonderful Singaporean friends, Tian Khean and Thian.

Tian Khean
Thian
In the second half of 1994, about a year before the start of "Gourmet Paradise Singapore", the first internet providers started to operate in many countries, including Singnet in Singapore where I lived at the time.

However, dial-up PPP connection was as fast as snail or sea cucumber! Consumer GUI was made available only by Mcintosh. Windows 95 was introduced as late as in August(US) and November(Japan) in 1995. Due to these and various other technological difficulties, internet was at the time in the first place for character communication. Discussion fora were flourishing.

WWW was included, from the outset, in the services offered by internet providers. However, due to low transmission speed, it was irritating to see big images. It was also not easy to create image files. Scanners were already available in some offices, but too expensive for private use. Digital cameras were not sold at reasonable prices yet. In that situation and without much information for website building, I was asked to make an internet site early in 1995 for the publicity of "Japan 95", a Japanese cultural festival in Singapore. I did it and gathered a little information how to make website.

While I was tackling the difficult task, CASIO introduced a new type of digital camera QV-10 at reasonable price on 10 March 1995. Though its resolution was not high, it was good enough to show simple photos on the net. I was fascinated by QV-10, immediately ordered one from Japan and started to make my first personal website for eatery review. That was "Gourmet Paradise Singapore".

There were not many websites at the time, therefore, my English-Japanese bilingual site had an immediate success in Singapore as well as in Japan and I got many "internet friends" through the site. However, less than a year after I had started the site, I had to return to Japan and decided to close "Gourmet Paradise Singapore". At the moment, Thian offered me to keep some English pages on his culinary site "Makan Time in Singapore".

Recently I discovered that English review pages of chicken rice and banana leaf curry eateries still exist in Thian's server. Therefore, I decide to reconstruct the "Gourmet Paradise Singapore" using those residual materials as far as possible, and using better technology I learned since then such as CSS and PHP.

During the course of reconstruction, I checked what happened to those eateries. To my surprise, nearly all eateries are still operating and some of them have huge success. Therefore, I decided to add links to their websites as far as I find them.

2021/04/04