Thomas Ong’s cockroach discovery in curry yong tau foo at Johor Bahru restaurant

“At that moment, the whole table fell silent,” he wrote.

“If I were younger, I would have gotten angry. But over the years, not only have my wrinkles grown, my emotional intelligence seems to have grown a bit too. I tried to ease the awkward situation with a comment: ‘Your eyesight is too good.’”

The restaurant later waived the bill for that particular bowl, Ong said.

“But to be honest, this is no longer a matter of whether the bill is waived or not,” he wrote, because the incident put him on his guard for the next week.

He said that no matter where he went to eat noodle soup, the first thing he did was not to take a photo, but scoop through the bowl and flip the noodles over.

He would also stare, wide-eyed, scanning the bottom of the bowl for any “unwanted protein” before he dared to start eating.

“I am not naive enough to think that every restaurant’s kitchen should be clean to the point where not a single cockroach is there. But whether or not there is something in the kitchen, and whether the customer can actually scoop it out of their own bowl, are two different things.

He said: “For some things, once you have seen them, every bowl of soup afterwards becomes a treasure hunt game.”