— E S S A Y · MAY 2026 —

The Road Not Taken

On lamb burgers, a mother in parkour class,
and the paths we didn’t walk.

I stood before one of the culinary institutions of a small town nestled in the southern Alpine ranges. One of the most beautiful little towns in the world. I stood in the middle of a long winding queue at a café called Fergburger. According to Instagram, this café sells the best burgers in the world. What a bold claim. Slowly inching forward, my mind was a little uneasy. My focus was fixed on my phone screen, on the available menu. I couldn’t decide which burger to get. Beef or lamb? The Bullseye, grass fed free roaming prime beef ribeye steak or Lamby Blue, high country lamb burger. Isn’t it poetic, the name “high country lamb”? Like savouring the world’s best burger amid the rolling high country hills straight out of The Sound of Music. Perhaps accompanied by a Highlander from the Scottish highlands.

My mind weighed up the merits and virtues of each burger species. Piecing together the knowledge I’d gathered from Google. This country is the world’s largest exporter of lamb so if you visit here and don’t try their lamb? That’s simply unforgivable. But then, why is half the burger menu here beef? Surely that makes beef their speciality? Even my deliberations over choosing a life partner were never this deep as my contemplation of beef versus lamb here. Perhaps because there was only one man gullible enough to propose to me.

Half an hour later I walked out clutching a brown paper bag. Inside, a colossal burger with a thick cut of beef nestled between layers of cheese, tomato, onion and sauces. I bit into the burger in my hand, savoured the super juicy steak and felt victorious that my choice proved right. I enjoyed my choice. Walking back to the inn, my gaze drifted to the Fergburger sign. And I said to myself: “Someday, I will come back. I’ll try your lamb burger.”

Yet, even at that very moment, deep down I knew that the likelihood of returning to this place and finally getting to try the highland lamb was incredibly slim. In my heart I knew that by choosing the beef burger, there would be a part of me that would forever regret the lost chance to taste the highland lamb in this lamb paradise.

Of course, this regret over the lamb burger didn’t linger long in my heart (though after three years have passed, I can still recall exactly how I felt at that moment well enough to write about it). The event that stirred the memory of the lamb burger was on a Monday afternoon, while I waited for my child who was in parkour class. I sat in a waiting room filled with other parents. Everyone was busy staring at their phone screens. In my signature daily uniform; plain t-shirt, shorts and loud sneakers; I sank into a sofa whose springs had long lost their elasticity. My gaze fell on another woman who was also waiting for her child. She chose to sit at a table, busily typing on a laptop placed before her.

Something about that woman stirred something inside me. Perhaps because she was wearing black oxford shoes? Or her smart suits that caught my attention? Or her neat bob haircut? Or… because this woman reminded me of the life path I had left behind. Reminding me of the alternative life that once, at some point in the past, had been a choice. A life where laptops, blazers, the smart-looking woman at her laptop screen, and plane hopping was life.

Like most millennials, I poured my restlessness into an Insta story. A photo of the woman from behind in her neat suit typing at her laptop, and in the corner of the frame my feet in keds and shorts. I wrote: there is always regret about the road not taken. Complete with a melancholic instrumental track as accompaniment. Of course, because Google on our phones is always listening and watching, my feed then surfaced a poem by Robert Frost. Entitled The Road Not Taken. A simple, unassuming poem. About something every human being has experienced and will experience again and again.

The Road Not Taken

— Robert Frost —

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I read the poem again and again. Imagining myself standing in the middle of a forest. Staring at two diverging paths that I couldn’t see where they would end. Would they end at a beautiful hilltop? Would the road be steep and climbing? Or gently sloping through a field of flowers? I could only squint to see 100 metres ahead. Oh the dilemma…

And someday perhaps I will tell that day to my grandchildren with the words: “Your grandmother chose the path less taken.” Though when re-read in the poem, both roads appear similar, both with footpaths that have been equally walked. Is it merely self-justification for why I chose this road and not that one?

The woman in her neat suit, looking important with her laptop before her, filled with colourful curves and charts was waiting for her child to flip and somersault in parkour class.

Me in my casual clothes and keds, hair bundled up like Gajah Mada returning from the Battle of Bubat, having spent the day squinting at Xanderskitchen recipe books to make chicken gulai interspersed with binge-watching Bridgerton on Netflix. Also waiting for my child leaping about like a Temu Spiderman.

A drop of regret for the lost chance to walk the other route.

“Satisfaction and longing at once. Joy and a quiet melancholy at once. Pride in the best beef burger I managed to taste, alongside a lingering desire to one day taste the higland lamb.

My husband read this essay, closed his laptop and let out a long breath. “I’m back to the time when we were still dating. And wondering what our life would have been like if I had taken the path of working at Bank Indonesia back then…”

We sat in silent. In our warm kitchen. Among the scattered homework books of two little ones. Leftover chicken curry warming on the stove. On Tuesday afternoon in May.

How about you? Do you have a burger in your life?