The Prawn Noodles Shootout

A friend posted a link to a webpage review of the 6 "best" prawn noodles in Singapore. One thing led to another and soon we were talking of doing our own tasting. A wicked idea then came to us. Instead of going to the different outlets over several days, why not do it all on the same day! And so we rounded up a small group of friends and whittled down the list from 8 to 6 and finally 4. Everyone was in agreement that 6 bowls of prawn noodles in a day will be a tad too much calorie and cholesterol overload. The final shortlist - Wah Kee Big Prawn Noodles at Cambridge Rd; River South (Hoe Nam) Prawn Noodles at Macpherson; Blanco Court Prawn Mee at Beach Road and last but not least Adam Road Prawn Noodle at Zion Road.

We started out quest at the seemingly most highly rated stall of all, Wah Kee Big Prawn Noodles. As a testimony to their fame, there was already a queue at 9.50 am when our early birds reached. After queuing for 1 hour, we finally got our noodles!

This stall sells only 1 version of the noodles but with super jumbo; jumbo, big or small prawn. There was no more "small" prawns when it came to our turn. But the bowl of noodles we ordered with 2 big and 1 small prawns at $5.00 was real value for money. And the prawns were very fresh too. Unfortunately, it was also almost an unanimous agreement that the broth was too bland for our taste bud. Maybe it is because they don't add pork to the broth unlike most prawn noodle stalls. Whatever it is, it tasted different. 

Next stop was River South (Hoe Nam) Prawn Noodles. This is in a small coffee shop and there were not enough tables for the people waiting. But they have a digital queuing system so we could place our order, find a place to sit and wait for our number to be called. Very efficient. No need to stand and queue for 1 hour. We waited for about half an hour for our food.

Here they serve many different of prawn noodles - with pork ribs; pig tail; abalone; clams; To ensure a fair comparison, we only ordered the plain old prawn noodles. Broth was definitely more tastier than Wah Kee but the prawns wasn't that big or fresh. Plus point was they provided chilli powder. At the end, everybody agreed it was not too bad but not really that good too. In fact of our group who used to eat there twice a month commented that the standard seems to have dropped a lot.

From Macpherson we went to Beach Road to Blanco Court Prawn Mee. This particular place has 4 other related stalls including probably the most famous prawn noodle of them all, the Beach Road Prawn Mee at East Coast Road. Maybe because it was raining, it wasn't as crowded as usual. The wait here was, actually what wait? There was no queue and the noodles came to our table in less than 5 minutes.

They also serve various version of prawn noodles but again we ordered only the plain vanilla although some of us opted for jumbo prawn and some the normal prawns. By now some of the group were a bit jaded and has resorted to sharing 1 bowl of noodles between them. Everyone agreed the broth here was the most flavourful and the prawns were big and fresh. At least, the jumbo were. But the prices here were much more expensive with prices from $4.80 to $10.00. This bowl of small prawn noodles cost $4.80. The jumbo cost $10.80. And we all think they used MSG although we are not too sure of that. Last but not least, the portion is very small.

Medium size prawn verses Jumbo size prawn

The last stall was the Adam Rd Prawn Noodles at Zion Road. There is another outlet at the Adam Road Food centre but we choose this place because we ate at the latter more often. Unfortunately we didn't do our homework well enough and reached there at 3 pm only to realise that the stall only open at 5 pm. But on the plus side, that gave us some time to digest the food by going for a walk along the Alexandra Canal. Maybe because we were early, when we returned, there were no queue at the stall and so we ordered the  medium size prawn noodle which cost $6.00 a bowl.

When the noodles came, everyone of us were surprised. There was pork added. On top of that, unlike the other stalls, the color of the soup was more milky and not so orangy. But looks can be deceiving because everyone agreed this was the best of the lot so far.g

So exactly which one is the best. Food, as I always tell people, is very subjective. One man meat is another man poison but never the less, we all agreed to give a rating on a scale of 1 - 5 for each stall so here is the range of scores.

Wah Kee: 3 Most value for money
River South: 2.5 - 3.5
Blanco Court: 3 - 4 Most expensive
Adam Road: 4 - 4.8

But don't just look at these scores. Go try them out and see if you agree with them.

Street Food of Tokyo

Tokyo was not some place where we expected to find street food but we did came across some gems.

Like while stumbling around in Shunjuku one night, we found this back alley where there were a whole lot of small little outlet selling Yakitori and noodles. These are really small outlet like this one here which can only seat at most 6 persons in front of the counter.

There were a few variety of skewered meat wrapped over different sort of vegetables and mushroom.

 

Nothing really spectacular about the food except for the below bowl of curry like food filled with what I believes are the left over from the making of the Yakitori. This was really good. 

Just a short walk away from the above was a soba stall which had a perpetual queue. One reason for the queue was that the place can only sit 8 persons so everybody wait their turn for some one to finish, sit down, order and gulp down the gigantic bowl of noodle and then goes off. 

  

Of course, we being food loving Singaporean, we got to join the queue and wolf down the bowl of noodle despite us just finishing the Yakitori. By the way, the bowl of noodle only cost Y300!

Just before our hotel, there was this little mobile truck selling Sweet Potato. M bought 2 to try. She said they are very soft. I think they have been cooked to death!

At Asakusa, there were stalls after stalls of snack food. Most time we don't know what they are but that did not stop us from buying everything that looks good which practically mean every stall.

Some sort of pastry which comes in different flavours like green tea and strawberry.

This store had the longest queue

 And the Princess with their produce - a huge polo bun

 Master chef making some sort of hot dog.

And M enjoying it

Another Chef doing something else

And that me with the result.

Not really a lot of street food but what was available was good although I think they are not too healthy. But heck, I will have regretted it forever if I didn't try any of them!

Ramen Kagetsu Arashi

I like Ramen and whenever a new outlet from some famous chain in Japan opens, I try to go sample the food.  So one evening, the kid recommended the Ramen Kagetsu Arashi at Tampines One. He has not dine there himself but seen the queue so the thinking must be - it must be good, right?

Ramen Kagetsu Arashi as the restaurant proudly proclaims in its menu is one of the largest chain in Japan and is famed for its Tonkatsu based soup. 

We ordered 3 different type of ramen:

Arashi Genkotsu Ramen

Arashi Toripaitan Ramen

Arashi Genkotsu Barikara Ramen 

And I must say I am rather disappointed. They used hard boiled egg instead of soft boiled eggs. I can live with that if that is the way they serve the eggs in all their outlets but what I did not like was the noodle itself. The noodle were soggy and overcooked. The broth was just average and not as favorful as I expected. 

I remarked to the others that I am pretty sure the chefs are not Japanese but students and true enough when we looked into the open concept kitchen, all we could see was a few young kids dishing out the food. And that is obviously the problem with most food chain outlets here. Everything is pre-defined and the young part timers just need to follow a pre-determined timing pour in the prepacked ingredients, dump in the noodles and volia - food is served. So what we get is a mechanically sound food cooked without passion. Which is fine if I get to pay fast food type of prices but unfortunately, this is not the case.

Food in Kota Kinabalu

Was in Kota Kinabalu a few weeks back and had a great time eating the local street food. We stayed in the Gaya area and there was absolutely the best food around. We went with the flow and ate mostly at the crowded shops although we did dine at some of the not so crowded and we immediately knew why they were not crowded!

Our first stop was dinner at this Bak Kut Teh place. The place was absolutely swamped with people from the minute it opened in the afternoon till it close at night.

This is the typical Malaysia style bak kut teh and comes with all sort of side dishes like pork ball, intestines, livers, stomach etc

Next up was breakfast at this place just across the road from the Bak Ku Teh store. There were 2 stalls inside the coffee shop, one selling Sarawak kolo mee and the other Sarawak style laksa. The kolo mee was the more popular stall. But I thought the laksa was not too bad too.

Kolo mee

Laksa

On the way back from race pack collection, we had lunch at this place that one of the guys recommended. The place was crowded and hot. There were many people ordering the noodles from one of the stall within but we went for the fried noodle stall and sadly the food were so so. Dinner was zhi char food at a shop next to our hotel but it was just passable and so all these shall not get a mention here. 

Breakfast on Sunday was at a dim sum shop. We had dim sum and noodle but these were normal and nothing to rave about. 

The only reason the dim sum shop get a mention and a picture here is that they used those 3-in-1 packet for the teh tarik that we ordered! Either they must be darned proud of their Sabah produced 3-in-1 tea or that is the way tea and coffee are made in the country but I don't really fancy those commercially produce tea.

For lunch we went to what must be the most famous Western food outlet in town, Little Italy! See we are kinda  weird, we do our carbo loading after the race and not before! Our party had pizza, pasta, salad the usual Italian stuff. Was the food really that good? I guess if there is a scarcity of such food in the country, it will be considered good and of course we wolfed down the food but frankly I think there are better pizza and pasta back home.

A Noodle Story @ Amoy Food Centre

Continuing the quest for new hawkers, this one stand out for its innovation. 2 young man running a noodle story with a twist. Like a typical kaisu kaisee Singaporean, they have come up with the ultimate kaisu kaisee all-in-one uniquely Singaporean noodle that cannot be found anywhere else on this island.

So what is the Singapore noodle? Very simple - take all that Singaporean like about noodle and volia
1) Wonton
2) Prawn
3) Fries
4) Japanese style egg
5) Hongkong style noodle
6) Japanese style barbecue pork or char siew
7) Sambal chilli
Throw in some local garnishees like hay bee (dried shrimps) and there you have it - the Singapore noodle!

Of course you can have all this but if it doesn't taste good - then nobody is going to buy especially at prices starting from $5 a bowl. I like the egg and the char siew which they use a flame to fire directly on. The curly fries was a nice touch. Too bad only 1 prawn it it. I find it too salty maybe because they use lemong rass as one of their sauce. Overall, it is very interesting. I wouldn't say it is good. Maybe unique. Let's just hope they will continue to experiment with the recipe and come up with something that is really uniquely Singapore and nice to boot,

Dirty Eat Dirty Big

Ordinarily I don't like to diss food stall that are no good. But this one I really cannot tahan.

A few years ago, a colleague tapau fried rice for me. It was one of the best I tasted. I was suitably impressed with the taste and went to buy for myself one fine day. But what I saw made me swear off the stall forever. To this day I have not bought the fried rice or noodle from this stall but I left it at that and didn't do anything. Then the other day, I was queuing up for noodles at a new stall which was next to them and while waiting, I could not help but look at the stall (the fried rice stall).

Now this fried rice stall is a 1 man show. Just an old man but his fried rice and noodles are good enough to attract a steady stream of customer. The problem with this stall and in particular him is that he is atrociously unhygienic!  He does not wear those disposable gloves. He handles his ingredients  such as prawn, porks and other stuff with his bare hands. When he receives an order, he will scoop up say a bowl of white rice and pour them onto a plate before pouring them into the wok. If there are any rice stuck to the plate, he will use his hand to push them into the wok. Next, he turns around and pick up the ingredients with his bare hands before throwing them into the wok. Because his hand is now a bit wet from the fresh ingredients, he wipe them on his apron if he is wearing one or on his trouser if not. The rice is fried pretty fast and he hands them over to the customer and collects the cash with his bare hands again.  If there are no customer, he wipes the table top with a table cloth. When another customer comes along, he repeat the whole cooking process. Note that I did not mention that he wash his hand in any of the above instances. The only times he goes to the basin is to rinse his wok when he has to cook a different dish. Even then, where does he wipe his hands dry? On his apron or trouser of course! Maybe that why the food he cooks is so nice!

The best thing about his stall? It got a A rating from NEA! For those who don't mind the "non washing of hand", why not give this stall a try? It's really pretty good. Like they say, dirty eat, dirty big.

Beef Noodles

A new noodle stall at Amoy Food Centre. The stall name says Pepper Bowl but it doesn't sell those pepper rice that is everywhere now. Instead its main dish is beef noodle.

I tried the dry beef noodle and I know now why the stall is called Pepper Bowl because there is certainly a lot of black pepper in the noodle. A very different taste from the usual beef noodle found in the food centre. More the beef hor fun style. Not a bad dish but definitely nothing to rave about.

What is nice is the fried seafood taupuk. Fried to a crisp outside and soft inside. Come with a sweet sauce which I think is not necessary. This one I like very much. To borrow a phrase, "die die must try".

But what got me excited is the durian puree which the stall call durian brulee. Sadly I haven't gotten round to trying it yet. A bit too strong for lunch time. Cannot afford to have durian breath in the office but damn it sure look goods!

Anyway, their credentials? This page of reviews say it all:

Hai Kee Teochew Char Kway Teow

I have been eating char kway teow since young and my absolute favourite is Hai Kee Char Kway Teow. This stall used to be at Margaret Drive and my family used to patronise the stall when we were staying in the area. Thus I can safely said I seen the young man grew old and he seen me grew old as well! But then again, he still looks younger than me! Must be the secret ingredients that he put into his CKT!

Anyway, with the closure of the Margaret Drive Hawker Centre, he has now moved to Telok Blangah Crescent. Since the move late last year, I have not been there and so I was all excited when a friend invited us there to sample his father's Char Kway Teow and it turns out his father is the famous Hai Kee Char Kway Teow!

So a big group of us gathered for a Char Kway Teow feast and we had CKT with hum (cockles), more chilli, less chilli, no hum etc. After a rather lengthy wait, (son also got to queue up), we finally got our order.

Photo by Francis Chia

A lot of time, after a stall has been relocated or even the hawker centre upgraded, for some reasons or other, the taste change. Or maybe due to a change in the ingredients, (like trying to do a healthier version), the taste change and most time for the worst. Did the taste changed in this case?

Thank goodness it did not! It still taste the same, not too wet and not too dry and comes with a generous heap of cockles. Mind you, this is sinful food and not for the health conscious but I enjoyed every single bit of it and slurped down every single morsel even before the rest of the noodles came for the other people in the group! At $3.00 a plate, (I think price has increased), it is still worth every single cents if you don't mind the cholesterol inducing oil and lard!

Photo by Jancy Yap

Hai Kee Teochew Char Kway Teow is now at Blk 11 Telok Blangah Crescent Hawker Centre opposite Safra Mount Faber. They also have a facebook page and a blog.

Wanton Mee

Talk about wanton Mee and Joo Chiat and Fei Fei Wanton Mee automatically comes to mind.

On our last visit there, passed by this little coffeeshop and saw that it was quite packed. So when the opportunity came, went down to see what food it offered. At 9am on a Saturday morning, there was just 2 stalls opened - one selling wanton mee and one roti-prata. The small little shop had about 20 tables, 5 in the coffee shop and the rest along the 5 foot way but with the exception of one table, everybody was eating the noodle.

Maybe it was that good or maybe there wasn't much choice to begin with but we followed suit and ordered 1 wanton mee and 1 chicken claw mee. After a wait of 20 minutes, the noodles finally came. Was it really worth the wait?

The first thing about the wanton mee that strike me was that the soup tasted like the version at Fei Fei. It has this weird taste which I can't put and and the closest that I can think of is that it is the smell of longkang water but then that seem to be the trade mark of wantun mee in the area just like the minced meat noodle is unique only to Bedok and Tampines.

The noodle itself was so so with little pieces of char siew and chye sim. The best of the lot was the chilli sauce which makes it taste great.

The stall claim to fame is 2 small newspaper article (same article) of an interview with Mr Charity. I think he was interviewed and commented on the stall being one of his regular haunt.

Was it really that great? As usual, I will reserve my judgement since one man's meat is another's poison. Free go and try. It the little coffeeshop along Tembeling Street off East Coast Road next to Haig Girl School.

Yummy Claypot

Due to work and other committment, we had to postpone a very important celebration till Sunday evening. 

In Singapore, when we talk about celebration, it is usually food.  

Not too sure what to eat and since Alicia wanted seafood and we old fogeys were too stingy to fork out on real seafood, we decided to check out the small little outlets in Katong. At Joo Chiat, home of the Viets, we came across this new claypot outlet. The decor looks good, there was a decent crowd inside and so we went in.

They served claypot and there was this big counter where the guy (yah.. look like from the PRC) was putting ingredient into small claypots.  Didn't look too promising now that we went nearer but we were already in so nevermind decided to give it a try. 

Their claypot soup was kept warm in a giant urn and not those glass and metallic steamers that are commonly used in stalls. We ordered the melon sharkfin or is it sharkfin melon soup which cost only $4 but was in a teeny weeny claypot. However, it tasted real good with big chunks of chicken.

We also ordered the house special - a double vege dish of kailan and seaweed fried with ikan bilis. This was quite different and the combination was rather palatable.

What is claypot without claypot rice? Initially we wanted the large portion but was 'encouraged' by the waitress to go for the single serving since the large claypot will take 40 mins to cook. So in the end we settled for ne of the normal chicken claypot and another pork rib claypot. Each claypot only cost $5.50. These was quite normal but for its price we ccouldn't really complain

Finally since Alicia originally wanted seafood and since they had some seafood on their menu, we ordered the XO crab bee hoon. This time we scored big time! The dish came with a mid size crab with plenty of roe boiled in rich creamy milk based soup favoured of course with XO. I must admit this was real good comparable to the XO fish soup noodle in Holland V. And the dish with the crab cost only $20! Real value for money!