I was on a mission to hunt for Big Prawn Mee stalls outside of the Jalan Besar/Beach Road vicinity lately and am glad to report that I managed to find a few on the northern part of Singapore which will be reviewed in the next few posts.

Now I’m feeling very good lately as far my hae mee fix is concerned because I’ve finally found one hae mee that is worth a rave, finally!!!!

Let’s face it – Prawn Mee is all about the prawn soup. It’s not your fault that some stalls are using King Prawns to tempt you to part $10 for a bowl of Prawn Mee but seriously, if you and your partner want to have a good prawn mee time, $20 sound quite a ridiculous amount no matter how good the prawns or prawns’ soup are. For $20 I can safely say that you can prepare a good prawn mee time for your entire family at home.

So it’s this reason that I find it hard to sing praises for a $10 bowl prawn mee, I mean, heck, $10 prawn mee is not like the $10 Hor Fun or $10 Cze Char where a few person can share the portion.

Ok there are many many stories about Dai Dong Prawn Noodles and they apparently played hide and seek with their customers around the Jalan Besar area for a while until they lost a big chunk of their regulars. Well they finally settled in this little corner coffeeshop at the intersection of Rangoon Road and Starlight Road.

Dai Dong $4 Prawn Mee

You need to have $4 in your pocket before the owner will agree to serve you a prawn mee here. Now, eventhough Dai Dong is a prawn mee stall, they also specialise in other mee combinations with ingredients like pork ribs/tails/intestines/liver.

Dai Dong $4 Prawn Mee

Sometimes, buying any food other than what the stall is famous for can be risky because you are obviously paying for something that are not the most popular but I’m going to tell you that at Dai Dong, the spare rib mee is definitely a risk worth taking.

It was by a stroke of luck that the pork rib ended up in my bowl of prawn mee. I didn’t tell the owner that I only wanted a pure prawn noodle and the owner just assumed that I wanted a pork rib/prawn combination because apparently that’s how orders are done at Dai Dong – the default bowl is with pork ribs.

Dai Dong $4 Prawn/Pork Rib Mee dry

As you can guess, I wasn’t happy when I saw pork ribs in my bowl of prawn mee soup when served. Hell I’m coming here to eat prawn mee so why am I now needed to eat pork rib?

Ok ok, as with any other risks, you can win or lose and I’m glad to say that this pork rib delivers a FULL HOUSE! FWAHHHHHHHHHHH! I’m never a fan of pork ribs in soup. I mean no doubt it can easily fall off the bones and are quite soft to chew but otherwise, what’s so shiok about a piece of ‘overboiled’ pork?

Dai Dong $8 Prawn Mee

Not at Dai Dong mate! Their pork ribs are cooked(braised perhaps?) in some kind of delicious marinate and by the time it ended in your bowl of prawn soup, it is such a fine piece of delicious rib. Well it is so good that I’ve visited them many many times in the past few weeks and every single time I need to get a $2 portion of pork ribs to go with my prawn mee, and mind you it’s just 3 little pieces but shiok enough to make me willingly part $2 for it.

While it may have been true that their pork ribs excelled for me, their prawn soup is what that can really make me have an ‘orgasm’! This is a real prawn soup, no gimmick, no dried scallops, no tik poh or hae bee(dried shrimps) thrown into the pot. Pure prawn flavour providing that excitement that is so sorely lacking in many of the Big Prawn Mees because they apparently use more ‘ho liao’ for the soup base which is suppose to give you more bang for your buck but au contraire, it often deviates from the original prawn flavour, so much so that the prawn flavour is diluted already.

Dai Dong $8 Prawn Mee + $2 Spare Rib (Prawn mee bowl very big!)

Ok to be fair, the soup does have a hint of that bakuteh herby flavour which pushes the oomph a little more north for me.

Dai Dong is where you get a bowl of prawn mee soup with very shiok prawn flavoured soup. Seriously real PRAWN FLAVOURED and not other strange flavours that you get when eating those Big Prawn Mee from elsewhere. It is shiok enough for me to rate it better than most of the Big Prawn Mees I’ve eaten.

If there’s ever one Prawn Mee that I would be happy to pay for just the noodle and the soup without any ingredients, then Dai Dong Prawn Noodles is what it takes.

Price: $4+

Recommendation: $4 prawn mee pork rib + $2 pork rib!

Conclusion: My champion hae mee soup. However since taste is all but subjective, I’ll just say that I relish a real prawn stock instead instead of other chapalang flavours you can get in some hae mee soup. Pork rib is a must try but don’t expect good prawns here. For the $8 bowl, you only get peeled prawns(banana) so it is definitely not in the league of those Big Prawn Mee stalls like Wah Kee or Hoe Nam as far prawns are concerned.

Likes: Soup, pork ribs.

Dislikes: A little expensive.

Address		Overall Rating
Dai Dong Prawn Noodles 97 Rangoon Road 8am – 3pm Off: Monday		Food: 9/10   Authentic: 9/10   Value: 8/10   Service: 8/10   Ambience: 8/10   Cleanliness: 8/10   Overall: 8.25/10