Ironically, Big Prawn Mee is rampant around Jalan Besar, Beach Road area. Further north a little, you can see a few others like Wah Kee at Farrer Road, and Hoe Nam at Bendemeer. I guess it ain’t rocket science that Big Prawn Mee must had been invented around that area but a surprising fact is that it still hasn’t ventured much into the eastern side of Singapore except for 1 stall.

If you’ve ever travelled on East Coast Road, I’m sure you would have came across Beach Road Prawn Mee Eating House near Siglap. This prawn mee stall hailed from Beach Road and from my observation, they seem to have mastered the art of pulling the crowd. Nevermind that the area has no decent parking facilities, people just can’t seem to stop appearing, even at non meal times like 3pm. And it’s not only the tables that are filled, the queue at the counter was even quite long.

The cheapest bowl here is $4.50 and you get 2 medium sized prawns sliced in half while several other combinations allow you to add pork ribs or other bigger sized prawns to your bowl. At $4.50 it should be considered as reasonable except that they seem to use tiger prawns instead of the banana prawns as in other stalls I’ve eaten at. Tiger prawns are of course cheaper so amongst all the big prawn mee that I’ve eaten, here provides the least shiokness as far prawns are concerned.

Prawn Mee $4.50

With the disappointing prawns, I was expecting the soup to be spoon-licking good but alas it didn’t. I think many $2.50 prawn noodles’ soup can even topple this. Though it looks quite good and as much as I want to show off the shiok factor of this prawn noodle, there really isn’t anything that’s worth a rave.

Prawn Mee $4.50

Beach Road Prawn Mee Eating House turned out to be one of those places I don’t understand. They are crowded and famous for reasons I don’t know and the fact that parking your car here is extremely difficult just makes the strong crowd almost spooky.

Prawn Mee $4.50

Price: $4.50

Conclusion: This is a very popular big prawn noodles stall and the crowd is forever strong but yet it it didn’t charm me. Since they are located at the heart of siglap/katong, I’m just guessing that this could be a rich man’s prawn mee.

Likes: Nothing.

Dislikes: Tiger prawns used instead of banana prawns. Soup no power.

Address		Overall Rating
Beach Road Prawn Noodle House 370 East Coast Road Tel: 63457196 8am-4pm daily Off: Tuesdays		Food: 6.5/10   Authenticity: 7/10   Value: 6.5/10   Service: 7/10   Ambience: 7/10   Cleanliness: 7/10   Overall: 6.75/10

It is no rocket science that Chinese style Malay’s food is our local inventions that were created to cater to the Chinese community or you can call it fusion food.

I had my first Chinese Mee Goreng experience at the Old Punggol Hock Kee seafood place at Punggol end long long time ago. Those days, I am pretty sure it was the only place that serves Chinese Mee Goreng. After they got chased out of that place by our gahment which was in the mid 90s, Chinese Mee Goreng started appearing in foodcourts and a lot of them had tried to say that theirs is the Punggol ‘Original’ version.

But how actually does an original Punggol one taste or look like?

Well for me, it does seem to be quite easy to produce a plate of Chinese style Mee Goreng. And believe me, a lot of Cze Char place can do it. The chilli sauce they need is those kind they use for their chilli crabs, mix it with some noodles and seafood, throw an egg in…..and TA-TA…you have a plate of the Punggol Mee Goreng.

The only thing here is…how wet…how dry…how spicy….how much wok hei….when to throw in the ingredients…..those few factors will dictate how good the plate of Mee Goreng is.

Punggol’s Hock Kee Mee Goreng was very delicious in the past. A good Chinese Mee Goreng usually has noodles that’s still al dente(QQ), a little bit charred, looks a little oily and wet with red chilli sauce coating it, a slight hint of ketchup but not too much, beansprouts MUST be quite raw in the sense that it still have that crunchyness when you bite into it, infact all the vegetables must still be crunchy, probably 1 egg thrown into it, and with chunks of those seafood pieces you can find in any Cze Char Hor Fun.

So in short, this Mee Goreng should be a quick job that probably doesn’t need more than 5 mins in the wok. Well at least that’s how Punggol Hock Kee’s Mee Goreng was and it was absolutely shiokadodo to go along with all the seafood dishes.

Ok now, the golden question, where to find this Mee Goreng now?

Unfortunately the ownership of Punggol Hock Kee at Punggol Marina had changed hands a few times so there is no doubt that the Mee Goreng there isn’t the same anymore.

And the thing is, it is not cheap there nowadays as well. My friend, who had just dined there, came telling me the Mee Goreng which he ordered, tasted nothing like the past and still costed him $12!

Now I’m going to introduce you to a very good quality Chinese style Mee Goreng that is double in shiokadodoness but yet half in price.

East Coast BBQ Seafood is, well, a BBQ seafood stall at East Coast Lagoon Food Centre and it is popular for a few things like Chilli Crab, BBQ prawns and Sambal Sotong.

I was told that their Seafood Mee Goreng is to die for and extremely value for money and being a spicy food lover, I couldn’t resist checking it out.

Mee Goreng

Big Succulent prawn!

My plate of Mee Goreng costed $6 and looked absolutely sexy. It had the 2 distinctive appetising color – green and red. But impression is one thing, how about the taste?

My first taste of it sent me to sheer ecstasy!

For $6, this kind of umami punch, I definitely didn’t expect. The noodles were very very QQ but had the marvellous wok hei too. The fire under the wok must be very very hot to be able to produce that. The chilli was ok though I wish it was that tad spicier because I am really a ‘HOT’ person. The sweetness was just nice and complemented everything very well. Vegetables were crunchy, many sotongs and 3 big succulent prawns were thrown in too.

This is comparable to the best Mee Goreng i’ve had before. The taste was good, the wokheiness of everything was perfect and the ‘al denteNESS’ of the noodles and vegetables were sharp and precise.

In terms of taste and value, this is one Mee Goreng that will be extremely challenging to find in any kopitiams. In restaurants, you can forget about finding something similar. In my view, food that doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg usually are not that fantastic but yet here, all you need is to have $6 to get a top quality Mee Goreng.

Price: $6

Recommendation: Mee Goreng

Conclusion: A very mean Mee Goreng that has all the necessary characteristics to replace my no 1 Mee Goreng at Hock Kee Punggol. For value, this will beat many other Mee Gorengs from other Cze Char places because it came with big succulent prawns and many squid pieces. You’ll probably get a few measly pieces of seafood only at Cze Char places. For taste, it is perfect for me and my entire Mee Goreng ‘texture’ was done right.

Likes: Whole plate was very skillfully fried. Seafood was aplenty. Value for money!

Dislikes: More spicy please and another egg wouldn’t hurt!

Address		Overall Rating
East Coast BBQ Seafood 1220 East Coast Parkway Stall 38 East Coast Lagoon Food Village Mon-Sat: 5pm – 10.30pm Sun: 1pm – 10.30pm Off on Tuesday		Food: 8/10   Value: 9/10   Authenticity: 8/10   Service: 7/10   Ambience: 7/10   Cleanliness: 7/10   Overall: 7.25/10

So what connotes a good chicken wing? For me it is fairly easy to do a delicious chicken wing, just like it is also easy to produce a good roti prata. The thing that really separates normal from delicious I think is how long ago was it cooked before it is being served to customers.

The fact is 90% of roti prata, if eaten hot after retrieving from the pan, will sure taste absolutely marvellous. The same goes for Chicken Wings. Most places that sell wings can marinate their wings to a certain standard in terms of flavour but what spoils it is that they tend to have the habit to grill it long before you order and just warm it up over the charcoal before serving to you.

It’s fine if the chicken wings were cooked 1-2 hours ago. It’s even fine if it were cooked 4-5 hours ago. But when you get something that looks a little too charred, meat very dry, bones look pale and overall it just looks like wouldn’t be too friendly to your tummy, you have no choice but may ask the question “Was this grilled more than 12 hours ago?”

The truth is chicken wing sellers always grill chicken wings in bulk but a good flow of customers is required to clear the stock so that they can continue to grill the fresh ones so we can shout shiokadodo when we eat it. Unfortunately that’s not the case in many stalls or should I say MOST stalls. They often have lull periods and when they couldn’t finish selling half of those they grilled, it sit there until the next unlucky customer appears.

Chicken Wings rack

Ah Hwee BBQ Chicken Wings & Spring Chicken at East Coast Lagoon Food Village is one of those chicken wing stalls that you wouldn’t need to worry about getting chicken wings that’s been grilled long time ago. And that’s because they only open at around 5pm in the evening and their grilling work starts around 4pm. And the good thing about Ah Hwee BBQ Chicken Wings & Spring Chicken is they usually chuck the chicken wings they couldn’t finish selling within the evening.

Chicken Wings

Chicken Wings

So I should say that perhaps operating hours for chicken wing stalls is the key to whether customers can get fresh chicken wings or not. Maybe a chicken wing’s stall that prefers to do business from lunch to the evening might be better off to be visited in the afternoon. Or perhaps if you really really want fresh chicken wings, then visit them as soon as they open business, well that’s provided of course they don’t keep cooked ones for the next day. Otherwise if you’re staying in the eastern part of Singapore and craving for chicken wings during dinner time, then Ah Hwee BBQ Chicken Wings & Spring Chicken is the place to go for freshly grilled ones.

Price: $1.20 each

Recommendation: Chicken wing though heard the spring chicken is good too.

Conclusion: Has the robust flavours of the chinese style of marinating. You are 100% guaranteed to be served fresh wings since they only start grilling before dinner time. Not my best but one of my top 5.

Likes: The nice flavour in the wings which can make you drool and freshly grilled.

Dislikes: Chilli not spicy enough.

Address		Overall Rating
Ah Hwee BBQ Chicken Wings & Spring Chicken East Coast Parkway Stall 14 East Coast Lagoon Food Village Tel: 9660 1690 5pm – 11pm		Food: 8/10   Value: 8/10   Service: 8/10   Ambience: 7/10   Cleanliness: 7/10   Overall: 7.5/10

It does seems to be that the theory of demand and supply is at work and maybe when food sellers are looking to setup stalls, somehow they’ll be more inclined to sell food like Mee Pok Tah or Hae Mee or Char Kway Teow which are eaten widely but what is the reason or reasons that Beef Kway Teow and Mutton Soup can’t receive the same level of demand? What do you guys think?

And the truth of the matter is that if you see a Beef Kway Teow or a Mutton Soup stall, more often than not, it is a family run business with closely guarded recipes passed down through the years or even decades. So that brings another argument, are these food not easily found because food sellers have not an idea how to cook them as oppose to something like Hae Mee where really is all just about putting the prawn’s shell in the water to boil? Well I think the answer lies in the fact that very few hawkers are willing to take the risk to produce a normal bowl of Beef Kway Teow and if they were to risk, then why not they go for more widely eaten food like Hae Mee, make sense? And possibly when that happened in a large scale, we see a hawker centre housing several stalls of Mee Pok Tak but yet only a stall of Beef Kway Teow exists in the entire neighbourhood.

Talking about closely guarded recipes, it’s all to do with authenticity. When it is really authentic, it is so special that you almost can’t find it anywhere else. Take for example, there is this famous Bak Chor Mee at Bedok Blk 85 market that everyone who are staying in the east must have eaten it but yet if you were to refer the name Bak Chor Mee to people who stays in the west, they’ll be thinking of another thing which is the Teo Chew style of Bak Chor Mee which is something eaten dried most of the time just like Mee Pok Tah except that there is a hint of vinegar in it and also comes with some braised mushrooms most of the time.

Now for those who doesn’t know, this kind of Bak Chor Mee that exist only in the Bedok area and are eaten in the soup version 99% of the time, is something that is really authentic. You can only find it in Bedok Blk 511 market, Bedok Blk 85 market and Bedok Blk 58 market and all of these stalls are actually relatives and so they’re really selling some food that their own family invented, now that’s really as authentic as it can gets.

It’s almost the same story for famous Beef Kway Teow around the island. Some Beef Kway Teow can be so authentic that you can get a particular flavour in a particular stall and no where else and the famous Hock Lam Beef noodle is one example.

Beef Kway Teow $4

Lagoon Leng Kee Beef Kway Teow thrives on something similar. For as long as I’ve eaten from this stall, I cannot remember eating another bowl of Beef Kway Teow with the kind of authentic flavour I get from this stall. Some of my friends that I’ve brought to eat at this stall have told me that it’s nothing fantastic and the funny thing is I agree with them that it is indeed not the best but yet I willingly swear by this flavour that it is really authentic. Afterall, authenticity has nothing to do with being the best right? Taste indeed is a relative meter and are we all not programmed to like or dislike certain taste due to our past eating habits which is also called taste acquisition?

I’ve eaten at Lagoon Leng Kee Beef Kway Teow since I was very very young and the flavour of the beef soup here is really something that is different from what you can find elsewhere. Well at least for me and so it really sets them apart from the rest. Beef being just beef and kway teow being just kway teow, therefore there’s really nothing fantastic about those ingredients here but the soup here is very special for me and because it has that hint of sourness which complements the entire bowl of beef kway teow very well. I think the sourness derives from the use of giam chai(preserved mustard greens), I’m not 100% sure but it looks(or rather taste) like it. The chili sauce that comes with it is good though I wouldn’t call it fantastic.

I’m not sure if many people will agree with me about this stall being authentic but then the long queues that I witnessed every single time without fail I suppose is a testament to it being a little special to those people in the queue at the very least. A bowl of beef kway teow here would cost you $4 for nothing more than a few pieces of beef on top of some kway teow with a few pieces of giam chai but yet the authentic soup here can more than make up for the lack of good ingredients. For that reason, it is special for me and indeed for many others especially those in the queue.

Price: $4 and above

Conclusion: The beef soup here is all that I’m coming for. If you like beef ’spare parts’ then maybe you can relate more to the $5 version otherwise if like me who don’t know how to appreciate those parts then $4 is sufficient.

Likes: The shiokadodo beef soup.

Dislikes: Beef is very normal, chili not sour enough.

Address		Overall Rating
Lagoon Leng Kee Beef Kway Teow East Coast Parkway Stall 33 East Coast Lagoon Food Village		Food: 8/10   Value: 7/10   Service: 7/10   Ambience: 7/10   Cleanliness: 7/10   Overall: 7.25/10

Singapore’s version of Roasted Duck Rice will never beat the Hong Kong version. Some of the best Roasted Duck Rice I had were in Australia or UK where they are so many good chefs doing Hong Kong roasted meat business on extremely competitive level. I guess that sort of environment does in some ways help to uplift the standard of the food.

But then again, some may say that in Singapore it is also very competitive and what’s more, here it was going for $2 until few years back and now it’s just $2.50 or $3. In places like Perth or Sydney, you’ll be lucky to get a plate of Duck Rice for under A$9. Well my answer to that is, that comparison is flawed because first, in western places, Chinese food outlets operate from close-knit eating area like the Chinatown or some Asian foodcourt etc. So when they have to operate businesses from close proximity, obviously it is going to be very very competitive. Of course there are Chinese food to be found in some ulu Aussie towns too but usually those places are not where you can find the good ones. Then also not forgetting there are lesser Asians in those countries and so the customer base undoubtedly is quite small to start with. If you want to know how difficult to do business in those places, I have friends telling me that in London, you might need a cash flow of around 1 million pound before you can consider ‘occupying’ a place to sell food in Leicester Square which is the London’s Chinatown.

Like all food, something that is roasted and grilled are always going to be more receptive to people. It goes the same for duck. Roasted Duck is more popular and Braised Duck is something that is probably as rare as Beef Noodle, at least for me. I have very very bad knowledge about Braised Duck Rice because I have only ever eaten at a few stalls. It does seems to me that whenever I’m at a kopitiam looking for food, Braised Duck Rice seldom appears. But interestingly when they do, it always seems like a good stall with plenty of shiny braised duck hanging on the display rack. I’m not sure whether because there are lesser competition so they can usually sell more or because they only sell duck and nothing more. As compared to a Chicken Rice stall, they may sell other things like Char Siew or Siew Yuk. So what do you think?

I vividly remember I ate my first Braised Duck Rice at Cheok Kee Duck Rice operating at a run-down kopitiam in Macpherson when I was little. My dad being a real foodie would really travel half the island just to have a plate of rice and some of my trips with my family there to eat the duck rice was quite memorable because to me, that plate of rice was really quite amazing. I figured after a while that it is something to do with the ‘Lor’(gravy) and it blends so well with the yam rice that I must consider it the same level of shiokness as curry on rice.

Fortunately, they have a stall only a stone’s throw to where I stay and so I can easily have my fix. Cheok Kee Duck Rice has been made into franchise along the years and they have a few branches around from what I heard. The one at Macpherson had shifted down a few yards and is now located somewhere near the Mazda showroom. There is one at the East Coast Lagoon Hawker Centre. Then I have heard about people talking about one at Kallang area and another one in the West near to Buona Vista.

Cheok Kee Duck Rice is delicious for me only because the combination of the ‘Lor’ and rice together with the duck meat has something that what I would call a ’smooth consistency’. Maybe the texture of the rice has a role to play too as I do remember the yam rice I had there were always soft and puffy. Braised duck unfortunately is just all about that. The duck meat and skin were braised in the ‘Lor’, unlike Roasted Duck where you can talk about how well it is roasted or how much fats there are. But for Braised Duck, it is still the same meat and skin except that it has a coat of that ‘Lor’ so the influence is still going to be the ‘Lor’ more than anything else.

Cheok Kee Duck Rice is undisputedly my favourite Braised Duck Rice. Just like a plate of good fried rice is one that doesn’t make you feel ‘jerlad’ after eating it, this plate of Braised Duck Rice hold the same truth for me. Unlike some other stalls where it’s either too sweet or too salty, this ‘Lor’ on the yam rice is something that can satisfy me because the hits on my umami were always constructed in a very well balanced manner.

Price: $3 onwards

Conclusion: Outstanding duck rice for me because the ‘Lor’ is so delicious, it can almost make the rice melt in your mouth. Never once had I felt ‘jerlad’ aftering eating a plate of it. That is usually the sign of good quality good.

Likes: The Lor aka gravy.

Dislikes: Meat was quite little for $3 portion.

Address		Overall Rating
Cheok Kee Duck Rice – East Coast Stall 29, East Coast Lagoon Food Village 1220 East Coast Parkway, (S)468960 (+65) 6445 4222 Mon – Sun: 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.		Food: 7/10   Value: 7/10   Service: 7/10   Ambience: 7/10   Cleanliness: 7/10   Overall: 7.25/10