Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [48]
The market portion of Tanjong Pagar takes up the whole of the large ground floor, crammed with stalls offering a stunning array of produce, including drag-onfruits that look like artichokes dipped in Chinese red lacquer and rose apples that resemble a cross between a pear and a chayote. The upstairs hawker center looks shabbier, enough so to intimidate the squeamish, particularly if they get a whiff of the pig organ soup simmering in the stand at the top of the stairs.
The soup draws crowds of fans, but our sights are set instead on ice kachang, another popular dish with greater appeal to us. The two places that tie for Makansutra’s highest mark for the treat in the city, Annie’s Peanut Ice Kachang and Huat Kee Ice Kachang, compete here as next-door neighbors. Our intention is to try both versions, but Cheryl demurs after we share one from Annie’s. “This is good, but two’s too many.” The personable proprietor shaves ice finely to snow consistency in a machine designed for the purpose—Makansutra raves about the blade she uses for this—and then mounds it into a large volcano-shaped pile. She pours a rich fruit syrup over the stack and adds jellied fruit squiggles and cubes, corn kernels, and sweetened red adzuki beans, showering everything at the end with finely chopped peanuts. Weird but tasty.
Rain starts pouring during our stay in Tanjong Pagar, so to avoid getting soaked on the trek to the subway station, we take a taxi to our next, across-town stop, the Old Airport Road Emporium and Cooked Food Centre. From the outside, the square, open-sided, three-story building looks like it could double as a parking garage. Food stands occupy the same space a car would, packed together so tightly that they leave minimal room for walking and eating in the aisles.
Makansutra likes many of the one hundred or so vendors in this old-style structure, though business is slow late on a stormy Sunday afternoon. Our goal is to sample several dishes, starting with fried Hokkien mee, a Singaporan comfort food that blends fried wheat noodles with seafood stock, prawns, squid rings, and strips of pork, often from the belly. Ng Hock Wah of the Nam Sing Hokkien Fried Mee took the 2005 Hawker Legend title for this specialty, which he has cooked for more than forty years. He stays open daily at the Emporium, but closes occasionally on an ad hoc, unannounced basis—like today, unfortunately.
Determined to try the mee in any case, we find another version nearby at a friendly mom-and-pop stall where the man cooks and the woman serves. He fries the spaghettilike noodles in a wok with the seafood, meat, lots of bean sprouts, and bits of scrambled egg, and puts everything together in a bowl of flavorful broth. The lady brings it out with a proud smile with lime juice and chile paste, and we devour it all down to the last lick of liquid. It’s good enough to get addictive.
While we eat, Pop prepares his other forte, known variously as or luak, fried oyster egg, and oyster omelet. He spreads a circle of taro flour on a flat-bottomed wok, adds beaten eggs and a sprinkling of red chile, splashes in some oil, and then dexterously maneuvers this mixture to the side of the pan. With his other hand, he dips oysters into more of the same flour and fries them lightly on the opposite section of the skillet, scooping them up when just browned to scatter over the still-runny eggs. He’s done in less time than it would take one of us to wash his wok.
Curry puffs, one of the few items that disappoint us in Singapore, come next on our list of things to sample. Wang Wang Crispy Curry Puff fixes a nice, buttery and flaky pastry shell, but the curried potato-and-chicken filling lacks flavor to us. Blandness doesn’t worry us at our next stall, Mattar Road Seafood Barbecue, another of Makansutra’s top fifteen Legends and its number one choice in town for chile crab, a Singapore icon usually spelled the British way as “chilli crab.” Ng Hung Leng and his wife close two days a week, a long business break here, to make the red chile sauce, a robust