Mom and Pop Penang Prawn Noodle

Penang Food Stall

Run by a elderly couple  who look like in the 60s, they serve Penang dishes like char kway teow, prawn mee, lor mee and laksa.

Not thing unusual there but what is unusual is that they are not stingy with their ingredients and they do not charge much for a ‘proper’ sized meal.

The picture above is a $3 bowl of dry prawn mee and it comes with:

3 whole prawns

a stack of fishcake

generous amount of pork slices

and being your typical grandmotherly type, adds in more kang kong vegetable than your usual hawker stall.

The dry sauce is a nice blend of chili and gravy with a healthy splash of pork lard into the mixture. It is not thick by any means but it feels, to use an overcliched term, ‘homemade.’

It is not by any means Penang-style, as if any of you have tasted prawn mee there, the taste is a blend of hot, sweet and salty and prawn flavour all rolled into one.

Prawn mee in Singapore, on the other hand, is pure prawn stock and the best stalls use flavours to enhance that basic flavour. The worst, unfortunately, use loads of msg.

As for mr pop and mrs mom here, once you come here, you feel at home. The auntie hobbles her way with a tray of your food and you almost feel guilty that she’s doing all the work.

Though not necessarily the prettiest, the food is robust and uncompromising and you’re not put off by the calculative amounts of ingredients in the dish, which is the feeling you get from many hawkers.

7/10

Penang Food Stall

block 431

Clementi Avenue 3

Mee Rebus Power!

Rahim Muslim Food

As the front of their shop says, “If it doesn’t taste good, tell us. If it does, tell your friends!” says the front of Rahim’s shop and immediately there is a feeling that Rahim does not take things too seriously and prefers to take things easy, observing the way he goes about his stall.

But do not be fooled by his deliberately easy-going pace as he produces one killer mee rebus.

$3.50 gets you a plate of mee rebus, plus almost a quarter of a chicken. The chicken itself is spiced with tumeric and the meat itself is soft, tender and never dry even though it hangs on the hook all day. With a whole egg, tofu pieces that are never over fried, green chilies, and a splash of lime, it makes for a more-ish meal!

The gravy is the real attraction here; nice and thick and even with the addition of a dollop of satay gravy on the top, it is never too sweet like alot of mee rebus places out there.

In fact Rahim is puzzled by the approach of other mee rebus stalls, “they always make it so sweet. It overpowers every other flavour in the dish.”

Rahim, 53, uses his father’s recipe which is over 60 years old. His father learnt it in the 1960s from a friend who hailed from Java, Indonesia and he has been making the mee rebus ever since.

Ironically, it is not his father’s original recipe that drew in the crowds, but his mother’s. When his father passed away and left the business to Rahim in 1985, his mother stepped in and revamped the mee rebus recipe and the crowds started noticing.

Success ensured and he sells roughly 200-300 plates of mee rubus a day. Even during the quiet times of the day, in between lunch and dinner, there is still periodic customers streaming in for a plate of mee rebus. Over the weekends, he has to close early as ingredients run out as early as 5pm.

Though they have shifted four times, the stall has been based along upper Serangoon road all this while as his customer base is here.

Rahim’s third daughter (he has four) is interested in taking over from her father and has been helping to run the business on the weekends.

The likelyhood of her taking over the stall is “in five years time maybe.” If she succeeds in maintaining the food standard, this heritage hawker will continue for at least another generation.

8/10

Rahim Muslim Food

Y2000 Beer Garden

793 Upper Serangoon Road

closed on alternate Sundays