Singapore is known to be a food paradise and Singaporeans would travel from one end of the island to the other just to savour a popular food or dish.
There is just not enough hours in a day to indulge in our national past time, which is why you will find many eateries, hawker centres and coffee shops crowded with people even way past dinner time at night.
Here are some of my favourite supper places.
126 Eating House (Wan Tou Sek)
Opening hours: Daily: 24 hours
Rating: 4/5
I just love dim sum, tapas and degustations. Unfortunately, the dim sum scene in Singapore just isn't that happening and I can't understand why. I really miss those days where the aunties would push a cart right up to your table and you get to choose what you want to eat. Why is it that there are only a few places that have them today, even though I think most Singaporeans still wish they were around? I would like to see a Hong Kong street Style dim sum place in Singapore. No fancy restaurant, just a nice kopi tiam atmosphere where the carts are pushed around and diners rush for their steaming har kow and siew mai.
So, you can imagine I was comforted to find such a place in Geylang. This small shop dishes out savoury dim sum in an atmosphere that is quintessentially Geylang. A good dim sum to me means that most items are good, some are excellent and some are unique and difficult to find anywhere else. That just about sums it up for Wan Dou Sek. Not exactly restaurant dining, but that's how I like it – nostalgic and chaotic. What I also like about this place is that they dare to be adventurous, so you can expect a few surprises. We should have more of such stalls in Singapore!
Let’s look at some of the more interesting items. The deep fried oysters were one of them. Simple and sinful, the oyster fritters were juicy and shiok. Too bad there wasn't any tartar sauce or blue cheese sauce to go with it! (4.5/5).
Another dish that caught my attention was the fried fish maw with Thai style chilli sauce. It is something you don't see very often. The chilli sauce was quite sour, reminiscent of Thai style seafood dip (4.25/5).
My makan kakis and I had come for the lo mai kai but after trying it, found it to be ordinary. The stall used only midwings for the lo mai kai. I thought the glutinous rice was not soft enough. For me, a great lo mai kai should have soft and gooey glutinous rice saturated with chicken juices (3.75/5).
However, I must rave about the fried yam cake there, as it was one of the best I have tasted in Singapore. The yam was generous and powdery (the Teochews describe it as “sang sang”) and the cake was full of hae bee (dried prawn) flavour. The cook deep fried it and it was so good! (4.5/5).
The curry chee cheong fun was just average. The curry was a bit powdery but if you want to spice up your dim sum meal, this might appeal to you, as well as its steamed seafood otah dish (3/5).
Opening hours: 24 hours
Rating: 4.25/5
I have been trying to find a cheaper alternative to Tandoori Restaurant. A fresh chewy naan with smooth and creamy butter chicken are among my top five picks! But the $15 butter chicken at Tandoori, though delicious, is not something I can afford to eat every week. I needed to find a satisfying meal for less than $10. This is one of the few places I can find naan after 10pm in the evening. So I made the 30 minute journey to the West to try it.
The butter chicken was delicious and good value for money. At $6 per bowl, it was almost one third the price at Tandoori. It was good enough for me to go back there again. It was less creamy but nonetheless still rich enough and had a strong tomato paste flavour (4.25/5). However, the palak paneer (pureed spinach with cottage cheese) was quite disappointing. The cottage cheese was tasteless and hard and the gravy had little oomph (3/5) The chicken tikka was impressive on display but didn’t taste as good. It was a bit dry when it should have been oozing with juices if it was freshly grilled. It felt like it was being double grilled (3/5). The naans really saved the day. The cheese and plain naans were excellent. Chewy, fresh and fragrant. And it was only $2.50 for the cheese and $1 for the plain, which means I could easily have 2 or 3 (4.5/5). Overall, it was a great place to eat but you must order the right stuff. I would go back and order the naans and the butter chicken and maybe try some other dishes that I didn’t eat that day. For around one third the price of eating at Tandoori Restaurant, I get 80% of the satisfaction.
Opening hours: Daily: 24 hours
Rating: 4/5
Ahhh… prata! One of the reasons I left Australia to come back to Singapore! You can't beat fresh roti prata and a cup of teh tarik for breakfast in the morning! These days, every prata stall wants to be known as the Jalan Kayu Prata when in fact, that the restaurant does not have any branches!
“Jalan Kayu" is synonymous with prata and these days, the name means more than a location. It has come to mean a typical style of prata that Thasevi has made famous i.e. the small, round and crispy type. The prata there was good. It was crispy on the outside, flaky on the inside and surprisingly, not too oily! My only complaint was that it was too small such that you would need to eat about four to satisfy the prata craving. 4/5 The curry was very tasty and complemented the prata well.
I continue to lament the falling standards and decreasing size of Singapore’s prata. This was supposedly the most famous prata but even it still fell short of the ultimate prata. My dream prata would be one that is made from ghee and evaporated milk. Big, thick and crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. The last time I had a really memorable one was at the Shangri-la Resort in Sentosa on my wedding night! Most of the prata in Malaysia would easily beat Singapore's. For prata's sake, won't someone just give us the ultimate prata?
Opening hours: Daily: 4.30pm-2.30am
Rating: 4/5
This hor fun has a special place in my heart. I first laid tongue (and eyes) on it over 10 years ago when I was still a medical officer at Changi General Hospital. I remember it was one of those nights I had to be on duty and my registrar and I had just finished our operating list. We had been without food since lunch and it was past 12 midnight. We had been removing haemorrhoids, stitching up wounds, fixing perforated stomach ulcers, appendectomies, fixing up holes in people's colons...... the sort of work that really builds up a good appetite. At that hour, we were quite ready to settle for whatever food available at the hospital but we were pleasantly surprised when a drug rep stormed into the room with a few packs of beef kway teow.
Words could not describe how I felt when I took the first mouthful of the kway teow. That smooth, “wok hei” flavour combined with the super tender beef in black bean and chilli sauce was so “shiok”, I gobbled up the whole pack before I could take a breath. Ten years on, it still remains my favourite beef kway teow. Although people tell me that the standards have dropped a bit, I still find the sauce irresistibly tasty. I think that the kway teow nowadays is not fried till it is charred like in the past, but it still is one super tasty plate of beef hor fun especially for supper!
Opening hours: Daily: 5pm-3.30am
Rating: 4.25/5
Many people say that frog meat tastes like chicken meat. If that is the case, why pay $8 for a frog when you can actually buy quite a substantial amount of chicken meat with that money?
The kung pao sauce in this dish was really very delicious, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether it would taste different if chicken was used in place of frog. I think you can see where I am coming from. I like this dish very much, but for $8, I only got a few tiny morsels of meat. How I wished there was such a thing as a Godzilla frog with legs the size of a chicken. I was told that this unassuming little stall in a coffeeshop serves Singapore's no. 1 frog porridge. I must say that a spoonful of the kung pao sauce with the porridge is quite satisfying to soothe a late night craving. I find frog meat to be a little sweeter and the texture more delicate than chicken. But because there is so little of it, it is a dish one has to partake with the same attitude as chicken feet.
Reproduced with permission from Dr Leslie Tay. He is the author of the popular food blog ieatishootipost.sg which chronicles his quest to eat, shoot and post Singapore's best eats.
