Hey Hive!
Now that a lot of people here have already gotten vaccinated, I'm very happy to hear that Singapore is now allowing in-house dining again but obviously you have to be vaccinated. But since there aren't any restrictions this allows us to try out different food places again!
Sean and I love hawker food and since our last hawker date went well (and we were really satisfied and stuffed), we decided to go on another hawker date at a different hawker centre!
If you're new to Singaporean food, hawker centers are non-air conditioned eating places with tons of stalls specialising in one or two dishes. They're the evolution of mobile food carts back in the 1950s and 60s, when the government wanted to improve sanitation and hygiene.
Now there are plenty of hawker centers in Singapore and while they used to be considered more catered to the less affluent, all the licensing requirements (including one for hygiene) has made it a cleaner and more pleasant place to eat, especially with a whole myriad of stalls specialising in different cuisines!
Hawker centers are definitely our favourite places to eat since it's cheap and good! In fact there are quite a few hawkers here that have been awarded Michelin stars! There are also plenty of hawkers that have been around for decades just honing their craft that have really delicious food too!
The hawker centre we visited this time is in Chinatown, specifically Hong Lim Food Centre! There are quite a few different hawker centres in Chinatown that we've yet to visit and we have come here before so we knew how to navigate it. Or rather, Sean knew since he used to come here while he worked in the area a few years back.
Source: danielfooddiary
So what we like to do on hawker dates is try a few dishes from different stalls according to what takes our fancy. And the first stall we decided to try is this one called Tai Wah Pork Noodle!
I think Sean has tried it before but I haven't. The stall has been around since 1939 and is probably one of those that came from a food cart back in those years! These stalls get passed down from generation to generation through the family, it's literally like getting a taste of history!
They actually don't have a menu it's just the pork noodles and how big of a portion you want. They have options for $6, $8 and $10. Kinda pricey in my opinion, but I will hold my judgement until I've tried it. We waited for about 10 minutes and I went to take a seat on the upper level while Sean ordered.
After a few minutes, our food was ready!
This dish is quite unique since the noodles comes with pork, pork liver, meatballs and curiously, a piece of fried salted fish! Now I'm not a big fan of liver, but Sean likes it at least. We chose mee pok for the noodles (which is flat yellow noodles). And I initially thought the sauce would be tomato-ey since it looked quite red but it wasn't too tangy which was nice.
The salted fish was good; not as crispy as I would've liked and I'm not sure how well it paired with the noodles either tbh, it was a little odd. But the pork slices and the meatballs were alright. The dry noodles also came with a bowl of soup, which I guess was used to cook the pork, was very flavourful and tasty!
Overall, I'd say this dish was nice but not really to my taste. I think I'd rather have mee pok with fishballs tbh. And since I don't really like pork liver I'd say it's kinda meh. The portion was also kinda small even for 1 person so I'm not sure if it's worth $6, at least not to me.
While walking around deciding what else to eat we came across this snack shop that sells different types of cookies, tarts and kueh.
So Sean bought their special homemade ondeh-ondeh to try! If you're unfamiliar, this dessert is of Indonesian origin and is sweet rice cake balls filled with palm sugar and coated in grated coconut.
It's normally too sweet for my taste but this one was really good and had a nice balance of the outer rice cake to inner palm sugar filling. It was still quite sweet but not too sweet for me thankfully.
We did eat try more dishes other than the pork noodles, but I think I'll leave that for next week instead.
Thanks so much for reading!
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