Cheap And Good Place Near Me

Decided to pop in to the Hainanese village today and man.. it a great decision! Queue was still going strong at noon when most of the activities at the market was wrapping up.
The noodles was well cooked and the meatballs were really fresh and good. Mind you, these are hand made and not the frozen ones you usually get with the usual bakchor noodles.
A major plus - the stall lets you help yourself to the fried pork lard!!!!
Highly recommend this stall!

He Korean shop at this Kopitiam ha brought the 炸酱面 and rice cake to a new low.
The noodles didn't even taste like 炸酱面，more like badly braised lor bak with potatoes with cheap soya sauce. It's just black and tasteless.
The rice cake is hard and hard to chew..
AVOID!

Today, I did something I never thought I'd do: I spent 2 hours queueing for food. And this was all for the sake of checking out why this stall at Chinatown Complex got a Michelin star, signifying that it serves really good food in its category.

Dishes I tried were the Soya Sauce Chicken + Pork Ribs with Rice and Char Siew Noodles. Let me just break them down into individual components.

Soya Sauce Chicken: One of the better Soya Sauce Chickens around, the meat was juicy and had this smooth, slippery texture in your mouth.

Pork Ribs: This came highly recommended but it just tasted like your run-of-the-mill, dry and tough Char Siew. However, I would urge you guys to try this again as the Pork Ribs I had looked really different from what other people have been posting. Mine seems to have been done in a hurry, lacking the much desired caramelised char, moistness and penetration of flavour into the meat.

Rice: Thought this was rather bland but that could be solved with more sauce. I felt that the texture of the rice was a little mushy as well.

Char Siew: I felt that this was the best item from the stall. Nicely caramelised while still retaining the moisture of the meat. It wasn’t too fatty as well. In my opinion, this would be the only thing worth queueing for (but still, 15 minutes max).

Noodles: The texture of the noodles cannot be faulted but I would have preferred my noodles to be a little firmer. The sauce was also a little too strong in terms of sweetness and saltiness for me, like I was taking of spoonful of oyster sauce that had only been diluted by the tiniest of margins.

One of the obstacles to retaining the coveted Michelin star(s) is consistency. If what I experienced today was an issue with that, I hope the stall will be able to quickly adjust and cope with its greatly boosted popularity.

Based on my meal today, I would say that Kim Heng HK Roasted Meat @ Serangoon could give you Char Siew of a similar quality (they have consistency issues sometimes though) and more tasty Pork Ribs. You might end up spending slightly more at Kim Heng, but I’m sure queueing for 15 minutes instead of 2 hours is more than worth the extra dollar or two.

Needed a fix for Teochew porridge and chance upon this place. Long queue but cleared very fast.

Long queue on a Sat night.