That Elusive 古早味

Nowadays, it's hard to find hawker food that tastes as good as those we've had in the days of yore, i.e. when we were young/kids... *Ahem!*. The hawker food these days just cannot make it! From my observation, I think it boils down to two main reasons:

* Foodcourt food being cooked by people who have no idea what the food they are cooking is supposed to taste like, or in a bid to reduce costs, they shortchange the customers, i.e. 偷工减料. It really irks me when many of these food court workers (many from PRC) try to pass off a brown-looking bowl of noodles as Lor Mee, or noodles with chilli oil and vinegar as Tom Yam! Hello, that is sacrilegious, ok!?! Real Tom Yam does not use vinegar. DUH!!

* The traditional ways of preparing/cooking the food is not being passed down to the younger generation, which isn't willing to take over the business from the older generation of food hawkers/chefs.

Hence, it is always a delight when we come across food that tastes really good, or has got that 古早味 that reminds me of childhood food.


Curry Donut - this recent addition by BreadTalk bakery chain reminds me of the yummy curry donuts from Yaohan Bakery!!

Yaohan Dept Store really holds lots of nice memories for me coz we used to live near to it, and would often visit to shop and to bowl at the bowling alley above it (not that I knew how to bowl, now still a longkang bowler).


However, in terms of taste, it doesn't taste like Yaohan's curry donut at all, and they've even added a piece of hard-boiled egg, which is more akin to local curry puffs.


Duck noodles - this one is very good, from Clementi Central's food centre, and it's only $2.50.

Hokkien mee fried in the 60's style


We found this by chance, at Beach Road. Look at the amount of lard they gave. While I think it will appeal to some, it wasn't quite up to our tastes (we're not that old anyway :P ), and I'm guessing they use prawn stock in the cooking instead of pork bone/chicken stock.

Zhi-Char from Chin Chin Hainanese kopitiam at ... Peck Seah or Liang Seah or something street.


They ran out of hor fun the night we visited (so early!), so we had to settle for fried bee hoon. This is rather good and has a bit of that old Hainanese taste as cooked by the Hainanese Ah Gor of the good old days.


The place I used to live as a kid had many Hainanese, who were then known as very good cooks, so they really did very good zhi-char, although I'm sure MSG was used liberally, which was common then.



The next place deserves special mention as it's so far our most favourite place for fried hor fun and the KL style fried Hokkien Mee.


Both dishes are excellent - very fragrant and very tasty which keep us coming back for more.

The only regrettable thing is that they don't use the big, fat, yellow noodles and have only the thin yellow mee.


The place? It's at Lai Huat Seafood Restaurant (a kopitiam) along Horne Road (#72?), just beside the Jalan Besar Stadium. They do some mean zhi-char dishes too like belachan fish, but we have yet to try it (coz too spicy for the SO).