Freshly fried beef hor fun worth waiting
for
IF YOU frequent stir-fry stalls, chances are you have by now been
conditioned to accept their assembly-line fare.
Nine times out of 10 when you ask for fried beef hor fun, for
example, the flat rice noodles are pre-cooked and might have been
sitting on a plate for hours.
The hawker heats up some gravy, stirs in strips of beef and greens,
drops it all on top of the hor fun - voila! lukewarm beef hor
fun.
So imagine my disbelief when I tried the beef hor fun from a stall
in the Chinatown Complex Temp Market And Food Centre one recent
evening. The dish seemed to have been cooked from scratch.
Certainly, the tender, tasty pieces of beef had been whisked in
with the hor fun, because they were not in a tell-tale pile atop
the noodles, but beneath and between strands of hor fun.
The noodles were nicely brown, too: Any browner and they would be
burnt. And there was an unmistakeable whiff of wok hei, that
fragrance of food fresh from a hot wok.
The ee fu noodles with seafood and fried rice I ordered were just
as outstanding. Like the hor fun, they are sold in small, medium
and large servings at $4, $8 and $10.
Hawker Ngo Meng Nguen and his colleague are the two stir-fry
masters behind these steaming meals.
Mr Ngo, 48, reckons he has been in the business for 30 years since
his days as a street vendor. In 1984, he moved to the old Chinatown
Complex, setting up a stall called Xing Long Seafood
Restaurant.
His stall has no name at its present temporary address - the
signboard shows only the number, 1-197, but he plans to bring back
the old name when he returns to the revamped complex.
He is Foochow, actually. But because he grew up in
Cantonese-speaking Kreta Ayer, he not only talks the talk but also
woks the wok.
He says modestly: 'It isn't that others don't know how to cook. But
they pre-cook all their noodles and gravy, and wait for you to turn
up.'
He prefers to do things the old way and let the customer do the
waiting.
'I know a customer comes to me because he's hungry. But if you want
to eat good food, you have to be understanding. You have to be
patient,' he says.
I went to his stall with my family one Thursday night and we waited
a finger-tapping 40 minutes for our orders. But when dinner
arrived, it was truly worth every minute of the wait.
