bak chor Mee

It has to be a Singapore-Singaporean who thinks about whether she should write an article about bak chor mee. No allegories, no references, no discussions, no reviews, nothing of the sort.

 

Just a plain bowl of bak chor mee.. as it is.

 

Of course, one could go on about hawker culture, whether it is dying, for what reason it is dying, whether there're still people going to hawker centers and why, and why not. Of course, one could also go on about whether hawker fare and hawker centers in general have a future, whether they even have a place in 21st century Singapore, whether graduates from cooking school should be encouraged to take up hawker-hood, whether they wish to, and how we can encourage them to forgo their dreams of dessert-making and cake-baking and instead enter the squeezy, cramped, stuffy, box-like space of a stall in the hawker centers.

 

And of course one we could go on about whether we are losing our culture and national identity if we allow the hawker centers to die and what we're gonna do to preserve it.

 

One could go on and on, and honestly, such discussions are marvelous in that they have made hawker centers into a culture. Eating at a hawker center, or ta-paoing food from a hawker center or coffee shop was always part of being Singaporean, but now it has become an official culture.

 

To be Singaporean is to know our local hawker fare. To be Singaporean is to be immensely proud of the fact that you work in a spanking office building in MBFC but will take the Downtown Line to Hong Lim Food Center and grab boxes of buttery muffins or mee chang kueh or kueh chang or have a crayfish laksa lunch.

 

To be Singaporean is also to claim not to discuss anything else other than bak chor mee.... but end up writing a couple of paragraphs before you get to the actual thing. :P

 

bak chor mee

and the bak

I know that there are very popular ones that people go specially for.

But this one is from Killiney Kopitiam at Circular Road, which I'm sometimes at when I'm in the CBD during lunch time. The CBD has a host of cafes and sandwich places and restaurants with plenty of great lunchtime deals. But I prefer local for lunch and this is a fantastic spot to be at. They're remarkably efficient, they've got a good selection of dishes and you don't usually have to wait too long before you get a seat.

Between the Hainanese Pork Chop, the Seafood Hor Fun and all the other dishes, I usually go for this, and I ask the aunty to customize it for me with kuay teow and tomato sauce. They've got the ingredients in the right proportion... fish balls, fish cake slices, soring onions, bak chor, lettuce, pork lard and all, and the tomato sauce isn't too sweet nor too overwhelming and makes a great midday meal when everything's mixed up together.