So seldom it is that I have prawns (of any style) that it came quite a surprise when one day I looked through my pictures and found that I had, rather unknowingly, eaten my way through three different meals featuring prawns prepared three different ways on three successive times.
The first one had been eaten at a cafe in the basement of 313 Somerset on Orchard Road.
The second one had been eaten at a restaurant in another basement of another mall next to Bideford Road.
And the third one had been eaten at a cafe on the second floor of Far East Plaza over on Scotts Road.
Maybe it has something to do with being in the vicinity of Orchard Road, but I was quite amused, seeing how I don't go for soup prawn mee very much, I have no idea where the good prawn mee stalls are, and prawns are not the first thing that come to mind when ordering zichar at the coffee shop.
But, pictures don't lie.
There were the humongous fried prawns laid over a plate of Pad Thai glass noodles sprinkled generously with fried onions and bits of cereal.
There were the prawns stir-fried wok hei style arranged on top of a plate of seafood white bee hoon drenched in a milky white sea of gravy.
Then there was a soup of prawns and shrimp (and other ingredients) boiled many, many times over into an orangey rich broth.
I can't say which of all three was the best- each to their own- but I will say that the prawns on my Pad Thai gave me quite a surprise.
I had not expected them to be this big.
I had also not expected them to come unshelled.
But because they were good and they made the dish look so full and so satisfying, I decided dining etiquette be thrown to the wind and I ate them using my hands instead.
I couldn't eat the half-shelled prawns of my seafood white bee hoon the same way though.
There was just too much gravy.
But it wasn't too hard to deshell them with fork and spoon, they went well with the bee hoon, and I had a great time munching on the cuttlefish, eating up the generous portion of lettuce, and slurping up the gravy.
I might go back to the same cafe next time for the very same dish.
Or I might make a trip all the way up to Sembawang to try the well known one.
I'll go back to Le Shrimp Ramen for the orangey rich broth though.
This one's really good.
Warm on the palate, rounded on the tongue, this is a broth that you can have when you want something soupy, or when you don't have much of an appetite.
This is a broth that goes well with ramen or rice, and which you can have with meat dumplings, gigantic prawns and soft mushy comforting leaves of lettuce on those days when you don't feel like having ramen or rice entirely at all.