Glad we were, I tell you, when the basement food court of Parkway Parade finally reopened to quiet fanfare.
For three months, us shoppers at this popular suburban shopping mall had had to ask ourselves the mind-boggling question of 'what to eat' because our favorite go-to chap chye png, wanton noodle, nasi padang, chicken rice, and Hakka yong tau fu stalls were sealed, boarded up, gone.
So it was with a bit of anticipation when on Facebook I saw that the food court had finally reopened.
And, going by the number of diners in the food court that one weekend afternoon, so did others, besides we.
I had thought we would have our regular order of chicken rice.
That was, after all, the stall we had often gone to before renovation.
But the (branded) chicken rice stall was gone.
So this afternoon we decided we'd try some of the new stalls in the food court, beginning first, with this plate of char kuay teow, and this colorful, substantial dish of Indonesian-style nasi padang.
One might say there were a lot of contrasts, which, in a way, yes, but we didn't mind.
There's only so much of color a plate of char kuay teow can have.
Maybe you can have it with the most colorful of crockery but no matter how colorful the plate it is, it's just gonna be a lot of black, and brown.
I was a little surprised by the char kuay teow, actually.
A part of me had thought it would be of subpar standard, you know, just take the rice noodles, throw it into the wok, dump soy sauce and all the other sauces, and fry.
But no, you got a fair bit of wok hei, you could taste the soy sauce balanced out evenly all over the noodles, and even though, as noodles go, they were on the sweeter side, I got the flavor of savory both the same time as well.
One thing I like about char kuay teow is the chew of the flat rice noodle.
The feel is a little hard to describe.
I just like the way it first sticks to my tongue, then disappears and slides easily down my throat after I've chewed through.
Looking at these pictures now it is interesting how the colors of one's favorite dishes can be.
If the char kuay teow was a pleasant, delicious-looking dark brown, the Indonesian style nasi padang burst with color.
You would think it were only the bamboo-style plate that they served the dish on.
But there was the green of fresh lettuce, there was the red of fresh sliced tomato, there was the khaki brown of the beautifully fried tempeh, the white of the rice, the maroon red of the sambal chili, and the bright orange, near vermillion of the skillfully fried chicken.
Whilst it were the colors that whetted my appetite and made me eager to dig in, it were the size of the dish that delighted me.
The portion was huge.
The chicken- not too fried, not too salty- was also huge.
I loved it.