Boon Keng New Taste (文庆新食代), Havelock Road

I've noticed this restaurant (719 Havelock Road, tel : +65 6966 6987) for a while before they opened up. Always had the idea that they were a local cze char (煮炒) kind of place because of their name. Turns out that they're serving Chinese food. As in Chinese food from China with some 东北-ish vibes and possibly Malaysian influences.

Never been much for fried rice in these kind of Chinese restaurants but the seafood fried rice here was good. Not gonna compare with that famous Taiwanese chain that people tend to. The flavour reminded me of Chinatown Fried Rice back in the day when they were still in People's Park Food Centre. Nice.

We had grilled skewers. Note to self : the memorable ones were the pig intestines, lamb ribs and pork belly. Tender and flavourful meaty bites with a healthy dash of cumin. The others weren't bad. They just weren't outstanding.

Here's their pork knuckle soup with not much meat in those knuckles. There were a bit of skin and some wobbly cartilage-ous parts but it wasn't much for eating. Soup reminded me of seolleongtang for some reasons.

Lots of soy beans in there.

We wanted more food so we topped up with chicken mid wings, crab sticks and toast. Those grilled mid wings were nice - meaty, salty and cumin-y just like how I like them.

The toast didn't look like much at all. I thought it was awesome because it was grilled with some butter and a moderated sprinkle of sugar. Pretty taken in by the texture of the bread which was a mix of some crisp parts and some moist (oily) ones. I'm gonna find it difficult not to order this again the next time.

One week later......

Ordered the bunch of stuff we liked from the skewers during the revisit. They were still good.

This was what turned up when we ordered yang zhou fried rice (扬州炒饭). The golden yellow was nothing like what we've ever seen with yang zhou fried rice before. The restaurant did confirm that turmeric was one of their ingredients when we asked. Like I said, nothing like what we've ever experienced with 扬州炒饭. No char siew or shrimp or even crab sticks. Was kinda tasty though.

Some Yunan styled claypot fish soup according to the menu. I'm not an expert on this but the soup didn't look/taste Yunan-ish or local. Plenty of slices of what might be the cheap dory/sutchi with black fungus, loads of bean sprouts, cucumber and carrot in a broth with sliced chilli for heat. 

I don't think these guys are great with soup.