Tiong Bahru Hainanese Chicken Rice, Ngee Ann City/Takashimaya

Tiong Bahru Hainanese Boneless Chicken Rice has opened a restaurant in town called Tiong Bahru Hainanese Chicken Rice (B2-36A Ngee Ann CIty, 391 Orchard Road, tel : +65 6900 4320). So they're no longer boneless? 🤔 Anyways, there's a slew of other stuff on the menu other than chicken rice. That seems to be how all these old chicken rice brands that expand end up.

Chicken's pretty decent. Quarter portion was bigger than I imagined.

Chook has jelly beneath the skin.

But it kinda feels a little different from eating them at Tiong Bahru Food Centre.

There's Hainanese crispy pork on menu too. I liked this even though I'm generally not a fan of crispy pork with the exception of the ones from the defunct Blk 38 Curry Rice. These were crispy, lardy and savoury. Loads of crunch and porcine flavour.

Even the curry that accompanied those crispy pork was delicious. 

The pickled mustard green were much more intense than those that I remember from their Tiong Bahru stall.

Bean sprouts quite nice. There're bits of salted fish in it.

Egg.

This outpost has chicken rice made using basmati and Niigata Koshihikari rice. Might come back and try those another time. 

Ah Lim (阿林), Soy Eu Tua Coffee Shop

Ah Lim is located in the same coffeeshop (Soy Eu Tua Coffee Shop, 15 Upper East Coast Road) as Chendol Melaka - stall's literally a coin's flick away. This was their $8 bowl. There's plenty of minced pork in this one. Okay-ish tasting bak chor mee as a whole but I also thought it was a little pricey. And not particularly memorable.

Chendol Melaka, Soy Eu Tua Coffee Shop

I read about Chendol Melaka (Soy Eu Tua Coffee Shop, 15 Upper East Coast Road) quite a while back and have been wanting to try their nasi ulam. It's finally happened.

 

I like it. I'm getting kaffir lime and lemongrass amidst the umami of dried shrimps, shallots and numerous things I couldn't quickly tell apart within the melange of flavours. Their sambal packed respectable heat and was delicious with the rice. 👍🏼 If I had to compare with the ones I've had previously, I like this better than the one from Little Red Hen. 

Sadly their durian chendol wasn't good. The flavour of the puree reminded me of those tubed durian kueh which I never liked because they don't taste like actual durian. Nonya Chendol beats this hands down.

Old Master Hong Kong Grill (炭烧香港烧腊), Smith Street Food Centre

Noticed Old Master Hong Kong Grill (Yellow Zone, #02-006 Chinatown Food Centre, 335 Smith Street) which I had initially thought was the Old Master Roasted Grill stall that disappeared some years ago.

Decent roasts here. Roast pork (烧肉) had a good bite and the duck breast slices were relatively tender. Love the sweet char siew sauce. What didn't work for me were the char siew. We ordered 半肥瘦 and this was probably 85% 瘦. Those looked a lot better hanging in the stall than they tasted.

Hoe Nam Vintage, Tiong Bahru Plaza

Hoe Nam Vintage opened up at the lot vacated by Lee Lai Jiak. The last time I've had prawn noodles from Hoe Nam was ages ago. Have a vague recollection of finding them okay-ish. I have mixed feelings about these guys here (#02-105/106 Tiong Bahru Plaza, 302 Tiong Bahru Road).

The impression I had gotten was that the crew were taught how to prepare the food they were serving and might not have much real exposure to how some these dishes were actually like.

And the kitchen was apparently dealing with some order issues that resulted in long waiting time.

This bowl featured small prawns and thin sliced pork belly. The latter was pretty good by the way. Saucing was...I don't know. Not bad but not what I expected from dry pork noodles. Then again, I haven't had Hoe Nam's prawn noodles for ages so maybe it's always been this way. The soup was pretty good, refillable and left an aftertaste like monosodium glutamate does.

What happened was we wanted to try their claypot dry bak kut teh. It never arrived and after about an hour, they informed us that we'd have to wait quite some time if we still wanted it. At this point, we didn't.

Tau kee's nice. The pickled mustard greens were the first sign that maybe, these guys weren't acquainted with what they were doing. There weren't very salted and were also fibrous and crunchy. 😮‍💨

One week later......

Prawn kuey teow soup's pretty decent. Portions were kinda small for a large bowl. These featured their "regular" prawns which were larger than the tiny shrimps from last week.

Okay-ish pig's stomach soup. Didn't taste exactly like what I imagined of it because the flavour was just a little different. Why is there 芹菜 in it?!

At $3.10, the pork liver rolls looked sad. Not nice. Not very livery. A knee jerk reached out to the memories of those superior ones from China Street Fritters and He Ji Wu Xiang Guan Chang. These ones here weren't close. Wouldn't get them again.

Their fried pork lard were freshly prepared but was oddly lacking in flavour. Hmmm......🤔

Managed to get the claypot dry bak kut teh this time round. I don't remember if I've ever had these so I have no frame of reference. This rendition was pretty good. I had expected the flavour to be more akin to dark soya sauce but these didn't quite taste like that. Still enjoyed it though. Pork ribs were tender with meat easily pulled off the bone. Love the thin sliced lady's finger. Would have been great if they sliced the chilli into smaller bits.

Revisiting Suukee Coffee

Let's start this entry with a date and a rant. We were here 24 Jan 2026 in the morning grabbing breakfast.

Not a fortnight back, there were social media posts about Suukee Coffee's CNY limit time items. Like their orh nee bak kua toast and orange kopi o which I was kinda looking forward to. And the sambal carbonara chee cheong fun. They were out of the orh nee bak kua toast today and CNY is still 24 days away.

The CNY promo started more than a month from the actual event and they ran out of bak kua in two weeks? 🤔 Laughably, I even see the unimaginatively over-abused word 'viral' used on them. 

From my lens...

• they suffer conflicting information on their opening hours
• depend on "crowdsourcing" to share their menu online instead of providing their own
• aren't exact responsive when you message them
• it would be nice if they'd indicated somewhere that some things are lunch only instead of needing us to find out from the ordering kiosk

Some priorities just aren't there.

End of rant.

That orange kopi o, didn't expect them to serve them hot. Nice.

Love the matcha orh nee toast. Nice green tea flavour with the creaminess from the yam puree.

OG orh nee toast also not bad. It's the one you can taste the yam the most.

Decent spam omelette toast...spam's kinda small here.

What's great about eggs here (at least for me) was that they crack them for you. Just like Ya Kun. But the eggs we got today were watery. So unlike Ya Kun, they don't discard the poorly done ones.

One week later......

Managed to get their orh nee bak kua toast this time round. I like the sweet smoky flavour from the bak kua that came through even though that meant that the orh nee was mostly relegated to just a creamy texture in the background.

Matcha butter toast was not bad. Wished the butter was bigger/more distributed.

Finally got to try this sambal carbonara chee cheong fun. First thought that came to mind was the lao gan ma chee cheong fun from Surrey Hills. That one was better. This didn't taste as nuanced and packed less heat though I wouldn't mind coming back for them. No it didn't taste anything like carbonara.

Got a curry chicken kolo mee. The curry needed salt. From this, one could surmise that Suukee either i) had no idea what they were serving ii) are poor judges of whether food was delicious. Or perhaps both.

There was just about enough for the noodles to soak them up. Those tau pok in the curry might have been thrown in at the last minute because they were dry-ish inside and did not absorb the curry at all. The rendition of curry chicken kolo mee from Traditional Sarawak Kolo Mee beats this hands down.

Orange kopi o ice's not bad.

Bona Aroma, Commonwealth Crescent Food Centre

Bona Aroma (#02-66 Commonwealth Crescent Food Centre, 31 Commonwealth Crescent) was another one of those stalls at Commonwealth Crescent Food Centre I've noticed numerous times and kept reminding myself I should give their food a try.

Never happened until recently when I noticed that there's a ketupat rendang which I've never had before. 

Tasted as good as it looked. There's mutton rendang (relatively tender lamb), sambal goreng, an egg and serunding all over some ketupat. This was a medley of savoury, sweetness and heat from the sambal and creamy nuttiness from the rendang. Paru was an add on. Not bad, I enjoyed this. Even though I wasn't getting any aroma from the ketupat.