Have Your Fish And Eat It

I chanced upon this stall unit 01-30 at Havelock Cooked Food Centre, off Old Havelock Road today at 2.30pm.

I was intrigued by the bowl of chunky deep-fried stuff on many tables, and stopped to take a cursory glance at the stall.

Oh, it served Fish with Tom Yam, Fish with Soup, Mian Fen Guo and Ban Mian. Two price-points, $3 and $3.50.

I ordered Fish with Soup at $3.50. Within minutes, my order was ready - Rice, Fish Soup, 2 different servings of Chilli sauce and, YES, that bowl of chunky golden-crispy stuff. I took a bite, and wiped out my handphone to take snapshots for my blog posting. The fish meat was fresh and succulent. The crispness was excellent. To refer them as fish nuggets would be a misnomer as they were rather chunky. For $3.50, it was a generous helping.

One slurp of the soup, I could say with certainty that it was fish-bone based with hardly any MSG, if any. It was rather wise of the stallholder to serve the fish and the soup separately, and allow the customer to enjoy the crispness of the freshly fried fish meat or to mix them with the soup as was commonly served elsewhere in Singapore. I am against the idea of mixing deep-fried stuff in soup as it defies the logic of basic cooking - the craved crispness of the stuff is lost in the soup !

There was no certificate of accreditation or recommendation by food columnist, etc. But, I believe that it is a matter of time when the stall would be recommended as worthy of recognition for its excellent cooking.