Har cheong gai rice bowl ($6.50)!
Chinatown hawker har cheong gai rice bowl: prawn paste fried chicken over rice with an onsen egg and shredded cucumber, sesame finish. $6.50.
Lunch at Chinatown: har cheong gai rice bowl, $6.50. 😋
What was in the bowl:
- Har cheong gai: boneless prawn-paste fried chicken pieces, craggy and golden, dusted with sesame
- Onsen egg: the soft slow-cooked egg in the centre, the yolk ready to break
- Shredded cucumber: the cool raw julienne under the chicken
- Rice underneath, with a herb dusting
Har cheong gai (虾酱鸡), “prawn paste chicken”, is the Singapore-Cantonese zi char classic: chicken marinated in fermented prawn paste (har cheong), the funky-salty condiment, plus ginger and sugar, then coated and deep-fried. The magic is the smell, that distinctive savoury-funk that plain fried chicken can never reach, and the test of any har cheong gai is whether the prawn-paste flavour actually penetrates past the crust. Done right, the funk is woven through the meat, not just on the surface.
Served as a rice bowl rather than the usual sharing platter, the fried chicken is boneless and cut into bite pieces, laid over rice with an onsen egg to stir through, the molten yolk binding the chicken to the rice. The shredded cucumber is the cooling counterweight to the rich fried chicken, the same logic as the cucumber that garnishes every zi char har cheong gai.
Why the rice-bowl format works: it turns a dish usually ordered as a $12-$16 sharing plate into a single $6.50 lunch, with the egg and cucumber making it a complete bowl rather than just chicken on rice.
At $6.50 for a har cheong gai rice bowl with onsen egg in Chinatown, this is fair hawker value for the zi char flavour.
Overall: 4.2 / 5. 😋👍🏼 The prawn-paste funk on the crisp chicken, bound by the onsen yolk, was the standout. Would re-order.
