Hakka yong tau foo set ($6.50) + meatballs ($2.50) @ New Horse Noodles, Chinatown Complex!
Home-made Hakka Yong Tau Foo Set, $6.50, plus meatballs, $2.50, at New Horse Noodles in Chinatown Complex: dark Malaysian-style dry noodles with a clear yong tau foo soup.
Home-made Hakka Yong Tau Foo Set with meatballs added, from New Horse Noodles at Chinatown Complex. 🍜😋
What we had ($9 total):
- Home-made Hakka Yong Tau Foo Set, $6.50
- Meatballs (3 pieces), $2.50
New Horse Noodles is at #02-148 in Chinatown Complex, Blk 335 Smith Street, upstairs with the rest of the food centre. The stall is run by two brothers who learned the recipe from an elderly Hakka yong tau foo hawker in Malacca, and they keep the menu to a single item, which tells you where the effort goes.
The set arrives as two bowls. The noodles are the Malaysian dry style, thick and chewy and tossed in a dark sauce until they go glossy and almost mahogany, with pork lard, fried shallots and spring onion through them. They are heavier and sweeter than a local dry mee pok, and a small dish of chilli comes alongside to cut it.
The soup bowl is where the yong tau foo lives, and it is the opposite of the noodles: clear, light and faintly sweet from the vegetables, closer to an ABC soup than the usual soya bean broth. In it were stuffed bitter gourd with a plug of minced pork in the middle, a slab of stuffed tofu, a tau pok puff and rolled tau kee (beancurd skin), plus sliced carrot and greens.
The bitter gourd is the piece worth ordering for. It keeps a clean bitter edge against the sweet broth instead of being boiled into submission.
The meatballs are an add-on and come deep-fried, three of them, craggy and crisp on the outside and coarse inside, sitting on top of the noodles. Worth the extra couple of dollars.
Overall: 4.1 / 5. 😋👍🏼 Chewy dark-sauce noodles, a clean sweet soup and good handmade yong tau foo. The bitter gourd is the one.
