Braised white lor mee ($6.80) @ Pu Tian Heng Hwa Cuisine, Our Tampines Hub!
Braised white lor mee, $6.80, from Pu Tian Heng Hwa Cuisine at Hawker Centre @ Our Tampines Hub: Heng Hwa style noodles in a pale broth with prawns, clams and peanuts.
Braised white lor mee from Pu Tian Heng Hwa Cuisine at Hawker Centre @ Our Tampines Hub, $6.80. 🍜😋
What we had ($6.80):
- Braised white lor mee, $6.80
Pu Tian Heng Hwa Cuisine is a newer stall in the hawker centre at Our Tampines Hub, 1 Tampines Walk. Heng Hwa food comes from Putian in Fujian, and it is a cuisine you do not see much of at hawker prices here, so a $6.80 bowl of it is worth the detour.
If you are expecting the dark, thick, vinegary lor mee sold everywhere else in Singapore, this is a different dish entirely despite the shared name. The broth is pale and milky rather than black, thickened but still loose enough to drink, and the flavour is seafood-driven rather than sweet and starchy.
The noodles are thin and silky, closer to a fine egg noodle than the fat yellow ones in Hokkien lor mee, and they soak up the broth instead of sitting in it.
What comes in the bowl is the reason it works. There were plump prawns, whole clams still in their shells, sliced mushrooms, cabbage and choy sum for sweetness, and puffs of fried beancurd that go spongy and soak up the soup.
Then the two toppings that mark it as Heng Hwa: crunchy peanuts scattered through, which stay crisp for a surprisingly long time, and a heap of fried shallots over the top for fragrance. The peanuts in particular are the giveaway, and the bit of crunch is what stops the whole bowl from being uniformly soft.
It is a gentler, more savoury bowl than local lor mee, and worth trying precisely because it tastes nothing like what the name suggests.
Overall: 4.1 / 5. 😋👍🏼 Silky noodles, a clean seafood broth and that peanut crunch. Good to see Heng Hwa food at hawker prices.
