白米粉 ($6) & 苦瓜蛋花汤 ($5)!
Kallang tze char — white bee hoon (白米粉) + bitter gourd egg drop soup (苦瓜蛋花汤), $6 + $5. Old-school zi char comfort lunch.
Friday lunch with BB at a Kallang tze char stall — when the menu has both 白米粉 (white bee hoon) and 苦瓜蛋花汤 (bitter gourd egg drop soup) on it, the order writes itself.
We ordered:
- 白米粉 (white bee hoon) — $6
- 苦瓜蛋花汤 (bitter gourd egg drop soup) — $5
White bee hoon is the underdog version of the dish — instead of the dark-soy stir-fried sin chow style, this one is braised in a clear seafood stock until the noodles drink it up. Slippery rice vermicelli, light-coloured, with prawns, slices of squid, fish cake, choy sum and the occasional clam if you’re lucky. The flavour relies entirely on the stock, which means there’s nowhere for a lazy stall to hide. This one had real depth.
Bitter gourd egg drop soup ($5) was the perfect counterpoint. Slices of bitter gourd cooked just past raw — still firm, still bitter, but mellowed — in a clear pork-bone broth with feathery egg drops swirled through. A classic Cantonese soup that’s supposed to be cooling for the body. Bitter, savoury, restorative.
The combination — white bee hoon with the soup ladled over a few spoonfuls at a time — is one of those zi char hacks that turns two dishes into one custom bowl.
$11 for two for this kind of cooking is honest hawker tze char pricing.
Overall: 4.2 / 5. 😋👍🏼 Quietly satisfying lunch — would revisit when the bitter gourd craving hits.
