I liked the fried kway teow (flat rice noodles) from this stall here but I did not quite enjoy his char chu mee (fry & cook noodles) and I never went back there since.
The other morning, however, I was at a loss as to what to order and walking past the stall, I could hear the loud banging of the guy’s wok. I stopped to see what he was cooking and it did smell good, his fried bihun (rice vermicelli) but I did not feel like having that.
In the end, I asked for his mee mamak and this…
…was what I got!
Wait a minute! “mamak” is the name given to those Indian Muslims (in the peninsula), those running the nasi kandar and the mamak stalls and their fried noodles, the mee mamak, is indeed very popular, available even at some classy cafés and restaurants.
However, tagged with a name like that, I would expect it to be halal…or at least, it should not have any pork among its ingredients. This one that I had that morning had quite a bit of char siew…
…though I am not sure whether that was pork or chicken. I did mention in my post the other day that folks here are switching from pork to chicken in their joint effort to protest against the sellers’ incessant, somewhat unscrupulous, increases in the price of the former.
The thing is we have all kinds of names given to all kinds of noodles, usually depending on how they are cooked. We went out for noodles one night not too long ago and my girl wanted the Singapore bihun…
I wasn’t sure whether that would be something she would enjoy as it would be nothing more than fried bihun with curry powder added. It may be nice depending on what other ingredients are added and whether it has this coveted wok hei fragrance or not, otherwise it can be somewhat plain and quite disappointing.
Another one is the lakia mee…
Now, “lakia” means dayak in Hokkien but unlike the mee mamak, this is not a recipe derived from how the dayaks or ethnic tribes fry their noodles. Actually, it is nothing more than the Chinese fried noodles, dry…
…but with lots of freshly-cut chilies added.
Anyway, back to the mee mamak, like the lakia mee, there will be a lot of freshly-cut chilies added too but the taste is different. If I am not wrong, it tends to be a little sweet, possibly through the addition of chili sauce and/or tomato sauce.
This one…
…that I had that morning had a lot of chilies, cili padi, no less…
…so it was very spicy and very much to my liking but unfortunately, I found it to be way too sweet. I squeezed the juice of that calamansi lime all over it to counter-balance the sweetness and it turned out to be really good after that.
I would say that I quite enjoyed it and I would not mind going for it again sometimes for a change but no, I would not go out of my way to come here for it even though at only RM6.00 a plate, I do think it is worth going for it a lot more than a plate of kampua mee, RM4.80-5.00 at some places now, with a few miserably thin slices of boiled pork coloured red to make it look like char siew and yes, that guy sure deserves a pat on the back for using glass plates instead of those horrendous gaudily-coloured plastic ones!
GRAND WONDERFUL FOOD COURT (2.309601, 111.845163)…
…is located along Jalan Pipit, off Jalan Dr Wong Soon Kai, on your right. You can also go in via Jalan Pipit from Jalan Pahlawan – go straight ahead till you get to it on your left.
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