When members of my family visit from far flung places, they understandably want to sample foods from far flung places within Singapore – like the best Hokkien Mee I know of.
So I went and drove to Beach Road, to the last place I bought Hokkien Mee from, and to my shock and horror after battling traffic for half an hour, found that they had converted the place to a steamboat dinner restaurant because every other shop along the street was a steamboat dinner restaurant.
It’s known as Bubble Tea Fever, and for the proprietors of the new steamboat dinner restaurant, may you pack up and regret a month after this, because that’s the dumbest move you’ve ever made.
Anyway, undeterred, I looked up the ingterneck on my N78’s search interface, which is very neatly positioned under all the other standby apps (good job, Nokia), and found that Kim’s Famous Fried Hokkien Mee still had their HQ over at Eunos. I noted the address and bookmarked it in Nokia Maps, and set a course at Impulse Speed to the corner of Jalan Eunos and Jalan Kechot.
While looking up the address for Kim’s, I stumbled upon ieatishootipost’s post about Kim’s, and how the famously clad in office attire Hokkien Mee Man was rumoured to have several wives, and how he disappeared for a while in the 80s before reappearing all over the island.
There is history in this Hokkien Mee. And when I got to the stall at Eunos (announced smugly by the female voice on the N78 – “turn left and after 100 metres, you have reached your destination, and remember, you couldn’t have done it without me”), I continued reading and chuckling over the debunking of the many myths surrounding Mr Tan Kue Kim (the Hokkien Mee Man).
Then, a middle-aged man in long sleeved office attire appeared and shouted a few things to the staff at the stall before putting a Good Morning Towel around his neck, picking up a spatula to clang away at the wok. The Man was frying my noodles. How cool was that?
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