Singapore Food Review: Fried Hokkien Prawn Mee

So I’m new to Singapore and its food. I do make it my life ambition to try all the local cuisine wherever I go and since I will be in Singapore for a while, I figured I should blog about all the unique Singaporean food that I try along the way. Although I make it a point not to eat out too much, I still have food out quite regularly. The reason being it’s readily available, cheap and relatively decent.

Singapore has this hawker culture where a lot of food vendors come together in a single building and each set up their own specialty. I generally eat at a hawker centre near work (at lunch time when I don’t bring lunch) and a market near where I live. I don’t really venture out of my way for hawker food, since I find them all very similar. That, and the fact that I’m too lazy to travel!

In Australia we have this dish called ‘Singapore noodles’ which differs slightly from place to place but the gist of it is fine rice noodles (sometimes referred to as ‘vermicelli’ but as far as I’m concerned ‘vermicelli’ is a shape of Italian pasta) stir fried with egg, prawns, char siu pork, beansprouts and has a bit of curry powder in it for flavouring. My friend Kenneth told me that this dish does not exist in Singapore. He’s right. I have yet to find ‘Singapore noodles’. So I suppose if there’s a dish that can be classified as Singapore noodles, this fried hokkien mee thing might be it.

I was watching ‘$2 Wonderfood’ today and they were talking about fried hokkien prawn mee. I thought that sounded interesting. Let’s try that. So off I went to a nearby hawker centre and ordered my own plate of fried hokkien mee. Surprisingly enough, I found it to be really good. As Josh commented, it doesn’t really look all that appetizing. I think that’s probably the main reason why I haven’t tried it until today! He reckons it looks like worms swimming in sauce.

What fried hokkien mee is from what I gathered, is two types of noodles (egg and rice) stir fried with beansprouts, prawns and squid (sometimes with pork and fish cake) flavoured with prawn stock. They serve it with some chilli and a little lime on the side which I ignored because I thought the flavour of the dish was already pretty good without the added conditions (which I feel would somewhat ruin the flavour).

But hey, I have to say, it’s pretty good! Definitely something I’ll have again.

Oh yeah, I LOVE fresh sugar cane juice. If there’s one thing I really like about the Singapore food scene, it’s the fresh sugarcane juice.