Good Pork Chop Fried Rice By Hawker Who Netizens Say Resemble Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu

On a Facebook post detailing Eric’s career prior to Mr. Egg Fried Rice’s opening, a netizen commented, “Chef looks like Simu Liu.” Says Eric: “When my wife first showed me the comment, I replied 'Who’s that?’” says the chef with a laugh. “Then she showed me a picture [of Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu], so okay lah, there is some resemblance.”

He hadn’t watched the Marvel flick or heard of the actor prior to this. “You can’t see [this kind of resemblance] for yourself, you need an outsider to tell you,” he adds.

Our take? There is some similarity if you compare the much younger photos of Eric used for his stall’s promotional materials, but less so when we see him in the flesh. Well, perhaps just a little — if you think of Eric as a more mature version of the hero with extra decades’ of experience wielding the Ten Rings under his belt, or in this case, ladle.

Instead of martial arts, the towkay spent his years training in the culinary arts, starting from stints at “dim sum and zi char restaurants in Chinatown and Tanjong Pagar” after making his way to Singapore aged 19. He moved on to Hua Ting Restaurant for two years, before embarking on a four-year sojourn to open an Asian restaurant in Melbourne as a consultant. He returned to work in Cantonese restaurant Golden Peony for another two years before joining the catering group as an executive chef, where he stayed until 2018. Though he spent most of his time in the dim sum kitchen, he tells us that fried rice was a staple dish he often cooked in his early days as a kitchen assistant all the way through to his executive chef days.

“I saw [8days.sg’s] article on Hong Style Fried Rice, Chef Wang, King of Fried Rice. A lot of these hotel chefs are leaving because there aren’t as many weddings, tourists and so on [to generate biz]. Everyone wants to do their own thing and rely on their own skills to make money,” he says.

“But chuang ye (starting a business) is easy. Gong ye (working) is hard,” he quips in mandarin. “Many chefs are used to having a lot of workers under them. They start a hawker stall and immediately want to hire many staff. It doesn’t work that way, you must learn to multitask.” Of course, he also confesses that he sometimes misses working a glam job with “many staff” answering to him.

He adds: “We chefs can’t just rely on the hotel name [on our CV] nowadays. Customers are very discerning. The first time, they will make a trip down because of your name. But if it’s not nice, they won’t come a second time”.

We ask if he's worried the trending Din Tai Fung-style hawker fried rice market might soon lose its shine. “If you talk about char kway teow, bak chor mee, or prawn noodles, you can find that everywhere too. Honestly, every chef can fry rice. But every chef’s fried rice gives customers a slightly different ‘feeling’. It’s in the little details like the ingredients, and the sides, that make people remember your dish.”

These details include the use of eggs from corn-fed hens (characterised by their vibrant orange yolks), which Eric says lends a unique eggy fragrance that can’t be matched by eggs laid by hens fed with the usual mix of grains.

He’s also a stickler for “SOPs” (standard operating procedures) like weighing out individual portions of Taiwanese pearl rice on a scale, a discipline he’s picked up from his time as an executive chef. “If you say ‘never mind, I’ll just taste everything’, are you really going to try every single plate [that you cook]?” Eric says.

The hype for cheaper Din Tai Fung-style fried rice is still going strong, if opening queues at Mr. Egg Fried Rice are anything to go by. Customers had to wait “up to an hour” during peak periods. “The queue was surprisingly long. I was confused, but also very grateful for some of my old customers [from his earlier HBB days]. Some came from Bukit Batok and Tampines just to support us,” Eric says.

“Working as a chef, when customers eat and say it’s good, that’s when you feel happy. But I was also paiseh, as they came all the way and had to wait,” he adds. Business doesn’t seem to have let up, despite new rules which began on October 13 restricting unvaccinated diners from dining in at coffee shops. “There hasn’t been any effect. Customers are quite ‘automatic’. They just show me their vaccination statuses without me asking,” he says.

A steady stream of hopefuls pop by throughout 8days.sg’s mid-afternoon visit, only to be turned away – Mr. Egg Fried Rice currently takes a break in the afternoon to rest and prep ingredients for the dinner rush. Delivery won’t be an option for now either, and Eric hasn’t been able to hire extra staff just yet (he jokes that they’re “probably all snatched up by [the folks behind] King of Fried Rice”). By the time we left at 5pm, there were about five customers already queueing for dinner.

The menu at Mr. Egg Fried Rice is simple: four types of fried rice – egg, tobiko, tom yum and XO scallop – with or without toppings like pork chop, luncheon meat and salmon cubes. Similar to King of Fried Rice’s menu, incidentally. The food here is also priced similarly to other Din Tai Fung-style fried rice hawker rivals.

The rice is whipped up to order over the stall’s pair of induction cookers – ours was done by Eric himself, though his partners also step in on occasion. Chef says he uses induction instead of zi char-style gas stoves here because of safety. “You’ll never start a fire using an induction stove,” he says. But can induction cookers produce the all-important wok hei in fried rice? He explains: “What’s important for cooking fried rice is the [intensity of the] heat from the stove and not so much if it’s using fire [or via induction]. If you’re too timid, you’ll have lao fan, not chao fan (old rice, not fried rice in mandarin),” the chef quips jokingly.

A competent plate of egg fried rice with a light smoky fragrance on top of the aroma from the egg and chopped spring onions. The Taiwanese pearl rice grains are chewy, but on the drier side compared to the delicate, moister original at Din Tai Fung.

The classic pork chop – marinated overnight with a secret recipe – is deep-fried to order and tender to the bite (though again, not quite as tender as the restaurant’s version). There’s a mild savouriness to Eric’s pork chop that’s completely devoid of the usual peppery or five-spice notes.

Both are pretty yummy, though we enjoy them even more with Eric’s chilli oil spiked with lots of deep-fried chopped garlic. More salty than fiery but super addictive with a delightful crunch.

The heap of tobiko (flying fish roe) tossed into this fried rice doesn’t do much for us. You occasionally get a hit of brininess when the roe bursts between your teeth, but little else. We accompany this with salmon cubes cooked on the grill and drenched in store-bought teriyaki sauce. The fish is crispy on the outside while still remaining moist within – it’s tasty, but less interesting than the other options on the menu. Perhaps good for kids. We’d rather splurge on the XO scallop egg fried rice instead (below).

Another fried rice option that we don’t find particularly remarkable. There’s some tangy piquancy thanks to the tom yum paste (Thai chilli paste with lemongrass and other aromatics), but we’d opt for the heady savouriness of the crunchy chilli oil over this any day (you aren’t served chilli with this plate, as the tom yum paste is already spicy). The bland frozen prawns don’t help much either.

Our favourite item. There’s a delicate interplay between the dish’s two key ingredients – housemade XO sauce (which contains hae bee, or dried shrimp) and deep-fried shreds of dried scallop – that we enjoy very much. An umami-rich, mildly spicy bowl of fried rice that’s suffused with the seafood-y sweetness of scallop in every bite. The deep-fried bits also add good texture. We’ll be back for this one.

The grilled chicken chop that we pair with the dish is pleasant enough, with the same mellow marinade as the pork chop. If you’ve got no strong preference for either protein, choose the pork for its springier bite.

Another day, another fried rice hawker stall by a chef with restaurant chops (whether or not he looks like Simu Liu is still up for debate). But does Mr. Egg Fried Rice’s grub make the cut taste-wise? We think so – it holds its own against its famous Din Tai Fung-style fried rice hawker rivals. While the pork chop-topped version is yummy enough for the price, what we’re really fond of is the umami, punchy XO scallop one. Our only grouse is that some of the grains were a little clumpy after our photo shoot.

Mr. Egg Fried Rice is at #01-195, Blk 151 Bishan St 11, S570151. Tel: 9172-5559. Open daily, 11am – 2.30pm; 4pm – 8.30pm. More info via Facebook.

Photos: Alvin Teo, TPG News/Click Photos, Mr. Egg Fried Rice

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