Young Hawker Couple Sells Shiok Bak Chor Mee With Tonkotsu-Inspired Soup & Herh Keow

Though he is only 26, Han boasts a decade of F&B experience under his belt. “I started cooking at 16 after ‘O’ Levels. I worked at [now-defunct] New York New York restaurant as part of their kitchen crew.”

Inspired to pursue a culinary career, Han enrolled in a diploma course for baking and culinary science at Temasek Polytechnic. He dropped out in the second year as he “wasn’t really interested in studying”. In 2014, he started working as a commis chef at Tanjong Beach Club, which he credits for his “first full-scale kitchen experience”. “It was crazy, we were doing 500 to 600 covers on Saturdays.”

Han also cut his teeth in the kitchens of hip cafes The Populus, Saveur and Scaled By Ah Hua Kelong before working his way up to a junior sous chef position at the Raffles Hotel Singapore outpost of UK restaurant chain Burger & Lobster last March.

While working at Burger & Lobster, Han started to dream of opening his own place. “My experience has been [centred on] restaurants and cafes, but I wanted to preserve hawker culture. I’ve always liked bak chor mee and don’t want to lose the ‘gu zao wei’ (mandarin for traditional flavours) of the dish. It struck me that we’re starting to lose our heritage and traditional local flavours and I wanted to do something about it. ”

The couple, engaged since last July, named the stall after their anniversary date – 25 July. They plan to register their marriage later this year. “We’re too busy to plan a banquet, so we’ll just ROM first.”

Han, who describes himself as “a very cautious person”, tells us he would not have taken the plunge if not for his “YOLO” fiancée. He left Burger & Lobster in January after working at the restaurant for nearly a year. “I was the one who encouraged him to just do it. We’re young – if we don’t do it now, next time we won’t have the time or energy [to open a stall]. At most if we fail, we just go back to working for other people,” says Chelsea.

Chelsea left her accountant job at an offshore company to open No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle and now handles the finance and marketing for the biz, as well as taking orders at the stall. “I decided to quit [my previous job] because I think he needs me here. I don’t want to just hire a stranger as it’s not easy to train a person from scratch. I’m scared of hiring someone who’s not reliable. I’ve got very high standards for service and I don’t want to risk other people ‘spoiling’ our name.”

For the past two weeks, the stall has been selling about 200 bowls daily – we observed a mix of office crowd and senior residents patronising the joint during our visit on a weekday afternoon. The couple, who invested about $20k to open the stall, credits the good turnout to social media marketing and word-of-mouth.

“We do have plans [to expand] and we’ve decided we’d never want [to start] a franchise as we don’t want to affect the [consistency of] flavours. For now, we’re focused on running this stall,” says Han.

“Bak chor mee is very common, but we’re challenging ourselves to do it better. We want to capture the local, traditional flavour but in a modernised way, that’s how we came up with using tonkotsu broth,” Han explains. “We did R&D for about a year before we opened the stall and from the beginning, we made it with tonkotsu soup. It’s also because we didn’t know how to make the traditional [bak chor mee] soup,” he quips. The hawker learned to make the tonkotsu-inspired broth from his own research.

Han says it takes at least eight hours to prepare the broth. “We start with pork bones and chicken feet, boiling the bones to extract gelatin. We also roast our own ti por (Hokkien for dried sole fish) and blend into a powder to add to the soup.”

For every order, Chelsea weighs the noodles on a scale before Han cooks them. “We also have a special treatment for the noodles before blanching them so they are chewy,” he says. The couple tasted mee pok and mee kia from over 20 suppliers before shortlisting their current one.

Toppings require their own unique preparation, too. Han uses a different marinade for the minced meat, sliced lean pork and pork liver. The handmade herh keow (Teochew fish dumpling) is supplied by a friend, who specialises in processed food like frozen dim sum. Other elements that are prepared from scratch include the hae bee-heavy chilli, fried pork lard and fried sole fish. “It’s laborious, but we think the flavours are worth it,” says Chelsea.

The soup is robust with the distinct smoky flavour of dried sole and boasts appealing globules of fat on its surface, as Han boils the bones over a long period to extract the marrow and collagen that cloud the soup. The texture and taste, however, are not what we’d expect from a traditional tonkotsu brew. The viscosity is definitely less silky and creamy than what you get at ramen joints, and we believe Han’s seasoning – which he declined to elaborate on – is pretty different from the usual tare (the concentrated sauce component of ramen broth). Overall, the richness of the soup is closer to the pork-heavy broth of one-Michelin-starred Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle at Crawford Lane compared to the cleaner, lighter soup from the popular Bedok stall at 85 Fengshan Centre.

That said, we enjoyed the rather shiok and rich soup that brims with perfectly-cooked ingredients including minced pork, sliced lean pork, pork liver, fried fish maw and herh keow. We especially liked the large slices of lean pork and liver – the former retains a natural sweetness, while the latter is tender with a hint of pink in the centre.

Springy, chewy dry mee pok serves as the perfect vehicle for the fragrant, house-made chilli sauce to cling to. The spicier-than-average mixture is also amped up with sinfully chunky cubes of fried lard and sizable pieces of sole fish.

The owners chose not to include black vinegar in their sauce due to personal preference, but we feel the noodles require a hit of tang to balance out the heady richness of the broth – thankfully the stall provides a bottle of vinegar on the side for your use.

Given the richness of the broth, we were concerned that this version may be too gao for our liking. We were pleased to find that the thick strands of kway teow tamed the salinity of the soup, and the resulting bowl is a comforting meal that will keep you satisfied for hours. Toppings are generous, too – you get a piece of fish dumpling on top of the standard minced meat, sliced pork and pork liver.

The herh keow has a decent slippery chew with a smooth and delicate skin, though we found the filling to be less plump compared to Song Kee Fishball Noodle’s. The flavour is also more subdued and lacks the punchiness that makes Song Kee’s so addictive.

Tasty, elevated bak chor mee by a hardworking young couple. We appreciate Han’s attention to detail to every component from the chilli sauce to the toppings. However, the absence of black vinegar in the dry mee pok seasoning was missed, as the savoury tang plays a part in making a traditional bowl of bak chor mee so addictive (but vinegar is provided on the side if you wish). Do note that the cheapest $4 dry bak chor mee is not served with soup, so splurge on the $7 signature bowl – the generous toppings and heady soup offer good bang for your buck.

No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle is at #01-3749, 161 Bukit Merah Central, S150161. Open daily except Sun, 10am - 3.30pm. Facebook Instagram

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Photos: Alvin Teo