Korean-Style Egg Sandwiches & Rice Bowls From $3.20 In Sembawang Coffee Shop

Eggciting sits in a new-ish coffeeshop in a BTO estate that’s a five minute walk from Canberra MRT in Sembawang. The mother-of-four was inspired to sell egg toast after trying popular Seoul egg toast chain Egg Drop on her family’s biannual holidays to Korea.

“It was a simple breakfast but very yummy, and it stayed in my mind,” she says.

To round out the menu, she added Taiwanese braised pork rice and beef and pork rice bowls, her specialities at home.

Luckily for Lynna, who starts prep work at 6.30am, the men at home chip in. Hubby Lim Yoke Poh, 50, a factory supervisor, sometimes buys the ingredients, while her sons occasionally take orders and serve customers.

Her brood comprises Jack, 27, an air traffic controller, Mike, 25, a freelance model (left in pic), polytechnic pharmacy student Ayden, 18 (right in pic), and Hau Yu, 13, who is in secondary school. They pop by to help about twice a week.

“Mum’s cooking is very yummy. Luckily, I work out quite often so I’m able to maintain my weight for photoshoots,” laughs Mike. The boyish 1.85cm-tall fashion model says he often gets stared at by “aunties” visiting the kopitiam.

“They just give me harmless compliments and sometimes they stare after that, so it’s kinda funny,” he quips.

Despite opening only on December 8, eggciting already boasts regulars young and old, some of whom come daily not just for the toast, but also the rice bowls.

Since being featured on hawker Facebook groups, some customers have come from as far as Tampines and Punggol for Lynna’s toast. Eggciting sells about 50 toasts and 100 rice bowls a day, with many orders coming in via Foodpanda.

Lynna’s ultimate dream is to open a cafe, so she can cook her entire repertoire of dishes.

The Korean egg toast here started out resembling the real deal from Seoul, but when we visit, ended up tasting rather like homemade sandwiches. The reason? Customer complaints.

The thick toast, initially meant to be sliced part way through and stuffed with fillings, has been replaced with two separate slices of bread, after customers complained the final bit of toast had no filling.

Lynna also removed milk from the eggs to prevent them from going watery during takeaways, so instead of fluffy, cloud-like eggs, hers are now fried omelettes.

Each toast comes with a choice of two sauces: pick from honey mustard, Japanese mayo, nacho cheese, Thousand Island, sweet Thai and chilli sauce.

The bread here, bought from a bakery in Admiralty, is sweet in the way neighbourhood bakery bread is. It’s thicker and fluffier than supermarket white bread, but suffers from dryness after being toasted. The flatter eggs are pleasant enough – but less fluffy and moist than the Korean version – and tasty paired with honey mustard and mayo.

The luncheon meat here is pale and soft instead of browned and slightly crispy, but works well to moisten the bread. We like the cheddar cheese, but our sandwich comes with lashings of mayo and Thousand Island that drown out the taste of the egg.

This tastes a bit like roti john, because of the chilli sauce and mayo combo. The tuna is similar to the kind found stuffed in tuna buns at heartland bakeries.

It’s hard to go wrong with the tried-and-tested bacon and eggs combo. A reliable Western-tasting breakfast pick.

Comes with heaps of decent quality, thin-cut shabu-shabu-style pork cooked in beer, soya sauce and oyster sauce till soft and sweet. Delicious, plus value for money given the quantity of meat. The pork is flavourful enough, so skip the sauces. Overall, a worthy contender against the big Korean chains.

As yummy as the pork, but with a sweeter taste thanks to the addition of sugar. The beef is flavourful, with a good amount of lean meat.

Reminds us of grandma’s cooking. Lynna’s signature dish is a light-tasting, slightly herby bowl of short-grain rice topped with braised pork that smells a touch gamey. The rustic-looking pork, diced unusually large, boasts a good proportion of melt-in-your-mouth fat.

Pork shabu strips find their way over rice, with the addition of beer in the cooking process particularly prominent, since the meat is the star against plain rice without additional sauces.

The alcoholic addition imparts the pork (and beef, see below) with a nuanced complexity and good softness. Bonus points for a fried egg with a gooey centre.

Same as the pork, except more flavourful, with stronger sweet and salty notes. The meat portion is reasonable for the price.

Eggciting’s egg toast is only loosely Korean-inspired after being tweaked to suit heartlanders’ palates. So while the omelette sandwiches are quite comforting, they taste more like local sarnies — we’d rather splurge on the yummier beef and pork shabu renditions. The tasty meats also work well in rice bowls for lunch and dinner, sold at pocket-friendly prices. Skip the sauces to savour the beer-cooked meat at its best.

Eggciting is at 2A, Block 115 Canberra Walk, S750115. Open Mon – Sun, 8am – 8pm.

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Photos: Kelvin Chia