A friend who works around the Lavender/ Jalan Besar area tells us about “a fish soup stall with long queues at lunchtime”. What’s its name, we ask. “No name leh,” says our pal. So we’re going to tell you which one it is by describing its specific location — within a grotty kopitiam called Ta Sun Eating House at Kitchener Complex, right behind a NTUC FairPrice supermarket.

If we weren’t told to keep a lookout for it, we’d have blissfully walked right past it. The narrow stall unit indeed has no name — a generic signboard advertises six types of soupy dishes with boiled and fried fish. Like Fish Head Bee Hoon ($4.50/$5.50), Sliced or Fried Fish Bee Hoon ($4/$5.50, or you can get a combination of both for $5/$6), plus Teochew Fish Porridge ($4/$5.50) and Seafood Soup ($4.50/$5.50). Each dish comes with your choice of either bee hoon or rice.

The stall is manned by a curmudgeonly masked auntie, while an uncle does the cooking at the back. Do not expect warm, fuzzy service here; this is not the place for you to falter over your ordering, or be indecisive about what to get. “Ya, what you want?” the auntie snaps at us in Mandarin the moment we approach the stall. We order our fish bee hoon soup, and remind her to add evaporated milk. “Ya lah! I know lah!” she grumbles.

To avoid the weekday lunchtime office crowd, we visit on a weekend morning around 11am, way before the circuit breaker (which explains why the hawker uncle is not wearing a mask). There’s no queue, save for one or two customers ahead of us, though a short line starts forming at noon. The auntie hands us our order within 10 minutes (it’s self-service).

Uncle plucks pieces of fried fish from a big pre-fried pile that steadily disappears within half an hour. For the stall’s wallet-friendly prices, we’re guessing he uses batang fish, instead of the pricier red garoupa or Chinese silver pomfret.

This stall’s fish soup offerings appear to be a hybrid of dialect cooking styles. While it offers the light, clear soup with boiled fish and tau cheo (fermented soybean paste) chilli dip favoured by the Teochews, it also has a heavier, milky Cantonese-style version, which we personally prefer. And there’s the addition of deep-fried egg floss, which is arguably popularised by another well-loved fish soup stall, Blanco Court Fried Fish Noodles. Just because we feel like sinning, we order the Fried Fish Bee Hoon Soup ($4) with milk.

It comes loaded with thick, curly pieces of fried fish that are still crispy to the bite, with springy flesh. The deep-fried egg floss soaks up the delicious soup, which is sweet and robust.

We zhng our soup with lashings of the stall’s insanely good house-made chilli dip with tau cheo, bird’s eye chilli and raw chopped garlic. The bee hoon here is also unique, its thickness somewhere between the usual fat vermicelli used for laksa and skinny bee hoon, with a firmer bite. We happily hoover up the whole bowl, soup and all.

The boiled fish with clear soup version is just as good here. While it’s not as rich as the milky broth, the soup is light and fresh, though the egg floss makes it a bit greasy. Again, the bowl is crammed with tender, generously sliced pieces of fish (how does the stall even earn a profit, we wonder).

We slurp up the jasmine rice with the soup like a cheng, tasty porridge. The stall does not have a phone number or, to our knowledge, offer delivery. But if you can’t trek down to the Lavender area, you can also look for a freelance food delivery driver from Facebook groups like Delivery United to help tapow your fish soup.

Open daily except Sun, 9am-2.30pm. Last order at closing or while stocks last.

PHOTOS: YIP JIEYING