Having started out as an “illegal” street hawker selling nonya kueh, Madam Chua switched to selling kway chap in a proper stall in 1964 at the Kim Seng Community Centre along Havelock Road. She emigrated from China’s Guangdong province to Singapore in 1954 , and decided to sell what she knew best — Teochew food. “I like to eat kway chap. By selling kway chap, I can also eat my meals from what I sell,” Madam Chua tells us chirpily in Teochew. “Saves money!”

She moved to Covent Garden Food Centre a decade later, before finally relocating to the current location at Havelock Road Cooked Food Centre in 2007 — all within blocks of each other. Which explains the stall’s oddly British name.

Covent Garden has been a family business throughout the decades, with Madam Chua’s sons, Tommy (pictured), 58, and Kim Soo, 65, running the stall with her later on (their late father was a “sailor-turned-coolie”). Madam Chua still presides over the roiling vat of braised pig innards, with Tommy at the storefront passing on customer orders for her to slice and plate. His brother Soo Kim washes the dishes and preps ingredients. 

Despite Tommy and his family’s (he’s married with two sons) suggestions that Madam Chua scale back on her commitment to the stall due to her age, she insists on working full shifts.  “She likes to go down to the stall early,” says Tommy. “Some customers will be there at 6am right when we open for biz, so she feels the need to be present for them.” 

On the days they open, Madam Chua is the first to arrive at 4am to get the big vat of ingredients boiling. “Back in China, life wasn’t easy. From young, I was already working from morning to night every day. So I’m used to it already,” she said, when asked how she has the energy to stay on her feet the whole day. She speaks with a liveliness that belies her years.

So what’s her secret to staying healthy at almost 90 years old?  “Light and simple home-cooked Teochew food,” she replies simply.

Tommy comes down an hour later right before the stall opens for business, while his older brother Kim Soo pops by at 7am. Once they sell out around 1pm, Tommy, Madam Chua and Kim Soo will spend a couple of hours on prep work for the next day.

“It’s not like we stop working once we sell out for the day,” says Tommy. “Cooking kway chap is a long, long process.” Preparations include thoroughly cleaning the offal (which involves double-cooking it to remove the odors) — the key to a good plate of kway chap — prepping a new batch of gravy, and making sure that everything is properly braised for the next day. 

Then, Madam Chua heads home at 2pm, while Soo Kim leaves about an hour later. Tommy stays all the way to finish prep work for the next morning — closing up at 5pm on most days.

The circuit breaker in April hit the family business badly. According to Tommy, they still kept the stall open for the first two days, but customers were few and far between. “That was the first time in all our years that we made zero profit.” 

Realising that it was not sustainable for them to remain open during the entire CB period, the stall closed for two months. Tommy and Madam Chua stayed at home during this period, and only reopened at the start of June. 

In July, a regular customer uploaded a post featuring Madam Chua at her stall on the popular Hawkers United - Dabao 2020 Facebook group. The public group was started as a joint effort to send support to hawkers badly hit by the circuit breaker, and has over 275k members. 

After the post took off — garnering over 1.4k likes and 260 shares — Tommy saw a big influx of customers in the days following the posting. “Nowadays, we can sell out around noon to 1pm,” he says, adding that business has recovered about 80 to 90 per cent. “So far, so good.” 

Prior to working at Covent Garden, Tommy had a full-time job in construction. “There were no rest days, so I wasn’t involved with the stall at all.” That changed when he was retrenched from his job in 2006. He decided to join his mother at the stall, and has been working there ever since. 

“My mum doesn’t like outside help, so we never hired anyone to help out. It’s just me, my brother and my mum,” explains Tommy. Since joining the business, he has taken over the bulk of the cooking and prep work. 

When asked why she has yet to retire, Madam Chua quips that she’s staying on to help her sons: “I see that they’re so busy at the stall daily! If I can still work, then of course I’d help to lighten their workload.” 

Once Madam Chua retires for good — likely within the next two years — Tommy is slated to take over the stall, with Kim Soo staying on to continue helping with the operations.

Most kway chap joints we frequent have fixed sets of selected items, but Covent Garden allows customers to freely mix and match ingredients. The menu board is easy to follow — pick your ingredients ranging from tau pok to pig’s stomach (remember to state how many portions of each you want), and then select the number of bowls of kway. 

The minimum order starts from $3. We spent $6 for two people during our visit — pretty cheap, considering that we typically pay between $4 to $6 per pax at other kway chap stalls. 

Tommy cites low rental and purchasing raw ingredients directly from suppliers as the main reasons why they're able to keep their prices low. “We don’t believe in marking up our prices just because we can,” he reasons.  

Peak hours are typically from 9am to 11am, with an average queue time of 10 to 20 minutes. 

According to Tommy, they’ve been getting their kway — broad rice noodle sheets — from the same supplier for years. The soupy gravy, or chap, is made from his mum’s recipe, which has remained the same since she started serving kway chap decades ago. The kway boasts a good texture — soft and slippery, yet it doesn’t break apart at the prod of your chopsticks. However, we feel the chap is a bit light, and could be more robust.

We tried the small intestines, large intestines and pig skin, along with the usual suspects of tau kwa and tau pok. When it comes to braised intestines, the most important criteria is that it has to be clean-tasting, with zero gamey funk. The small intestines here hit the mark, along with having a superb texture — tender, with a bit of chewiness. As for the large intestines, they were firmer and gamier — not our favorite. 

We’re not big eaters of pig skin, but this one was surprisingly pleasant as well with a soft, smooth consistency. It’s on the unctuous side, with a mouthfeel reminiscent of pork fat. 

As for the braised tau kwa and tau pok slices? They were the perfect vessels for soaking up all that chap.

More than decent kway chap for the price point. Moreover, octogenarian hawkers are a rare sight — pay the stall a visit to catch Madam Chua while she’s still in action. 

Covent Garden Kway Chap, #01-05 Havelock Road Cooked Food Centre, 22A Havelock Road S161002. Open Tuesday to Saturday 6am-2pm, or till sold out.

Photos: Alvin Teo

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