Hot Hawker With Man Bun Serves Superb Fish Soup

True enough, inside the stall stands a 180cm-tall dude in a snug T-shirt that shows off his toned yoga instructor-worthy bod. As he stirs slices of fish in a weathered pot of bubbling soup, we take in his H&M outfit, shiny hair slicked into a sort of stylo-mylo samurai’s bun and carefully groomed hipster beard. It all clashes spectacularly, and quite wonderfully, with the grimy soot-covered walls and soup-splattered stove.

If you squint a little, he can perhaps pass off as a Japanese model or some sort of rock musician at a shoot in Singapore, posing insouciantly in casual summer wear ‘where the locals eat’, for some indie magazine. To think our parents never uttered a word to us about this hawt hawker.

While he may look a little bit like a catalogue model, Aaron, is in fact, the resident cook at the wildly popular First Street Teochew Fish Soup stall. Instead of a catwalk, he presides over the steaming stove. His dad, William Lim, 62, only takes over the cooking during Aaron’s breaks. Alas, Aaron is off the singles market — the well put together hawker is married with two young daughters. His wife co-owns a clothing biz and doesn't help out at the stall.

Aaron says he owes his tight bod to thrice-weekly gym sessions where he “does cardio and lifts weights”. And that epic hairdo? He admits he “takes quite a while” to style it each day. “I would retie it multiple times till I get it right. I also steal my wife’s hair oil [to smoothen my locks]”. Hilarious guy.

Aaron has been cooking full-time at First Street for about five years, but he’s helped out here since he was a teenager. “So I more or less knew how to cook fish soup since I was young,” he shares. The senior Mr Lim opened the stall at this very spot back in 1989.

Incidentally, dad (right in pic) is as good-looking as his son. The elderly gent has enviably sculpted features and kind, twinkly eyes.

But that’s not all — there’s also Aaron’s older brother Desmond (left in pic), 37, who preps the fish each day and takes orders. He boasts a boyish, bookish charm versus his younger sibling’s manly appeal. He too, is married.

Evidently, good looks run in the family. Do female customers flirt with the younger men? “Not with me lah, my dad told everyone I’m married already,” says Aaron sheepishly. “They seem to flirt with my brother more — because he’s the one taking orders while I’m inside cooking. He’s also more of the friendly, flirty type! Even aunties flirt with him,” laughs Aaron.

The brothers used to run four spin-off First Street fish soup branches about six years ago (including one at First Centre), but have since shut them down due to landlord and staff issues. They took over their father’s stall at its current location when the latter decided to semi-retire. Daddy Lim still helps out daily though, ’cos he got bored at home. Aaron says business here doubled after he and Desmond took over the reins. He adds that this one stall can comfortably sustain the three of them and their respective families. “I’m not saying we can afford [a luxurious lifestyle], but it’s enough for us to maintain an average Singaporean’s standard of living, lah”.

“We’d like to open more stalls, just not at the moment because we know finding good staff is a problem,” says Aaron. “We’re exploring using machines [technology] to help take orders for our future shops”.

Why did he and his bro choose the hard path of being hawkers? “I dropped out of school at 15 because I wasn’t very good in my studies. After the army, I worked as a waiter and kitchen hand in restaurants like Blue Ginger. But later on, my bro and I decided to set up our own hawker stalls (dad helped to fund the first one) as we’ve always wanted to run our own business. Too bad they closed down. I enjoy cooking, but it’s hot and cramped in the stall. Other than that, [life as a hawker is] okay lah.”

Ironically, Aaron isn’t a professionally trained chef — but his older bro is. Desmond is a Shatec culinary school grad who used to work as a cook in a few western restaurants, including Italian joint Prego at Fairmont hotel.

“I’m not sure why I ended up the one cooking here. But that has always been the arrangement since we started doing this full-time. However, my brother does a lot of the prep work in the morning, like filleting the fish. Plus he’s good at remembering our regulars’ orders,” says Aaron. First Street gets its fish from Kovan market daily, and Desmond starts prepping it from an ungodly 4am each day.

It’s gruelling work, and the tiny, greasy stall isn’t the most conducive place to work shoulder to shoulder with your sibling. That’s why spats between the brothers are par for the course. “Our regular customers know that we sometimes shout at each other due to things like wrong orders, but we’re okay after work,” says Aaron matter-of-factly.

The main reason we’ve never bothered to drop by here prior to this feature is ’cos we’re told queuing here is inevitable. Unless you go for breakfast on a weekday between 8am and 9.30am, when the wait is a tolerable five to 10 minutes, the queue can go up to one hour on weekends. However, we prefer fish soup for lunch and made a spontaneous move to brave the crowd on a recent Wednesday at noon. There were already 15 people waiting in line and no matter where we sat or stood, the small kopitiam was uncomfortably hot and humid. If you’re lucky enough to have someone else standing in the queue for you like we did, you can stroll over to the nearby Yong’s Teochew Kueh to tapow some soon kueh to tide you over while you wait.
First Street Fish Soup

There are three types of Teochew-style fish soup — batang (from $6), red garoupa (from $9) and Chinese silver pomfret (from $11), with your choice of rice, mee sua, or porridge (50 cents extra). What is Teochew fish soup anyway? From our experience, the soup is often clearer, lighter and more wholesome, with a focus on the pure flavours of the lightly boiled fish slices, as opposed to the heartier, usually milkier and greasier broths found in Cantonese-style fish soups (which sometimes contain fried fish). Teochew-style fish soup may also feature goodies such as salted veg, toppings like fish roe and a tau cheo (fermented soybean paste) chilli dip.

The priciest option here, but pomfret is after all the most prized fish in Teochew cuisine. And the best kind is used here — wild-caught large Chinese silver pomfret, commonly served in upmarket Teochew restaurants and considered the most superior species in the pomfret family due to its fine-textured, flavourful flesh and size. Our $15 bowl brims with about 12 to 15 thin, satiny slices of the delicate fish. The soup, boiled with mackerel bones, chicken bones, pork bones, mang kwang (jicama root), ti poh (dried flat fish), blue ginger, and “a bit of pig skin” for three hours each morning, is light and elegant. It allows the naturally sweet, gently creamy pomfret, blanched a la minute in the broth, to shine. We added sliced bittergourd to our bowl, which lends the tasty brew and silky noodles some bite and a welcome bitter edge. Not cheap, but the quality and quantify justify the price tag.

These humbler Spanish mackerel slices (albeit also wild-caught) are thick-cut, smooth and meaty. They make a good-value, filling meal if you’re unwilling to splurge on the pricier fish. There are about seven slices in the smallest bowl and 16 in the largest. We’ve had this a few times and it’s usually great, save on one occasion when the batang was enthusiastically over-salted. If you order this porridge-style or with rice on the side, you get bits of kiam chye and tang chye (preserved veg) in the soup, which brightens each sip with briny, tangy pops of flavour. There’s an option to add a dollop of minced pork mixed with umami dried flat fish if you can’t live without meat — plus it also saturates the soup with a savoury richness.

We’ve never had the wild grouper soup here yet because we usually choose pomfret over this — grouper can sometimes turn slightly chewy when boiled. Still, we'll probably give this a go on our next visit. Toppings like the soft, rich fish roe sell out quickly, so drop by early if you want some. The indecisive can opt for the “Mixed Soup” ($5/$7/$10), which has an assortment of prawns, fishcake, fish maw and mackerel slices.

Clean-tasting soup steeped in just enough flavour to make it interesting, coupled with good quality, faultlessly fresh fish. This is one hawker meal that’ll leave you feeling sated yet virtuous. Go in the morning when the queue is shorter, though the photogenic brothers do give you something to, ahem, look at while you wait.

First Street Teochew Fish Soup is at 1014 Upp Serangoon Rd, S534752. Open daily except Mon, 8am to 3pm (or till sold out). www.facebook.com/fsfishsoup/



Photos: Kelvin Chia​​​​​​​