Tippling Club Trainee Chef-Turned-Hawker Sells "Localised" Japanese Rice Bowls From $4.90
And it's pretty yummy.
Despite the stall’s specialty in “localised donburis”, this one is a pure Japanese citizen. Bite-sized chunks of hot, crunchy Japanese-style fried chicken thigh meat, marinated with sake and shoyu, are heaped on short grain rice with garlicky cherry tomatoes, greens and a gooey-yolked onsen egg. The garlic and ginger powder-coated fried chicken is especially shiok. Special mention goes to the Koshihikari rice; the plump Japanese grains here are clean-tasting, fluffy, fragrant and a treat for such a wallet-friendly bowl. Hoover it up with the umami house-made tare sauce (a sweet, thick soy-based sauce typically used for dipping yakitori skewers) and tonkatsu mayonnaise, which Jin Rong makes by mixing tangy tonkatsu sauce and mayo. Filling, and at $4.90, cheap for the quality given. The big piece of fried popiah skin sprinkled with seaweed powder also adds a nice crunch.
It’s a rainy afternoon when we drop by hawker stall Bowl Chap. A slim, sweet-faced young girl is hunched over a pail of soapy water, laboriously scrubbing bowls. We are more accustomed to seeing work-weathered aunties tackle dish-washing, but Lee Pei Sin, 27, is one young hawker who has taken on the dirty, unglamorous job without complaints. One month ago, she and her boyfriend Lee Jin Rong, 29, opened their stall at Ayer Rajah Food Centre selling “localised donburis, as they are easy to serve and we love Japan”. The punny name (Jin Rong is quite literally the ‘bowl chap’) also sounds like bo chup, the Hokkien term for someone who can’t be bothered. “When I was young, my mother said I was very bo chup!” Jin Rong remarks.
Miso Glazed Tofu, $4.90 (8 DAYS Pick!)
According to the boss, this is the most unpopular pick among his customers as it is meatless (it’s however vegetarian-friendly). But even die-hard carnivores like us would give this a try. The tau pok cubes, soft inside and crispy outside, draped with a savoury miso glaze, are pretty satisfying even if it’s not meat. “It’s inspired by nitsuke cuisine (where the Japanese simmer ingredients in miso),” Jin Rong says. A ‘salad’ of black fungus and hijiki (a type of crunchy Japanese wild seaweed) dressed with soy sauce, plus carrots, broccoli and garlic-tossed cherry tomatoes add lovely texture to the clean dish.
Smoked Paprika Chicken Katsu, $5.50
This Mexican-inflected bowl reflects Jin Rong’s experience cooking at a Latin American restaurant. A big slab of boneless chicken thigh is brined in his “secret paprika solution” for three hours before being breaded and deep-fried. It’s paired, oddly enough, with Indonesian-style sayur lodeh (a coconut milk-based veggie stew) and wispy, eggy shreds of fried omelette. The combo kinda works, though. It’s robust enough, and adds more flavour to the crispy paprika-scented fried chicken cutlet. A bit like mod Hainanese curry rice.
5 Spice Apple Braised Pork Belly, $5.80
This is the chef’s tribute to his late dad as it was his favourite dish. The pork belly is braised with red apples and five spice powder and left to marinate overnight. Fragrant enough, though like the vinegar pork belly, it’s a tad too sweet. Otherwise, the briny crunch of black fungus, hijiki and carrots drenched in the runny yolk from an onsen egg makes this bowl pretty delish.
Black Sweet Vinegar Pork Belly, $5.80
“My mum always cooked this during my childhood,” shares Jin Rong, who had learnt to make the dish from her, but replaced pig trotters with the more popular pork belly. He stir-fries the meat with caramelised sugar and ginger slices before boiling it with Chinese black rice vinegar for half an hour. The concoction is left to sit overnight for the sweet-sour flavours to seep into the pork. During our visit, the prized dish tasted too sweet and rather flat, as though the flavours had not been infused quite enough. But still, the tender, indulgently fatty pork belly cooked by this young chef has potential, and we hope to savour an improved version of it soon.
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