Tippling Club Trainee Chef-Turned-Hawker Sells "Localised" Japanese Rice Bowls From $4.90 - 8days Skip to main content

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Tippling Club Trainee Chef-Turned-Hawker Sells "Localised" Japanese Rice Bowls From $4.90

And it's pretty yummy.

Tippling Club Trainee Chef-Turned-Hawker Sells "Localised" Japanese Rice Bowls From $4.90

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.

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