www.Go To The Mountain - Musings of a Potential Guru

I love good food and I do not mean fancy restaurants. In the good old days when I was a boy, there were many zi char stalls at every corner and even the worst stall is better than most of what we are having today. Of course, there were some really good ones back then. With what is left today, it is really tough to find good zi char stalls but here at 15 Tampines Ave there is a Goodyear Seafood Village, just along Tampines Road. When you turn in, it may look quaint with bumpy road and car park and it can get crowded. At first, you may think that you are in JB due to its old shop house facade and a sign that proclaimed its original Johor Pontian Bak Kut Teh. On one side is an air-conditioned unit which would be more comfortable but if you were to be seated just outside the air-conditioned unit, you can get hit by the strong smell of rubber from the tyres next door and in the open.  Walking forward to the front will lead you to a coffee shop styled unit and there are some tabl...

Zi Char is so much a part of our food culture that it will never go away. Problem is that t hey still "zi" but seldom "char" these days. When I was a child, there were a couple of zi char stalls at nearby coffee shops and both were very good. Those days, we seldom have the opportunity to order different kind of dishes like meat or fish so we often settled for the simplest form of food to fill your stomach. I would often just order bee hoon mixed with yee mee either in soup or typical zi char style or hor fun. They would throw in some pork, fish slices, prawns, liver and squid. These days you could hardly see any of it, just a wee bit here and there and the rest just noodles. We decided to dine out recently at a nearby zi char stall near the Buangkok MRT. The stall is called Master Crab. To show their collection of prizes in the form of crab shells, they hung it all over the place, perhaps evidence that they are the crab master just like how you would disp...