no. 110: canticle

My favorite bowl on this trip felt like a point of departure. Rong Fa (Mui Siong), a stall in an industrial canteen, with an hour’s wait at lunchtime. Their expo system is an absurdity, a crumpled slip of paper on which they track orders, tables, special requests, and stock. We were first told that they were out of noodles, and would have to settle for vermicelli, but somehow noodles appeared, two bowls of mee kia and one of mee pok, miracles of noodle cookery. We accepted providence with gratitude.

The noodles were absurdly good – sharp, bright, pugnacious. The soup is lighter than it looks. The technical term for the stuff that makes the soup look opaque is meat protein exudate, I don’t know of a more appetizing term in any language (except, perhaps, schmutz). Much of it comes from the paving stones of liver, and the rest from a scoop of minced pork, all cooked directly in the soup. Setting mousses and such aside, theirs is still the most perfect liver I’ve eaten, anywhere, in any idiom, pastel pink the whole way through, blood and dirt and clotted cream.

The soup is almost solid with pickings. That liver, fish cakes fresh and fried, pork balls, fish balls, a dumpling or two, morsels of pork. It feels like an occasion, in a way the classic version does not. A point of departure implies an origin, which might be Bao Fa Traditional Food.

Since Vaughn first sent me to Bao Fa, I’ve probably eaten there more than at any other bak chor mee stall in Singapore. The whole experience is a comfort, down to the leaf of lettuce, and their refusal to give up the mushrooms. My first photo there looks identical to the photo above. Only the prices have changed.

Bao Fa might represent the ne plus ultra of classic bak chor mee. Like any proper argument, this one has several parts. First, the broth is light and clear. I’ve looked in their stockpot, which is a burbling tank built right into their counter. It’s a mess of chicken bones and tau cheo. It’s full of sediment, doing a slow ballet, but the bowl is clear as a conscience. Second, they slice the liver thin, and cook it till it’s firm. Third, the toppings sit on the noodles, not in the broth, a seemingly trivial difference which is inextricable from the fourth and most important point: the meal feels like a snack. There’s something offhand and casual about this dish, some pheromonal signal that you should hoover through your bowl and leave. The soup is lubricant, the noodles fade, the experience unravels if you don’t hurry. This feels essential.

Speaking of the noodles, this bowl was ever so slightly overcooked. With any bowl of noodles, the most important element of quality is also the hardest one to judge: how the noodles are cooked. Noodles live fast and die young. They hydrate, cook in the residual heat, and cool, with a mayfly sense of time. The cook has no idea how long it will be between their handing you a bowl and your actually starting to eat, or finish. A good cook is doing actuarial calculus in their head.

In this sense, the best way to eat noodles might be alone, in haste. A couple can still give the cook fair hearing, if they get right down to business, but delay in any form just throws the whole experiment off. It takes a solid minute to assemble each bowl. If you wait for the cook to make four (as we did on this visit), the first bowl’s halfway to the grave by the time you sit down to eat, more if you didn’t already find your table.

In the context of this trip, the simplicity at Bao Fa feels like obduracy, an unimpressed comment on modern times. Compare, for instance, this bowl from Clarke Quay Bar Chor Mee.

A clear soup, the stubborn lettuce leaf, the mushrooms, and twice as much stuff as you get at Bao Fa. The mee sua brought Uncle an iconoclast’s fame. Un-alkalized, it shears rather than bouncing, and the sauce velcros to it. Using mee sua for this is doing your own stunts: mee sua is particularly unforgiving, but Uncle’s been doing this for decades (his apprentices need some practice). Everything in the soup tastes clean and simple, the pork gently sweet, the meatballs light. This is as good a meal as you can get in a high rent shopping mall in Singapore, a sincere homage to every bowl of bak chor mee Uncle’s ever eaten.

I think on some level this really is the dish Uncle wants to make: a bowl that feels occasional, a bowl you have to work through. But I think too much, so this also felt like arms race abundance to me. Evolution implies evolutionary pressure, and I can’t see past the context in which Uncle has to operate. There’s a kind of trickle down effect in cooking, where the dish is the last thing you decide on. Your recipe trickles down from your pricing which trickles down from the rent. Hawkers persistently have to justify the cost of their food, and one of the easiest ways to do so is to pile more onto the plate. I don’t think that’s the only reason Uncle cooks the way he cooks, but I also can’t unsee the address, or the stories about how rent is killing everyone in F&B.

If Mui Siong was a departure, this might be the destination. No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle, in Bukit Merah, mere noodle-lengths away from Mui Siong. In quality, they’re separated by mere particles of schmutz.

The (young) hawker keeps a small saucepan of broth at a rolling boil. With each order, he adds the toppings and boils them hard while the noodles cook (in a separate pot of water). He drains the noodles, then gobbets of liver go in the soup, carnal and raw. He lets the whole thing churn for two breaths more, then he shuts the heat off, so the liver poaches to a uniform, resistant pink. The broth emulsifies and coats your tongue.

The noodles resonate. The sambal is unusually dark, and dominates the sauce. There’s vinegar next to the chopsticks, and I suggest you use it. The kway teow was a recommendation. Their quicksilver nature responds to the sauce. Kway teow usually seems insubstantial alongside the pork, but here the milquetoast has brought their muscle. You can’t see this in the photo, but the two bowls are actually sauced differently, the mee pok is coated while the kway teow wallows, in sambal and lard let down with a ladle of broth.

The whole thing felt serious, and oddly lavish, a nighthawk bowl we ate for breakfast. Again, the soup is mostly full of stuff – slices of pork, what seems like a fistful of liver in each bowl, pork balls, fishballs plain and stuffed, and then that heaping spoonful of minced pork atop the noodles. There’s less meat in most burgers. Its opacity seems like a declaration, its depth arresting. There’s MSG, of course, there’s always MSG, but there’s also dried seafood and bones and body. But it’s also the opposite of clarity, of light. Is this even bak chor mee, in anything but name?