Jin Long

Tze char stalls really rock my world right now.

For the uninitiated, tze char stalls are kinda like restaurants located at coffee shops. In short, it's a less classy version of a typical Chinese restaurant. At tze char stalls, there are no air conditioners, only fans and round tables sometimes lined with red plastic. Seated on plastic chairs, you stand to sweat and feel the humidity but know that you can't do much about it. Then you pray hard that the food is well worth your discomfort. When that happens, you forget about your surroundings and start to enjoy the food for what it's worth.

I had a similar experience recently. Leo and Cass have always raved to me about this tze char place near their homes. It's called Jin Long and they supposedly serve good and cheap seafood and food. So at their invitation last week, me and a couple of friends joined them and as promised, did not live to regret it.

Let me start with the black pepper crab as seen in the above picture. This crab was truly amazing. The peppery sauce enchanted all, so much so that we were licking our crab shells (ok, that was me) and scooping up the excess sauce from the plate and eating it with our rice and all. You could feel the silence that ensued, after the crab was served. Everyone could only look in awe and once we've all picked a part of the crab, you could hear the concentration given in ensuring that nothing is wasted, not a shred of crab flesh left in their shells that would go to waste. No no no, we all dutifully cleaned out our shells and slurped up all the sauce. It was really really good.

Next, the oatmeal prawns,



Nothing super fantastic but I love their abundance of oatmeal and I liked that it wasn't too oily. You know how sometimes they put loads of oil when they fry their prawns, until the oatmeal becomes so wet and oily because of their high absorbency? Yea, that was absent in these prawns and I was so happy. Ended up eating quite a bit of the oatmeal :)

At tze char stalls, pork ribs are usually the most common dish that everyone needs to eat:



I suppose it's quite hard to go wrong? These pork ribs were tasty and delicious. Personally, I think that if a tze char stall serves good pork ribs, then their other dishes probably wouldn't all too bad either!

Ahh and I want to rave about another of their dish:



Sambal Kangkong with cuttlefish. Gosh, this was delish. I love sambal and I appreciate a good serve of sambal kangkong and wasn't at all disappointed with this one. It was cooked just right and the sambal was uber shiok!

Mmmmmm.....

Oh, then, last but not least, the triple egg soup:



Really tasty this soup! It has 3 types of eggs according to Cass. This is her favourite soup and I think it has century egg, salted egg and your normal egg. I like it. Though I know it doesn't really look really appetising in the picture.

Anyway I'm glad I finally went to Jin Long. It really lives up to its reputation (from what I hear from Leo and Cass, it's really popular) and you can tell that it's quite well-liked from the crowded tables! We had to wait for a table of six when we were there on a Wednesday night. Imagine that! I don't really have the address but I know it's somewhere near Bedok Interchange. About 10 minutes walk.

Before I forget, let me wish all of you a very HAPPY NEW YEAR! God Bless You! And may this year of 2007 bring you good health, happiness and lots of good eats. Cheers :)