M2000 Café

Address M Hotel, 81 Anson Road

Opening Hours Pies available from 10am-3pm daily

Telephone 62241133

What, when a Hainanese teenager with a yen for mechanical and electronic engineering ends up toiling in a commercial kitchen because of the lack of opportunity? In this case- he became a fatalistic soldier of his destination who labours through his craft with methodic diligence.

He analyses, rationalizes, deconstructs and reconstructs the approach to his food. And today, 46 years into his craft, you can fully appreciate his specialty when chomp into it. The first thing that hits you is the creaminess of the chicken pie. The very juicy fillings oozes with choc-a-bloc full of chicken cubes that stares at and dares you to devour.

“Once”, he forgot when, as his memory at 61 years of age, is sketchy, ”an ang-mo (western) chef gave us a chicken pie recipe to follow and it was terrible. He just copied some cookbook ideas without testing it himself” recalls Mr Wang Khang See. So he and his colleague, simply modified it and since then, as way back to the seventies when he served it at the former Boulevard Hotel, it has become a signature which has always been associated with him.

If you are just some casual chicken pie chomper, you will at times be irritated by a slimy texture and stale flavour which can come from the green peas inside that are overcooked and broken. It turns yellow, hallows out and affects the flavour and textureof the sauce which has since dried up because the potatoes has absorbed them and turned mushy. It was what bothered Mr Wang. It did not take him long to figure that the appeal of chicken pie should lie simply in, well, the chicken. He took pains to reverse engineer the boiling process (we know only too well what the Hainanese are when it comes to boiling chickens). He did not boil them fully as he factored in heat from the baking process. Bite into his pie and you’ll know it’s not just chunky bits of breast meat but cuts from the juicy parts of the drumstick as well. It does not taste dry.

“I use only three ingredients, fresh carrots, whole chicken and canned champignons (button mushrooms). The bones flavour the sauce base and is thickened with cream and butter.”. The pastry that contains the mixture has a soft crispy gumminess that holds well. Once I deliberately let it sit at room temperature for six hours and by dinner, it was still juicy and did not loose its shape.

And after three decades at it, his pies, at $3.50 each, are still juicy and consistent. “ I wanted to give it all up and retire sometime ago but all my bosses held me back, all three times.” So he gave in with a final condition, that he only makes chicken pies and baked curry puffs, because of the age and workload. They gave in.

His very faithful fans include family members of this ex-bosses, the Khoo family that owns the Good wood Park and Boulevard Hotel. One unique request he remembers from the patriach, the late Mr Khoo Teck Puat was that he liked his pies devoid of cream. At its peak, he was shifting close to 1000 pies a day at his old Boulevard Hotel kitchen. But today, due to age and response, he can only manage about two to three hundreds pieces each day.

The shy Mr Wang would put out his first batch of hand made pies in a heated display rack outside his café at 10am, and each time he returned with another batch, the rack would be empty. He’ll diligently serve up the last batch by 3pm as“ that’s all the energy I have left today.”.

Then he methodically returns to clean up the kitchen and call it a day only to return and restart the whole task the next day, like a dutiful mechanically engineered process.