Hajah Mona Nasi Padang

Address 01-301, Geylang Serai Temporary Market Between Eunos Rd 5 and Sims Ave.

Opening Hours 7am -9.30pm closed on Wednesdays

It’s nice to know there are some very prudent and diligent vegetarians out there, who for reason known to them, practice this gentle makan art in the name of health, vanity, compassion or religion. Nice, but sometimes I don’t get it.

They resort to mock meats ( an oxymoron to me), dribble lemon juice over green stuff that you bend over an pluck in the garden ( nouveau cuisine for rabbits and tortoise), crunch on nuts, lentils and fruits, or go on a complicated carbohydrate overload. Painful, but it need not be.

Just pay a visit to the rare few nasi padang stalls that offer nasi jeganan with urap and nangka lemak and you’ll know the heavens above did design some vegetarian meals that meat chompers and spice lovers (like moir) can naturally love. Hajjah Mona, bless her sweet soul, toiled over a hot wok some thirty years ago just so that she can provide for her children. Her late cinema-usher husband passed on in the 80’s and she had to play provider and mother. She started selling in the streets some thirty years ago moving from one spot to another before she settled at Geylang and became one of the nasi padang icon of sorts there.

At 65 of age this year, she has retired from the wok but still wields the quality whip and oversees her children in the kitchen. It took her elder child Razak some three years of rote learning before she had a peace of mind and allowed him to “graduate”. Today, Hajjah simply hangs around and ensures that the daily and freshly made 35 odd dishes on offer are glistening under the clever warm daylight lamp tubes they use to illuminate the food counter. Their all iconic rendang (spicy stewed beef), is what I call the original version. The harder meat from the leg is used and they stew it in a complicated concoction of spices for hours before it is reduced to a firm and lightly chewy piece of beef that behaves so well with a plate of steamed rice. Their assam sambal stingray is my favourite, very meaty, juicy, fresh, spicy and not too tangy. The most popular item, is the sambal goreng- a crunchy and sweetly spicy wok tossed salad of long beans, tofu and tempeh (fermented soy bean cakes).

But what floats my boat here is the humble looking and stacked high plate of urap, sitting at the top right hand corner of the display, beckoning. It is an extremely crunchy salad of raw bean sprouts, winged beans (four angled bean), blanched kangkong and urap rajah (a Malay/Peranakan green herb). The toss with a delightful serondeng which is grated coconut gently dry-wok stirred with chilli sambal, gula melaka and flavoured with cheko, a root used to inject fragrance into the peanut sauce in gado-gado. To create the look of freshness, they make it one plate at a time, so they sit there airy, loose and crunchy. Hajjah Mona does this up to twenty times a day.

They offer a set called Nasi Jeganan, where the urap sits atop the rice but gado-gado style peanut sauce, instead of serondeng, is smothered over. Sprinkle some sambal goreng over and carnivores won’t care that it’s vegetarian. The crunchy tempeh, which is protein infested, offers a sensational bite feel. You just need to finish it off with a dollop of their sambal belachan dip, which I must declare now has a hint of fermented shrimps (in case you only eat things that never move).

Their other favourite set of mine is Nasi Ambeng, which has the wonderful urap and you can choose to pair it with fish begedil and beef rendang, or simply add sambal goreng again. I always plant a nice juicy piece of assam sambal stingray on top.

But if you have no idea and is momentarily stunned but the dazzling display before you, just ask Hajjah’s younger son Eesham, who in her words “is very good with customers and service.”.

To me, it’s almost a joke that in today’s era, these world class dishes only set you back by $3 to $5, on average.