When Singaporean born Hong Kong culinary commentator Choi Lam recently took a jibe about how good Malaysian food is and how shallow Singaporean mindsets are ( I know not how he paired that with his vision of our shallow ability to take negative criticisms), it set me thinking. He also said Singapore chow looks better than it taste and that stirred my stomach acids. No, I am not about to throw a counter punch and dignify his comments but I actually thought there may be some merit to his words.

So I headed up again on my usual makan pilgrimage to Kuala Lumpur last week and penciled a session in Hutong, their latest food court rage in Lot 10 shopping mall, off Bukit Bintang. Within 5 minutes in there, I realized what he said was fair. Come on, the chap was sponsored to be a spokesman for the eatery and every word he said had to be fair- to the generous Malaysian sponsors, of course. When the local Chinese tabloid asked me for opinions to his musings, I hadn’t known about the commercial slant on his words and I replied that nobody is actually fit to compare the food of one country over the other. “It’s a bit shallow to do so.”, and I continued and painted the “how do you compare apples and pears” scenario between Singapore and Malaysian chow.

The only way to get Hutong looking so spacious is
to use an ultra wide angle lens

Back to my Hutong escapade. Forty seconds past the main entrance and I was sliding down the escalator into the basement where Hutong occupied entirely. There was a little “Hutong” wooden sign hanging atop as I stepped off the escalator. Nice, I thought, it reeks of some hutong (old cramped Chinese courtyard kampong) atmosphere. Then, you are blasted with island after island of little open fire kitchenettes. The ceiling is low, the floor is multi textured and color coded with different tiles and it had different sections which conjured up differing moods. At many corners, I think they forgot to install one key application- chairs and tables, and it looked like there was not enough of it around. You had to circumvent the eatery to find a seat (ah, that may be their grand design scheme of things- to get you circling the place). If you are reading between the lines here, you will know I am actually crying out “cramped like heck, packed like sardines in a can, prettily designed but a real headache to experience.” But they justified all that with one simple act- they named it Hutong, and all that mess made sense.

The Kim Lian Kee Hokkien mee chefs were clanging away in a kitchen that was loud and as splattered with black soy sauce as with their original stall in Petaling Street.

I was awesomely impressed with the Kim Lian Kee fried Hokkien mee stall (the setting, that is). Two big black steel woks sat over, get this, a fan controlled charcoal stove in a open kitchen set behind tempered glass. I had to order a portion as these folks are a Chinatown legend in Petaling Street right across from the famous Mata Kuching drink stall. They set up shop here and like in the original stall, the chef tossed and tossed and then braised Hokkien noodles with the thick soy sauce in the wok. The deliberate clanging and angling of the wok was part of the whole original act. Alas, the black noodle dish was palatable but lost out in one division – it did not spend enough time on the wok. The distinct flavour of the fire was absent. I next tucked into the Kong Tai Singapore style fried Hokkien prawn noodles and oyster omelet – I shall be polite and skip next, to my favourite dish there, the Ipoh Chicken Rice. These are the iconic folks that run a stall in Jalan Gasing and our RM10.80 set order came as good as I remember it to be. The rice was not oily, fluffy and grainy but that chicken, although soft and flavourful, was a bit fibrous (much like kampong chicken). The highlight was most certainly the Ipoh bean sprouts. These shorter, sweet and fatter wriggly little fellas came crunchy and perfectly blanched with soy sauce and sesame oil. The few slices of roast pork the set came with had crackling skin so soft yet crunchy, it can make you dream about it.

If you’ve ever had Ipoh bean sprouts, then you know just how this picture of the Ipoh chicken rice set would taste like.

Then, there was Ho Weng Kee wanton noodle stall. I raved about his noodles on these pages before but although Mr Ho has a good recipe, the hired hands at the stall could not convert accurately, the recipe to finished product.

But I have to add, that since the advent of Food Republic food court at the Pavillion mall just across the road from Lot 10, our friends in Malaysia has just upped the ante in making statements about Asian food culture in these new fangled food courts. I had and will say it again, that this kind of competition bears only one winner- us, the foodie.