Top Secret

Joo Heng Restaurant
360 Joo Chiat Road
Tel: +65 6345 1503

It is hard for me to explain, to anyone who has not lived in Asia, what tze char is. It is not a cuisine, nor is it a technique. There are no rules, recipes, or common ingredients (well, if you don’t count oyster sauce). It can be Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew in origin, or can draw upon a host of other influences. Upon reflection it is even more difficult for me to pinpoint what makes good tze char. Is it the unmistakable char and texture of food that is cooked at impossibly high heat? Is it the liberal use of soy and oyster sauce, in dishes that are both sweet and salty at the same time? No one really knows. But most people in Singapore know good tze char when they eat it, and I am no exception.

First, a primer. Tze Char (煮炒) is loosely translated as “stir-fry”, and to me refers to wok-cooked food that can be found in any manner of establishment in Singapore: from the lowly hawker stall to the larger places that almost approximate restaurants. These mid to larger places typically serve a variety of dishes, sometimes including big-ticket seafood items like crab and lobster. Someone once remarked to me that the true test of a tze char place is its fried rice, which is true to a certain extent. I have found the quality of the fried rice to be a consistent barometer of the quality of the food at any given tze char establishment, and since almost every tze char place serves fried rice in some form it is a easy comparison.

On my return from the States I set about trying to rediscover all the good tze char places in Singapore. Sin Hoi San, a perennial favourite, was still decent to good (and still expensive). My dad used to take us to this one stall, Keng Kee, in the Amoy St hawker centre that was his favourite, but their star has long since dimmed. There were many options, but no true contenders. I despaired, for every Singaporean needs a go-to place for comfort food. And then, I found mine.

My mother recommended Joo Heng to me warily, as if once hooked on it I would forsake her own home-cooked food. She herself had been to dinner there with her colleagues, and had come back with only good things to say. Given that the restaurant has been around for a long while, I wondered aloud why I had never heard of it, and expressed my many doubts in no uncertain terms. I must say that I no longer have any.

The excellence of Joo Heng makes me mad that I had not experienced it while growing up, and cannot therefore “lay claim” to the place. For it is one of those places that families go to with unwavering dedication and in ritualistic fashion, and generations have been weaned on their food. Yet I was doomed to be a late convert, to have my eyes opened only in adulthood.

Joo Heng is located along Joo Chiat Road, a stretch littered with KTV pubs and other less-than-savoury establishments. It is obvious that the place has expanded from its original size, for it is made up of two storefronts – one of which looks much newer than the other. I have tried eating on both sides, and I must say that eating on the older side somehow makes the food taste better.

I hesitate to recommend any dishes at Joo Heng, for while they are not all stellar there are too many of the the good ones to list. The must tries include the claypot tofu, the sesame oil chicken, and the fish-head steamboat. I think its real strength lies in the wok hei of the food. Just from the aroma alone you can tell that it has been cooked at high heat, and the efficacy of the restaurant’s runners means that the food always reaches your table piping hot. A warning: do let your food rest a little before attacking it. The taste is unmistakable – flavours are melded together like they only can at high heat; ingredients are flash-fried for a crispy exterior and succulent, tender interiors. A great example would be their omelette dishes – where they fry up eggs with savoury ingredients of your choosing: crabmeat, prawns, etc. My personal favourite is the omelette with whitebait. Because it is cooked at high heat, the edges of the omelette are crisped perfectly, and the inside is just the right side of runny. The saltiness of whitebait is a perfect complement to the egg. I order this as an appetiser every time.

So now, I am hooked. After I discovered the place I went around asking my foodie friends if they had heard of it, and invariably they all did. Those bastards just conveniently forgot to tell me about it. Apparently this is one of those places that everyone makes an effort to keep on the down-low, the secret neighbourhood favourite that everyone is possessive of. Writing this blog entry may defeat that aim (although I doubt it, given the minimal readership of this blog), but I felt I had to share.