Hawker centre #3: Toa Payoh

For the third hawker centre, we continued our explorations of the west, headed to the Toa Payoh complex. It was an enormous complex, above-average even for Singapore. There were 8 or 9 different communities in Toa Payoh, demarcated by different lorongs. We chose lorong 7 largely on account of the recommended food. Alas, it was Monday, which apparently is a very bad day to visit a hawker centre: many of the stalls we came to visit were closed. So we closed our eyes, picked some random stalls, and had some lunch.

One of my absolute favorite things has been getting incredibly fresh juice with every meal. Inevitably, there are a couple of stalls that have a lot of produce and a juicer. You simply walk up, say which fruits you'd like, and they juice it and give it to you. No additives, no wait. Here, I got a rock melon (cantaloupe) and celery juice while Jenika opted for the watermelon and pineapple mixture. Jenika hit a homerun with a creation that is her current go-to. Mine was refreshing but I've since switched the green apple and celery. Sahana stuck with her normal orange and banana. Paired with the juices was a slice of rainbow-colored gelatin. This turned out to be a mono-flavor rice cake, not bad but not quite as exuberant as it looked.

Next up was some carrot cake. In Singapore, this is a savory dish made with carrot and / or yams, fried up with eggs and some garnishes. This version was unfortunately the white variety, which rendered it relatively bland. The black variety adds, I believe, a dark soy to the mixture and ups the flavor quotient.

Thirdly there was char kway teow. Definitely one of the top traditional dishes, this has fried noodles, some meat (beef or pork), bean sprouts, chillies, chinese sausage, and cockles. The sauce on this version was nice and it seemed a solid attempt. I'd like to try more to get a better feel for the dish.

The final dish was a duck noodle soup. This was very nicely done, with the clear broth remaining light (even with a fair amount of oil, as I'm sure you can make out). The vegetables within were also crunchy and a great balance.

One final note: there was one vendor who was selling both crocodile meat and turtle soup. Two reasons you see no pictures of those above: (1) I'm not sure if either is endangered or unsustainably caught and (2) I did not see a single person frequent the stall, which made me think it might be bad tasting crocodile, which would be no good.