Hawker centre #4: Ayer Rajah Food Centre

Heading all the way out to the BirdPark provided a nice excuse to get to a hawker centre that seemed to have a plethora of dishes worth trying. Ayer Rajah Food Centre was mostly halal and largely caters to Indian Muslims. Unfortunately, two of the dishes I was most excited about weren't available that day. One was soup kambing, a mutton-based soup. The other was soup tulang, an even more exotic mutton soup that largely used mutton bones and in which the bone marrow played a central role; this version is also highly spicy. But we still had to eat.

For our first dish I trekked over to Habib's Rojak. According to Makansutra, they serve a mean version of indian rojak. This dish is a user-created amalgamation. At the stand, there are a variety of ingredients available for selection; these include fried dough, fish balls, sausage, cuttlefish, and more. The eater puts about five of these on a plate and hands it to the stall owner. The chef then coarsely shops these up, stir fries them with a bit of oil and some green chillies, and puts it on a plate with some dipping sauce, usually composed of peanuts, chilli, and shrimp paste.

And this was my version. I was a bit perplexed by some of the ingredients and, as it turned out, overly adventurous. Among my choices were fried dough, chicken patties, sausage, fried battered egg, bright red jellied squid, and a bizarre dark red fish-like thing.

This is worth an aside. You can barely make it out in the photo, but there is a small piece of it near the top just to the right of the cup of chilli. This was awful. It wasn't bad, it wasn't hard to eat, it was worse than inedible. I took one bite, forced myself to take another, and then knew that the only option that would cause things not to get a whole lot worse would be to spit it out immediately and flush my mouth with fruit juice. I still have no idea what it was, but it tasted like a combination of really old fish (tuna, perhaps) and really old blood pudding, left out sitting on a counter for a couple of days. This is, easily, the worst bite of the whole trip so far, surpassing those shells in Japan.

Moving back to the whole dish, the rest of it was ok. I was hoping for more flavor and more peanut in the dipping sauce, which was more or less just chilli sauce. The other bites were certainly edible, but not that memorable.

The second dish was mee siam. Though it has the word for Thailand in it, it is not a Thai dish. It does borrow some of the basic flavors of that cuisine and combines them with some of the fishier flavors of China. With a lot of vermicelli on the bottom, it had cuttlefish, greens, and more bathing in a dark sauce and sprinkled with peanuts. Middle of the road fare, could fill the belly but not much more.

The final dish was roti john. This dish had a fascinating history, Western expats apparently ordered egg, onion, and meat omelettes and would also by some bread to eat along with the dish. Classic brunch food, right? Well, in Singapore, a creative hawker turned this into the roti john, a panini where the filling is egg and meat and onion, which is then covered in mayo and chilli sauce. It wasn't half bad, either, after we scraped as much mayo off as we could.

And then there were the beverages. There was the requisite fruit juice, of course, kiwi lemon for me and orange for Jenika and Sahana. Paired with that was some delightful teh halia, or ginger pulled milk tea. This was served in big steaming mugs that look like they're normally used for beer. Thumbs way up on the tea!