Address: Upper East Coast Road leading into Bedok Road, near Bedok Camp

This place is famous for a store selling Cuttle fish and Vegetable (jew hur eng chai…pardon the mangling of the hokkien translation). People from all over the island would flock to this place just to sample the Cuttle fish and Vegetable dish.

When we arrived there at 7pm, the stall had already sold out on the famous dish. This same stall, however, had a long queue for its other famous offering - that of Cheng Teng (literal translation to English would be “clear soup”, a dessert).

Adopting the famous Singapore mantra of “monkey see, monkey do”, we queued in line. The left side of the stall sells the Cheng Teng while the right side sells the Cuttle Fish dish.

If you notice, the Chinese name of the stall is 夜来香. The English take on this name would be quite poetic - the fragrance of the night. However, my chinese teachers from my schooling days had repeatedly highlighted to us that the use of this phrase is a definite no-no when describing food. This is because the phrase is in fact used as a elegant way of describing the aroma of faeces as the night soil man goes around every household to clear the offending material (this was of course back in the days when the wonders of plumbing had not been introduced). Apparently, this little nugget of information did not register in the minds of the people queuing up nor did it affect the popularity of the stall.

The Cheng Teng (S$2) did not have any aroma. Although if you had a particularly wicked imagination, you could picture the Cheng Teng as the end product of a rather watery diet. heh heh.

The Cheng Teng was indeed refreshing. It had longans, rambutans, barley and assorted ingredients that I could not identify. However, I question the need to queue for about 15 minutes for this dessert.

As always, when my friend BT is around, he would be the one taking charge of our food orders. He IS the man when it comes to food.

Soup Kambing (S$3). A hearty and totally grease-filled bowl of mutton soup. Guaranteed to induce a warm fuzzy feeling of content in your stomaches.

Chicken Murtabak (S$5). Acceptable standard. Although it was quite disconcerting to find huge remnants of chicken thigh bones in the Murtabak.

Satay. A perennial favourite. Love having the onions with the peanut gravy.

Piling on the calories, we had Fried Carrot Cake and Fried Oyster. Truly yummy stuff. I view the egg as the bedrock of all cuisines. All hail the humble egg!