Address: 382 Joo Chiat Road, Singapore 427622
Website: www.cantonwok.com.sg

I have been sick for the past week. Down with some virulent flu bug. I thought I could put off going to the doctor until I finally realised I needed a much needed rest. A Medical Certificate (MC) was issued to me enabling me to be excused from work for a day. Strangely, I felt guilty that I would not be attending work. Thoughts of my work piling up kept registering in my mind. This phenomenon swiftly passed when I went on a anime watching marathon at home instead of recuperating…hahahha. The end effect was that I got whirly eyes and managed to make myself sicker.

And when one is sick, there is hardly any desire for food. My weekend was spent picking at my meals. So this review is on a foodie trip I took with my girlfriend’s family to Canton Wok…during happier and my non-sickie times.

Canton Wok is located at the heart of Joo Chiat. It is housed in a bungalow. Quite a unique setting with innovative retrofitting of the formal abode into a restaurant.

The main reason for us flocking to the eatery was that there was a S$298++ promotion for their 8 dish set meal!

Our first dish was the Fish-Maw / Shark Cartridge Soup. Definitely not a favourite for me but a hit with the older folks. The Deep Fried Eggplant w/Pork Floss I took to better. I am quite a convert to the fried pieces of eggplant. However, I still have bad memories of my mum forcing me, the poor kiddo, to eat Pork Floss with plain bread when she was too frustrated to handle my hunger pang demands…

The Bacon Prawn Rolls w/Mayonnaise Cream was probably something me as a kid had fantasized about having for my meals everyday. It was a remarkably savoury dish. Each piece of fried prawn tenderly wrapped in the slice of bacon and doused with the Mayonnaise.

A recent thing for restaurants to adopt now is having a Double Taste item on their menu. Canton Wok had their Double Taste Pork Ribs. Pork Ribs cooked in 2 styles - normal sweet and sour flavour and the other in coffee. The wonders of having all these fusion of condiments and spices. If any chinese restaurant were to present a dish of coffee flavoured pork to their patrons 10 years back, the place would have been mobbed and the chef lynched and made to shove his own spatula up his own behind.

I am definitely a fan of the Homemade Bean Curd w/Dried Scallop. But wouldn’t it be a misnomer to brand it as Homemade Bean Curd if it was made and served in a restaurant? I mean, wouldn’t it be more accurate to term it as “Bean Curd supplied by some unknown person doing part time work preparing food stuff for restaurants”?

The Steamed White Patin Fish w/Garlic was super garlicky. I would call it the great equaliser of bad breath. Everyone’s breath would smell the same after this dish.

The Steamed Crab w/Glutinous Rice is reputed to be the restaurant’s signature dish. I like my crabs peppery or in hot chilli gravy. I felt that the dish was a bit haphazard in that it was two rather distinctive dishes clobbered together unnaturally to form a new item. The rest of the dining group thought otherwise though.

Between the crab dish and the last dish of the Stewed Bee Hoon, we had to wait for close to an hour. It may be because they spied that we had not finished the glutinous rice and thus chose to withhold the Bee Hoon. That was one of the blip in a otherwise enjoyable afternoon meal. I hear from my gf that her grandma had a terrific appetite and thoroughly enjoyed the dishes (with special mention of the bee hoon). And that is reason enough for us to return.