Freshly fried beef hor fun worth waiting for 
IF YOU frequent stir-fry stalls, chances are you have by now been conditioned to accept their assembly-line fare.
Nine times out of 10 when you ask for fried beef hor fun, for example, the flat rice noodles are pre-cooked and might have been sitting on a plate for hours.
The hawker heats up some gravy, stirs in strips of beef and greens, drops it all on top of the hor fun - voila! lukewarm beef hor fun.
So imagine my disbelief when I tried the beef hor fun from a stall in the Chinatown Complex Temp Market And Food Centre one recent evening. The dish seemed to have been cooked from scratch.
Certainly, the tender, tasty pieces of beef had been whisked in with the hor fun, because they were not in a tell-tale pile atop the noodles, but beneath and between strands of hor fun.
The noodles were nicely brown, too: Any browner and they would be burnt. And there was an unmistakeable whiff of wok hei, that fragrance of food fresh from a hot wok.
The ee fu noodles with seafood and fried rice I ordered were just as outstanding. Like the hor fun, they are sold in small, medium and large servings at $4, $8 and $10.
Hawker Ngo Meng Nguen and his colleague are the two stir-fry masters behind these steaming meals.
Mr Ngo, 48, reckons he has been in the business for 30 years since his days as a street vendor. In 1984, he moved to the old Chinatown Complex, setting up a stall called Xing Long Seafood Restaurant.
His stall has no name at its present temporary address - the signboard shows only the number, 1-197, but he plans to bring back the old name when he returns to the revamped complex.
He is Foochow, actually. But because he grew up in Cantonese-speaking Kreta Ayer, he not only talks the talk but also woks the wok.
He says modestly: 'It isn't that others don't know how to cook. But they pre-cook all their noodles and gravy, and wait for you to turn up.'
He prefers to do things the old way and let the customer do the waiting.
'I know a customer comes to me because he's hungry. But if you want to eat good food, you have to be understanding. You have to be patient,' he says.
I went to his stall with my family one Thursday night and we waited a finger-tapping 40 minutes for our orders. But when dinner arrived, it was truly worth every minute of the wait.