Heng Heng Hainanese Chicken Rice. Worthy Alternative to Tian Tian @ Maxwell Road Food Centre 興興海南鸡饭

If you are looking for the actual Tian Tian Chicken Rice it's here 👈 click

Maxwell Road Food Centre is the chicken rice central of Singapore with 8 different stalls all offering Singapore's unofficial national dish. Recently, I spent a month combing the hawker stalls in Maxwell Road Food Centre to prepare a Tanjong Pagar food trail.




Needless to say, Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice enjoy the longest queue, as it is constantly featured in local and overseas media for decades now. Almost everyone in the long queue at Tian Tian are tourists. Not many locals come to Maxwell Road Food Centre specifically for chicken rice despite its national chicken rice central status.





The chicken rice stall with the honour of having the second longest queue at Maxwell Road Food Centre, goes to Heng Heng Hainanese Chicken Rice. It made me curious as to why, as there are 8 chicken stalls at Maxwell and Heng Heng does not enjoy any much media coverage.

So, last week when I was early at Maxwell Road Food Centre, it tried Heng Heng Hainanese Chicken Road for the first time. It was also the only chicken rice stall that was opened for business at 9:30am.


Looking through the glass window at the row of fried and poached chicken, they looked enticingly succulent and juicy. Fresh from the pot, there was still a slight sheen on the wet poached birds.

 
As stall boss Mr Koh was catching a breather before the crowd descends on Maxwell Food Centre, I was able to have a brief chat with him. When Maxwell Food Centre opened in 1987 (it was a vegetable market before), Heng Heng and Tian Tian were the only 2 chicken rice stalls here. After Tian Tian became famous around the late 1990s, more chicken stalls jumped on the bandwagon.

 
Now, there are 8. Heng Heng is still holding its own with Tian Tian plus another 6 competitors. Heng Heng's resilience must say something about its chicken - I shall find out this morning.

 
I opted for the S$4 set - it has everything - mound of greased rice, chicken meat, cucumber, chili sauce, ginger sauce, dark soy sauce, and a soup. Some other stalls actually omit this or that, such as no ginger, no soup, etc.

 
There was quite a generous amount of chicken meat.


I like it that the meat come in all 3 layers - smooth skin, melt-in-the-mouth jellied fat and tender juicy lean meat. The skin and fat carried the natural chicky sweetness which I like. The lean meat has less flavour which was remedied somewhat by the savoury sweet brown sauce. Truth be told, I prefer Heng Heng's chicken meat over king of hill, Tian Tian's.

 
On the other hand, at Tian Tian, the meat come with neither skin nor fat. So, there wasn't much, if any, natural chicky sweetness and the dish relied heavily on the savoury brown sauce for flavour to make up for the pretty flavourless white meat.

 
Heng Heng's greased rice was aromatic and flavourful, but a little too wet for my liking. The rice was a mix of full and broken grains. The grains were tender and had a slight nuttiness which I enjoyed.


Heng Heng provides all the requisite sauces - chili, ginger and dark soy sauce - no cutting corners here. The sauces, however, were of average quality. The chili sauce was quite spicy sharp with sourness from vinegar. The ginger sauce was mildly spicy in the ginger way and watery.


The sweet savoury soup was too sweet for my liking.

Information for you👌 Though not the top of my mind chicken rice in Singapore - I prefer Sin Kee, Heng Ji, & Randy's - Heng Heng is a good option at Maxwell Road Food Centre which is the chicken rice central of Singapore.

Maxwell Food Centre was originally a vegetable market opened in 1929 on land which was a Chinese cemetery (Chinese Burying Ground in this map of Singapore dated 1846). It was just across South Bridge Road from the infamous death houses of Sago Lane.

Photo credit: National Archives Singapore

The vegetable market was converted to a hawker centre in 1987. Most of the hawkers who were moved here were operating in the back lanes around China Square (2 blocks away). Today, Maxwell Food Centre with around 50 hawker stalls is one of Singapore's most popular and famous hawker centres.

Restaurant name: Heng Heng Hainanese Chicken Rice 興興海南鸡饭
Address: Maxwell Food Centre, 1 Kadayanallur Street, #01-40, Singapore 069184
GPS: 1°16'48.5"N 103°50'41.9"E 🌐 1.280129, 103.844979  
Waze: Maxwell Food Centre
Nearest MRT Station: Between Chinatown and Telok Ayer stations
Hours: 9:30am - 8:45pm (till sold out)

Non Halal



Date visited: 23 Nov 2019