Singapore foodie social media was recently abuzz with a new stall named Old Village serving Kuala Lumpur style pork noodle at Peking Room coffee shop in Tanglin Halt. As I love KL pork noodle but had no chance to taste it in Malaysia for the past two years, I was excited to try it as soon as possible.
Everyday, somebody will post the early morning queue at Old Village which gets longer by the day as news of the stall gets out. I was excited to try Old Village's KL pork noodle before the queue gets unbearably long 😱 (In other words, I am kiasu 😜 )
I got here at around 10am. There were two queues - one to order, and the other were takeaway customers waiting to collect their food. I asked and got on the correct queue.
I got to the front of the ordering queue after about 15 minutes. Placed my orders, paid and was given this pager. Found a vacant table in the small, gritty, corner kopitiam (which won't be out of place in KL or JB). It was another 30 minutes before the pager buzzed, alerting me to collect my food at the stall.
Two of us, each of us had a KL pork noodle "dry" with soup served separately, and a bowl of long bean rice. Everything here for slightly over $11.
This is the $3 bowl and I added another $1 worth of ingredients. It was choked full of lean pork slices, minced pork, pork intestine, pork liver and pork balls. There's also choy sum greens, fried shallot oil and pork lard. The shallot and lard were freshly fried at the stall, so they were extra aromatic.
All the ingredients were boiled till soft-tender. Porcine sweetness was not strongly forthcoming but there was plenty of meat to chew on. If you are not a fan of fresh porky sweetness, then this will be just nice.
The soup felt watery but had nice aroma and taste from the fried shallot oil and lard. Made by boiling lots of socket bones and with so much pork ingredients, the porcine sweetness was a little meeker than expected.
I had yellow noodles and bee hoon (rice vermicelli) mix which soaked up all the savoury spicy greasy sauce, especially the bee hoon. The noodles and bee hoon were cooked to just the right soft-tender doneness. The yellow noodles don't have any alkaline taste. Next time, I shall just get only the yellow noodles so that I have more wet, slurpy feel and more flavour from the sauce.
Long Bean Rice for $1.50. Add 50 cents and the staff will top up the bowl to the brim.
The rice is flavourful and aromatic. It is stir fried with strips of pork belly, dried shrimp, cabbage, long beans, savoury sauces and oil. The fried rice is then cooked in a pot. The resulting rice is a little moist and soft but packed with savoury sweet flavours.
You can have the pork soup with long bean rice but we had both rice and noodles 😅
KL Pork Noodle is unabashedly a proletariat comfort dish, or put another way, a poor man's dish. So, it is not made with choice cuts and depended a lot on grease for flavour and aroma. Chef Jemmy, the serial entrepreneur who is also behind the popular Old World bak kut teh and fried porridge stalls was inspired to start Old Village by the KL pork noodle he tasted in KL Chinatown in 1990.
Written by Tony Boey on 4 Sep 2021
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