Empress Place Teochew Beef Kway Teow @ Raffles Courtyard, Raffles Hotel

 ~Invited Tasting~

Hawker Stories at Raffles Courtyard collaborates with David Lim, the fourth-generation descendent of the legendary Hock Lam Kuay Teow, and current owner of Empress Place Teochew Beef Kway Teow. For more than 20 years, David has been known for selling his special version of the Beef Kuay Teow Soup, known for its delectable and lighter-bodied beef broth with hints of pandan.

 

The Empress Place Bundle

We tried the Empress Place Bundle which had a bit of everything. It comes with a choice of the Beef Kuay Teow in Dry or Soup version, as well as a Beef Mui Fan. While having been a fan of the beef kuay teow since my younger days in the east of Singapore, I was dying to try the Beef Mui Fan as there are almost no places in Singapore that are still selling this old school dish.

Beef Kuay Teow (Soup)

 

This is a delectably wholesome dish that I could eat everyday. With generous heaping portions of beef balls, beef innards like tripe, stomach, tongue, etc., it was really great comfort food in rainy weather and this definitely stands out as one of the top versions of the dish here in Singapore.

Beef Kuay Teow (Dry)

Oh my goodness. You know, during my days visiting Empress Place Teochew Beef Kway Teow, I would order the soup version only because that’s really my favorite thing to eat. Perhaps I was wary of the starchy goopy Hainanese versions of the dry dish that has been popularized by other beef noodle stores. Lim’s version is really how a dry beef noodle should be: robust, with beef fat flavors bursting in a delightfully fragrant stock, lightly soaked in beef gravy. Oh, don’t forget the chili. Lim tells us proudly that he prepares his chili the whole school way: pounded, and the secret ingredient was chopped whole calamansi limes (not blended!), as he claims, that gives the chili the extra piquant and sourish kick.

Beef Mui Fan

 

I remembered this dish vividly from my very young days in Cantonese restaurants where if you ask the waiters nicely, they will ask the chefs to make it for you. It is almost always an off-the-menu dish (I don’t know why!), and they might not even have the ingredients all the time. I enjoyed Lim’s version immensely, as he has chosen to only sprinkle black beans sparingly into the dish and allow the beef stock to be the star. The rice is also still chewy and fragrant, meaning he has strictly only finished the dish at the last second, thereby keeping the texture of the rice as sweet as possible.

 

Vegetable Spring Rolls

 

This was a surprising addition to the bundle, but I welcomed it very much. It was lightly fried and not too oily, and generous in vegetables and big on flavors. It was a welcome foil to the beefy flavors we had and I would even simply enjoy this on its own.

 

The Empress Place Teochew Beef Kway Teow’s collaboration with Hawker Stories at Raffles Courtyard is going on from 20^th April 2022 to 8^th May 2022.