Wah Kee Big Prawn Noodle was quick to ride on the recent trend of upscaling hawker food stalls into restaurants. They are a handful of the famous stalls to follow suit after the setting up of the Michelin-starred soy sauce chicken restaurant.
They have been a veteran name in the “prawn noodle” scene, serving up savoury and rich prawn noodles from the humble hawker stall in Pek Kio market. The son of the owner/chef expanded the business by opening an air-conditioned restaurant with longer opening hours to serve more customers.
Wary that there are usually long queues during peak dining hours, we decided to visit the shop slightly later to avoid the crowd. Since they indicated their evening operating hours as 05:00pm – 10:30pm, we went at around 9pm. Avoid the crowd, we did. As when we arrived the shop was almost empty. Then we understood why…the signage wrote “Sold Out” for their $6/$12/$20 prawn noodles. We were left with the $30 option. As there was an ongoing thunderstorm out there, we decided to go ahead with the order instead of having to look for alternative dining options.
The service staff was kind enough to point out to us that we could order 1 portion of the $30 prawn noodle and add-on an additional single serving of noodles for $3 so that the 2 of us could share the prawns.
The prawn noodles was served in a metal-like pot vessel which enabled the soup to retain its heat well. The 3 prawns would meant each of the prawn cost about $10 each, they were fresh, large and succulent as they can be but I still have my doubts on whether it is worthy of the price tag. The richness and robustness of the soup was the key highlight, not the prawns. The soup was filled with umami of the crustaceans used to boil the broth, along with generous portions of pork lard.
I wouldn’t mind returning again to the air-conditioned restaurant, but will probably order up to max of $20 prawn noodle per pax. The hawker stall certainly offers better value-for-money albeit they are not opened in the evening.
If you have craving for prawn noodles at night, you can also consider going to a stall in Zion Road hawker, it’s one of my fav haunt.
YummyDelight 