Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice – Deliciously Messy Hainanese Curry Rice in the North!

Yishun is famous (or infamous) for many things but lately, I’ve seen folks talking up a new scissors cut curry rice stall that has popped up in a kopitiam in Yishun Ave 5. As it’s something of a rare find in the north, I was no doubt intrigued and decided to check out what Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice has to offer up north. 

The stall is helmed by Bong Chon Joon and Chai Chin Tek, a pair of schoolmates with a wealth of experience in the F&B industry. They had joined hands and got their stall up and running in October 2021. 

Chin Tek had mastered all the know-hows of running a scissors cut curry stall after having spent years working at cai fan and nasi padang stalls and is responsible for the cooking. Meanwhile, Chon Joon, who cut his teeth at the now defunct Spanish restaurant Santi at Marina Bay Sands, is in charge of snipping up the cooked food and serving customers. 

You can expect the usual suspects when it comes to scissors cut curry rice — deep-fried meat and fish as well as braised pork belly, curry chicken and vegetables. You can either mix-and-match whichever liao you fancy or select from their curated sets that comprise popular choices such as chicken chop, pork chop and braised pork. 

Set D ($5) comes with a little thumbs up on the menu, so you can trust that it should come packed with pretty good nosh. I opted for chicken chop and received a hefty plate piled with fried chicken thigh snipped into strips, braised pork belly, cabbage and a fried egg on rice, liberally doused with aromatic curry. 

The chicken chop was well-marinated, and delectably tender. The flavours from the chicken melded wonderfully with the slightly thick curry. With a total of ten different spices used in the making of it, the curry carries a mildly sweet, spicy tinge that won’t easily wear out your taste buds. 

The flavours of the pork belly, which had been braised with soya sauce, garlic, five-spice powder and sugar, were on the gentler side. There was roughly a thirty-seventy ratio of fat to meat, making it less melt-in-your-mouth and having a firmer bite instead. As for the fresh sweet cabbage that had been stewed in pork broth and fried with garlic, it had a slight crunch and was a refreshing palate cleanser from the rich flavours of the other ingredients. 

I also got the Set E ($5), which came with pork chop and curry chicken along with the mainstays of cabbage and fried egg. The marination on the pork chop was a lot stronger and even bordered on salty at times. It was also about as tender as the chicken chop, but I’d say the latter definitely ranked higher, in my opinion. There wasn’t much fanfare from me when it came to the curry chicken but it’s still a classic choice that’s faultless.

A side dish that had me pleasantly surprised was the Nam Yu Fried Pork Belly ($3). I usually prefer my pork belly braised so this version that pays homage to Chon Joon and Chin Tek’s Hakka roots was something different. While the fat isn’t exactly the melt-in-your-mouth type, there was a good balance between that and the amount of meat, and the distinctive flavours of five-spice powder and fermented red bean curd paste were very prominent. 

The Fried Battered Prawn ($2.50 for three pieces) featured a thick layer of batter encapsulating sweet, fresh prawns. There wasn’t much of a crunch but despite its appearance, the batter was actually quite light in texture. I just thought that the ratio of batter to prawn was a tiny bit off. 

Ultimately, Legend Scissors Cut Curry Rice definitely earns a spot in our list of good Hainanese curry rice stalls in Singapore. Great news for those of you who live up in the north, you no longer need to go the distance to get a deliciously messy plate of scissors cut curry rice.

MissTamChiak.com made an anonymous visit and paid its own meal at the stall featured here.

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