No. 25 Minced Meat Noodles – Bak Chor Mee With Delicious Broth by Young Couple

I’ve always had fond memories of Bukit Merah Central (the now-defunct Bukit Merah Library was my weekend getaway when I was a child). It is now a community hub, and No. 25 Minced Meat Noodles is located at the coffee shop right down the street from it.

The young chef at the helm was in the food industry for nearly a decade, but mostly had experience with Western cuisine. Why the switch then? He felt that the hawker culture was dying, but the stall was also born out of he and his fiancee’s love for traditional Bak Chor Mee. As for the number 25, it is a loving nod to the couple’s anniversary date — a meaningful touch to their business venture.

I had a go at their Signature Minced Meat Noodle ($7), and the bowl was topped with a generous amount of minced meat, fried ti poh and pork lard. While most BCM places don’t place much emphasis on the accompanying bowl of soup, the soup here could be a star entirely on its own. I especially liked that the liver slices present were cooked perfectly and were not grainy. While the prices of their noodles are on the steeper side, the pieces of fish maw and homemade fish dumplings in the soup, coupled with the soup’s robust flavours made the bowl very worth it. The broth is cooked for at least 8 hours with pork bone, chicken feet, and flavoured with tipoh.

The mee pok itself, unfortunately, was a tad overcooked. The flavours did make-up for it — their homemade chilli sauce had a nice kick, which was nicely complemented by the tanginess of the tomato sauce. A lover of pork lard myself, I liked that theirs did not have a stale oil taste. If I had to be picky, I wished their lard was not as smoky.

Note that their regular BCM ($4/5) does not come with their signature soup, which you would need to top up a dollar for. Although there are many Bak Chor Mee places out there, No. 25’s flavourful and tantalising soup sets them apart from the rest.

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