I don’t know if any of you foodies remember Ten Noodles, a restaurant with a ten-dish menu featuring noodle dishes from different parts of Asia. I remember the pad Thai, the Vietnamese spring rolls with vermicelli, and the samosas with the sweet-sour tamarind dip. More than anything, however, I was seriously addicted to the char kway teow.
Char kway teow literally means “fried flat noodles” and is made with the fettucini-like Chǎo hé fěn (flat white rice noodles) which are fried with soy sauce, eggs, pork, chives, prawns, bean sprouts, cockles, and chili. Sometimes, as in the case of the version served at Ten Noodles, slices of Chinese sausage (lap cheong) are added. Ten’s version was so good: rich, savory, and satisfying; neither too sweet nor too salty and – considering that it was fried in lard – was not too greasy.
The branch at Glorietta closed down several years ago and the one remaining branch is in Manila’s Harrison Plaza. Now, I am hardly ever in the Malate / Ermita area even if I did go to school within that part of town (That’s over a decade ago and is another story, all together…), so it’s been ages since I had a helping of char kway teow. When the craving finally got a bit too much, I hightailed over to Rasa at the Gateway Mall to get my noodle fix.
I should state at this point that those of you who expect authenticity with regard to Southeast Asian cooking will be caught a little askance by Rasa’s version. Traditional char kway teow is fried in lard and cooked with pork. The stuff served at Rasa is the halal version preferred by Singapore’s Muslim community, so it’s made with beef – just beef, no pork, no chili, no prawns, no cockles either. Mercifully, it had everything else: soy sauce, bean sprouts, and – thank goodness! – chives.
Aesthetically speaking, char kway teow isn’t really very pretty to look at. (It’s the taste, after all, that counts the most.) Rasa’s sticks true to form: a green-flecked brown tangle whose rich aroma belies its appearance. I should state at this point that the dish set before me was somewhat on the soupy side. My mind went Is char kway teow supposed to be soupy? I couldn’t really remember, so I went on ahead and dug in.
The flavors in this particular version were fairly good: the beefiness working well with the bland noodles, just a hint of ginger and onion, the soy adding a salty sweetness to the whole thing. What I didn’t like was the fact that the “soup” the noodles were drenched in turned out to be an oily sludge and the weird dizzy feeling I had at the end of the meal could only be attributed to – alas! – MSG.
While having lunch at Rasa blunted my craving for char kway teow, it hasn’t completely quelled it. Methinks a trip to Ten Noodles is in the cards for me – and bother the fact that I’ll have to head for Manila to get there.
Midge in the Kitchen 