Old Mother Hen, Sims Ave, Singapore

So here I was in the Geylang district looking for "Old Mother Hen". Er, no, I wasn't feeling frisky that night. I was however, (surprise surprise) feeling hungry! This place was recommended by a friend to be pretty kickass so I had to check it out.

This place is popular for some of their claypot dishes. They use a mix of old-school charcoal and gas as the heating elements here. I guess this sort of incorporates the best of both worlds.

We started off with this black herbal chicken soup. Apparently this is like a tonic and is supposedly healthy for you. I enjoy starting the meal on a healthy note, so I wouldn't feel that guilty when it goes downhill from there into sinful greasy indulgences haha.

A friend of my professed that the claypot rice here is as good, if not better than the famous one along the main Geylang strip. I haven't tried the "famous one" so I can't say if it's true. I can however, profess that this was possibly the best claypot rice I've had in Singapore. Whilst it was being stirred by the server, it exuberated this fragrance which was simply brilliant.

The stirring process mixes the oil, soy sauce and ingredients about evenly and also coats the claypot with a nice layer of crispy rice bits which is always ever so fun to scrape off and chomp down later.

This awesome flavor is made up of a concoction of sauces and the quality ingredients of Chinese pork sausage, Chinese liver sausage, chicken, salted fish and salted egg yolks.

Finally, a decent Singaporean version of salt and pepper squid. Encased in a light and crisp batter which gave way to reveal soft and tender squid flesh, this goes great with beer.

This is very similar to the egg white, crabmeat and broccoli dish from Cheng Li Yuan except this came sans the broccoli. It did start to taste a bit "heavy" after awhile, there should have been some red or black vinegar to go with this. Next time I'll ask for some.

The nam lu pork here was fried to the right texture and the cut had the right balance of fat and meat. It was a bit too salty though, nevertheless, it was great beer nibbles.

This was the toughest contender against the claypot rice for Top Dish tonight. Their home-made special beancurd was fried to a super crisp finish externally but yielded to soft, delicate beancurd. It was topped off with a gravy containing minced pork and crispy lard bits! Extremely delicious.

Another recommended dish, I thought this fried broad rice noodle tasted only ok. I mean, it was better than average but it paled in comparison to the rest of the dishes. I still prefer the beef version from Fatty Weng's. The meal was finished with some hot Chinese tea.

Yes, that's right, hot Chinese tea just melts all that grease away so you simply can't absorb it haha. The trick to eating is to start the meal healthy (herbal chicken soup) and end it healthy (Chinese tea) whatever happens in between doesn't matter haha.

I'll definitely come back here again to try out the other stuff. They did seem to have a rather decent selection of crab dishes as well. This dinner only cost us 48SGD, there is simply no reason not to try out this joint.

D