Hung Kee Rice Shop Ipoh

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Every time  I get to go back to Ipoh for work, I get really excited. 1. it’s my hometown 2. I get to see my grandparents (aged 94 and 89) and 3. I get to pig out on good food.

Also, being from Ipoh and everything, I thought I knew most of the great places for food, but this particular place slipped by me for some strange reason. If not for my Ipoh colleague, another born and bred Ipoh-chai (Ipoh boy) I would never have had the fortune of eating a whole bowl of brains by myself. For this, I have Marcus to thank.

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Pig brain soup. Yes, in Cantonese this is the Chee-lou-tong.

They say eating brains makes you smarter. Errr.. not true. Try again.

They say eating brains makes you fatter? True!

Brains are after all, almost 60% fat due to large quantities of myelin (which itself is 70% fat) that insulate the axons of neurons.. and we ALL KNOW that brains are mainly made up of neurons right?  Yes yes.. that’s why they call it grey and white matter.. it’s full of FAT. So, when they called you a “fat-head” in school, they were actually right.

How did this soup taste? Delicious! It felt like an oil-slick on my tongue with a texture not unlike what brains look like – A SQUIDGY MESS ..  boiled in all that sweet, meaty goodness of pork meat and bones. Oh dang..  please pass me the Lipitor as I can feel my arteries constricting with the effort it now takes to pump blood to my extremities. Lunch has not even begun and already my system is shutting down fast.

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Why don’t they sell nice things like fake singing birds in KL? I miss these!

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A safer bet. This is the Ham Choy Ngap Tong. Salted Vegetables and Duck soup.

OK, so at this point I realize that this restaurants signature dish is in fact, the soup and its accompanying rice dishes. Yay, full marks for Ciki spotting this even though her own pig brain soup is fast lulling her into a semi-comatic state. Oh, believe me when I say, the soups here are superb. The Ham Choy Ngap Tong here is not too salty and full of duck flavour. This would be a much healthier soup to have than the pig’s brain one, but I would still order the pig’s brain because I am addicted to the flavour of myelin sheaths and axons and dendrons;)

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Steamed rice in individual porcelain bowls. How gorgeous is that?

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Even the rice tastes better! This method of steaming imparts a fluffier texture to the rice.

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Pau Siew Yoke – Roasted pork that is fried up in garlic, and black sauce. So good words cannot describe it. The crispy pork rinds in this dish are to die for.

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Fu Kwa Mun Kai is the final dish and let me just say, this is one of the most awesome versions of this dish I have ever tried. The bitter gourd is soaked in sugar just long enough to remove the bitter taste and then stir-fried with black bean and chicken to produce this home-cooked wonder, where once you’ve tried it, even time and tribulation could never erase from your memory.

A great yet simple meal at Hung Kee rice shop. I was surprised that this shop stirred so many memories and emotions in me. But then again, isn’t life about the more humble, so called “lesser” experiences that leave you wondering where you have been living all this time?

I like humble. It means more.

Add:
Restoran Hung Kee,
No.1, Jln Raja Ekram,
Cowan Street, 30450 Ipoh, Perak
Tel +605 241 0105

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