Eats: Char Kuey Tiaw in Jakarta

If you are a Chinese born and bred in Malaysia, Singapore or even Brunei for that matter and living abroad, you can't run away from missing that special char kuey tiaw stall that just know how to whip up that plate of especially satisfying char kuey tiaw.

Whenever we have cravings for char kuey tiaw, there is this Kwetiaw Akang along Jl. Arteri Pondok Indah that we will go, to satisfy ourselves once in awhile. We almost always order their kwetiau goreng spesial (by the way the spesial is not a typo, it is how they spell the word special locally) which comes complete with prawns, crab meat, fishcakes, charsiu and lapcheong. The crab meat is real, unlike the vegetarian crab steak that you get in Malaysia because one can sometimes accidentally bit into some remnants crab shells.

Apart from kwetiau goreng, they also have kwetiaw siram (which is Cantonese fried kuey tiaw i.e. wat tan hor), kwetiau sapi or beef kuey tiaw. You can also opt for telor bebek or telor ayam (duck egg or chicken egg) to be fried into your kuey tiaw. I did that the last time but did not get the special aroma that one gets from Penang duck egg char kuey tiaw. So was kinda disappointed. But all in all, Akang is still a place that I would go for decent char kuey tiaw

And then we discovered Kwetiau Kerang Singapore. Now, THIS is truly a serendipitous discovery. Hubs was coming back from a company meeting in Thailand on a Saturday morning. After picking him up at the airport close to lunch time, Hubs suggested why not lunch at Pluit since we were close by. Being so impromptu, I suddenly lacked ideas on where to go and somehow couldn't find any interesting place except Tabona in Pluit Sakti which we had already try the curry noodles.

Anyhow, we decided to head to Pluit Sakti first and then take it from there. Once there, Hubs saw Kwetiaw Kerang Singapore and read that they have very good char kuey tiaw from some blogs. So Kwetiaw Kerang Singapore it was. Despite its name, Kwetiau Kerang Singapore turned out to be a Chinese sit-down restaurant. Too tired and hungry to go anywhere, we ordered two dishes, a rice and their specialty kuey tiaw to share. While the other dishes were good, I didn't bother to take photos of those because the star is really the char kuey tiaw.

At first bite, both Hubs and me looked at each other and said, "Now, THIS stuff really taste like home." Indeed it was. Although the portion was small - only had baby cockles (seriously very baby sizes, but I'm ok with it because I'm not a big fan of blood cockcles) and few pieces of sliced-up fish balls, that plate of char kuey tiaw had enough "wok hei" to warrant me to order another plate after we finished our food. That's how deprived I was of char kuey tiaw.

Now what is wok hei? Wok hei (in Cantonese) literally translates as qi of the wok. Sounds very zen-nish but this wok hei is the essence of Chinese stir-fry and char kuey tiaw. It's high heat to cook the food in a few stirs of the spatula, and the dish comes up just to the right doneness. Even Kwetiau Akang cannot beat this Kwetiau Kerang Singapore.