Comfort food

Back to Perth but still craving Singaporean food, qin and I decided to hit the alleys of Northbridge to get our fix.

Northbridge is Perth's Chinatown. Well, sorta. It isn't as packed with chinese as, let's say, LA's Chinatown where it's literally filled with chinese people, restaurants and groceries stores. It is, however, where you can find many dim sum places, chinese tze char restaurants, hong kong tea houses and taiwan bubble tea cafes. Not to mention a good amount of vietnamese and korean restaurants and the occasional malay restaurant. It's also home to the famous Corica apple strudel and Hog's breath cafe, plus a few other western restaurants which look a little too high end for my pockets.

The place we dropped by yesterday was called Da pai dang, or Hawker place in english. Apparently it's a Malaysian-food based restaurant which served quite a good variety of dishes, amongst them the Singapore-styled chilli crab.



We had Nasi goreng special ($9) and Hainanese chicken rice ($9) which were quite decent. The only bad point with both dishes were the rice which was a tad too soggy. Other than that, the chicken rice came with a whole chicken thigh which was tender and well flavoured. Although the rice was too wet, the taste was there as well and paired with the chilli, made for a very good meal. The chilli, however, is different from those we normally have in Singapore. Instead, it resembles more like the chilli served in chinese restaurants. Think chicken rice chilli infused with a little thai chilli sauce. Slightly sourish sweet but very tasty nevertheless, definitely a nice alternative to what we usually have.



The Nasi goreng was also well fried, a pity about the rice's moisture though. Filled with juicy prawns, mixed vegetable and chicken meat, it also comes with 2 sticks of satay which were not too bad. It also came with a freshly fried chicken wing which qin said was "very good!". Plus, she said that the belachan they provided was "quite power".

I'm really glad we still have Northbridge to fall back on. Stay tune as I'll be back for it's dim sum restaurants, Viet eating houses and Taiwanese tea cafes!