Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
While I’m a huge fan of hawker stalls that offer a large variety of dishes, sometimes, I can’t help but be drawn to vendors that specialise in just one dish. For stalls to be able to sustain themselves so well on just a single dish, I can only imagine that the taste and quality have to be out of this world. One such stall serving only one dish is Long Kee Carrot Cake, located in Ang Mo Kio.
Long Kee Carrot Cake is well-known for constantly having long queues, despite the fact that it only opens for 4 hours a day, closing at 12pm daily. No matter what time you visit, you’ll likely have no choice but to queue up just to get a taste of their famous dish.
This stall is run by a single elderly lady who has been manning the stall for years. She prepares the dish by first cutting up a block of radish cake, pushing it through a wire mesh, then cooking the chopped pieces in a variety of sauces, eggs, chilli and spring onions.
I queued for approximately 20 minutes before I finally got my hands on a plate of carrot cake.
What I tried at Long Kee Carrot Cake
Long Kee Carrot Cake’s signature Carrot Cake is sold in 3 portion sizes, priced at S$3, S$3.50 and S$4. I opted for the S$4 portion, which came with a pretty standard amount of fried carrot cake.
The soft carrot cake cubes were nicely coated in vibrant orange chilli oil, with a pretty generous smattering of fried eggs throughout.
The carrot cake had a lovely soft texture, and my teeth sank into each cube easily. The dish had been nicely seasoned, such that the carrot cake was not too salty, yet yielded enough flavour to be enjoyable.
Personally, I felt that the carrot cake lacked a bit of wok hei. The dish was slightly wetter than I had expected and wasn’t really crispy at all. Hence, I wasn’t all that blown away.
I really liked the scrambled eggs, as they were super fluffy and pillowy soft. Each piece of egg soaked up the flavours of the chilli and the sauces nicely, giving the dish more flavour.
In all honesty, I had pretty high expectations for Long Kee Carrot Cake due to the unfaltering queues it always amasses, but I was left a little let down. The dish tasted pretty average and comparable to most other carrot cake stalls in the country, hence not justifying the waiting time and the long queue.
Final thoughts
I’ve personally always preferred black carrot cake to its white counterpart, so perhaps I would have enjoyed Long Kee Carrot Cake’s dishes more if that had been included on its menu.
In the past, the storeowner used to serve black carrot cake too, but as she found it too laborious to be prepared, she eventually stopped. How I wish I could have tried their black carrot cake back in the day!
Though I would prefer to get my carrot cake fix elsewhere, perhaps my opinions are an anomaly, as many loyal patrons still revere this humble stall and willingly queue for the carrot cakes. Hence, don’t knock it ’til you try it for yourself.
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