Chatterbox Chicken Rice

FINALLY! I got to eat Chatterbox Chicken Rice.

Whatever you may say, I could never justify stepping into Marriot, pay $25 just to eat Chicken Rice, when I could easily get a plate for $3 from that yummy chicken rice store at Maxwell. Ok, maybe not a good comparison, but look at Boon Tiong Kee and 5 star chicken rice, for $25 my whole family would so full that our stomachs would be close to bursting.

Well, but a lunch meeting finally allowed me to eat this much talked about Chicken Rice that tourists come here specially to eat. We ordered in close to 20 packs of this. Check out the packaging man! You can't see really clearly from here, but it's so well packed, no one could imagine there's chicken rice in there. The packaging is just as fantastic as those mooncakes from hotels. Full Marks for its packaging. Then again, for $25, it had better be good to justify the money.

Each individual set came with it's rice, chicken (a lot of it!), soup and the sauces - black sauce, ginger, chilli and the sauce for the chicken.

Now to the food itself. The chicken was a letdown. Sure, it was soft, and cooked just right, but it was almost tasteless. I had to dunk the chicken in a whole load of the sauce to stomach it down. If you know me well, I'm not one who likes to put sauces on my food unless necessary. I prefer the natural taste. But, for this chicken, besides dunking it in the sauce, i smeared it fully with chilli and black sauce to give the bland chicken some taste. And as they always say, the secret to good chicken rice is in the chilli. Chatterbox's chilli was very good. I like it a lot. I'm particular about my chilli sauces. I don't like those with a very raw taste, so you won't see me eating green chillis and red cut chillis. Chatterbox's chilli was super tasty and it was almost good on its own. Garlicky, a little savoury, and most importantly, the raw chilli taste was masked. The rice was good. Still soft and yummy when we ate it. However, it wasn't the best I've tasted. I've tasted much better in other hawker center stores, and I felt some parts of the rice were a bit too mushy. The soup was ok, it was cabbage soup, btw, not chicken soup.

Would I pay to eat this again? No, definitely not on my own, unless there's a really good reason and it had better be an extremely good one, cause there are so many better and cheaper alternatives out there.

Now, that's one off my list of expensive Hawker food. Next one up is Chen Fu Ji fried rice.

Big Eater

In line with my mum's delightful discovery of me knowing how to de-shell crabs and being able to enjoy the experience of eating crabs with her, we went to eat crabs again. My mum has been telling me about this place for a long time, saying how good their salted egg creamy crab is. My defense? "Mum, I don't eat crabs. I only take the sauce, so I won't really enjoy it." Now, that defense is useless. So, off we went to eat crabs... =)

We ordered the Prawn Noodles (the zi char version), which I didn't particularly like. Then again, I don't like the zichar version of prawn noodles. I only the soup version (beehoon please) or the fried hokkien mee version. The zichar version has too much black sauce that scares me away.
We also had some fried fuchouk (you know that vegetarian thing?) thing that was quite good and a nicely done version of sambal kangkong, oil reduced. The soup was normal. The stars of the night were the crabs (she ordered 2!). One chilli crab and one salted egg creamy crab. Hmmm... The chilli crab was nice, but not spectacular at least, the sauce wasn't spectacular enought for me. But, spicy? Yes, spicy. The salted egg crab was a nice change. Not something i'd eaten before... But I would have liked it if they added more sauce so that I get extras to dip with the crab meat.
Reasonable price with reasonable food and you get decent service,

Crabby Menu

I finally learnt how to eat crabs.

You see, I've always avoided eating crabs cos I never knew how to de-shell them and I didn't want to be a freeloader to get people to de-shell the crab for me so that I can eat the meat. The story goes way back as to why my parents, being avid fans of seafood never taught me how to eat a crab. Long story short, I couldn't eat much seafood when I was younger, so I never really liked crabs, prawns until I grew older and could eat more seafood. So, since young, I never learnt how to peel a crab and I just couldn't be bothered to learn how to even though now I can eat seafood with no problems. I just procrastinated and I would just stick to the main shell and eat whatever roe or new shell that is forming. It wasn't until a customer dinner that I was forced to learn how to eat crabs. Yes, I was trying so hard to avoid having a pincer plonked on my plate, but my customer wouldn't let that happen. And, I had to learn how to de shell the crab meat.

Ever since then (that was in March), much to the delight of my mum, she's been suggesting for us as a family to eat crabs more often than before. In the last 2 months, I've eaten crabs twice! Considering we used to have it at most twice a year (cos she says it's not shiok to only have daddy and her eating crabs). Anyway, we went to Melben (the one near Bishan park), queued for 1 1/2hrs (I can't believe we ACTUALLY did that!!!) and got our crabs. It was good, definitely. I absolutely loved the crab in that milk soup (can't remember the name). The soup was super power packed. I didn't take photos of the crab, cos I was busy wolfing it down. But, both were good. I liked the black pepper version too. Just right, not overpowering with pepper.

But, really, the point of my post today is to show u a shot of the menu that I took when I was there. It's hilarious... Go ahead, have a good laugh. Mind you, this is an eatery that specialises in selling crabs and this is what you see in their menu: