Must Try Food: The best Soy Sauce Chicken - Chiew Kee Noodle House vs Chew Kee Eating House

When we made our first visit to the disuse shophouse that now hosts Beary Best - we were reminded that the previous tenant of the building was the renowned Tam Kah Shark's Fin House.

Tam Kah what? Apparently it was one of the old time favourite restaurant along the street many years back. We didn't dwell much on it though - in fact, good riddance we thought. Justice is served for the poor sharks!

As we started our renovation work - we began to learn a little bit more about our neighbours along Upper Cross Street. The most striking (and our favourite) has to be the famous pair of Soy Sauce Chicken rice and noodles restaurants flanking us at both sides: Chiew Kee Noodle House and Chew Kee Eating House. (If you had to re-read the last part of the sentence again... don't worry you aren't the only one...)

Chiew Kee Noodle House - to the left of Beary Best Hostel

Chew Kee Eating House - to the right of Beary Best Hostel

We knew we were on to something when we noticed our construction team of painters, builders and vendors were all having their lunch at either restaurant ALMOST DAILY!

As we later discovered and tasted for ourselves, both restaurants serves a particular style of soy sauce chicken dish that you don't often find around in Singapore. Unlike the more tourist popular Hainanese chicken rice - soy sauce chicken rice is more of a local thing and less common too. The ultra fragrant and "melt in your mouth" soy sauced chicken slices are served either with rice or noodles and often complemented with dumpling soup. Some of our foreign guests in fact have mentioned how they prefer these version of chicken rice compared to the cold Hainanese ones.

Yummy, yummy noodles, melt in your mouth soya sauce chicken

and tasty dumpling soup!

The story of these two restaurants are pretty interesting itself and we have heard several consistent stories albeit with some slight variations to it. TLDR: The long and short of it is that both originated from a stall along this street around 60-70 years ago. Somewhere along the way, the siblings who inherited the business split up with one elder sister retaining the original location (Chiew Kee Noodle House, 32 Upper Cross Street) while the younger brother headed of to a few shops down the street (Chew Kee Eating House, 8 Upper Cross Street).

And now to answer the most frequently asked question we get from our beary guests...

Who is actually better?

Well for the purpose of this blog... we prefer the safe answer of saying... BOTH!

(You think we dare to offend our nice neighbors?) =)

In all honestly though, after 4 years... I think we are still rather split over it.

And from the feedback we get from guests - both serves equally good food and at the same reasonable price.

So try both of them or if you must, just ask the host at the reception who can probably give you their own personal opinion! :)

Chew Kee Eating House

8 Upper Cross Street (to the right of Beary Best)

8am-6pm or till the chicken runs out!

(Closed alternate Fri)

Chiew Kee Chicken Noodle House

32 Upper Cross Street (to the left of Beary Best)

8am-7pm or till the chicken runs out

(Closed alternate Wed)

#Chinatown #MustTryFood