Mee Noodle Soup with Dumplings

Wonton (Wan Tan) Mee (Noodle Soup with Dumplings)

Yap Siew Ean sells wonton mee: noodles tossed in black sauce, served with wontons, and topped with a little bit of a choy and hot pink char siu (roast pork), with pickled chilies on the side. (You can also buy just the wontons: ten wontons in a bowl of pork-bone broth.) She started helping her dad out when she was little — her dad bought the cart she still uses forty-two years ago, when she was born — and learned how to cook from him (he learned from her grandmother). She buys the char siu and noodles ready-made but makes the broth, sauce, pickled chilies, and wontons (pork, shrimp, pepper) herself. She talks about “original” taste — that these noodles are in the same tradition of her father’s. Her family’s been here longer than the owners of the coffee shop and they’ve watched the business change hands. The building itself — with the coffee shop — hasn’t been around forever; before the storefronts and coffee shop existed, she says, her family sold wonton mee from the side of road.

Where: Jalan Pantai Jerjak 13 (see map above).