Rail Mall is not a typical mall in Singapore. It is a row of single storey shophouses along Upper Bukit Timah that has shops, restaurants, a medical clinic, a bank, some children’s education facilities and Cold Storage. It was not a place you would think of going to unless you were living or working nearby. But now that the MRT Downtown Line is in operation, the Hillview MRT Station is just a stone’s throw away. Rail Mall has become a dining destination for more people. We start our eating adventures at Rail Mail with a takeaway lunch of Teck Kee Chicken Rice.
Teck Kee is more than just a chicken rice restaurant. There are other rice, noodles and cooked items on the menu. It is like a mini tze char restaurant. Here are pictures of some portions of the Teck Kee menu. The chicken rice options stood out as the main attraction. We had a quarter roasted chicken ($12), fried bean sprouts ($7) and two portions of chicken rice ($2).
Good chicken rice requires good sauces. Before we write about the food proper, it is important to point our that the chilli sauce was very good. Spicy and with some garlic flavours, it enhanced the taste of everything we threw at it – skin, meat, tow geh. The slightly sweet sauce is a non-spicy sauce option, not so relevant here with the roast chicken, but we can anticipate that the plain steamed chicken would go perfectly with a dip into both soy and chilli sauces.
Here is a close-up view of the one-quarter roast chicken. It was a very well prepared chicken. Smooth, moist and well roasted. It was more than adequate to be shared by two person. The gravy was tasty.
Just like burgers and fries are the undisputed food companions, we think the most suitable companion dish for chicken rice is bean sprouts fried with salted fish. This classic dish was well cooked at Teck Kee. Nothing eventful, but honest straightforward crunchy tow geh with the complex background taste of sated fish.
And finally the rice. This is chicken rice we can eat all by itself. The chicken flavours have been infused into the rice grains. Probably concealing a thousand calories of chicken fat and not to be eaten too frequently, but the taste was great. The texture was good. It survived the journey and was still firm and tasty. No mushiness or wishy washy texture about this rice.
We had bought the Teck Kee chicken rice without any expectations. Overall we were most impressed by what we ate. This was really good chicken rice at Rail Mall.
Ratings:
Food: 4
Service: 3
Value: 4
Atmosphere: 3
Overall Rating: 3 TOPs
Teck Kee Chicken Rice
450 Upper Bukit Timah Road
Singapore 678069
Tel: +65 6314 1475 (Reservations) / +65 8685 0400 (Takeaway)
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