Kok Sen Zi Char Takeaway Lunch : Claypot Yong Tau Foo

We had a simple Kok Sen zi char takeaway lunch recently. Kok Sen Restaurant (國成球記菜社) is a famous zi char restaurant at Keong Saik Road which has been in business for many decades. It is listed as a Bib Gourmand restaurant in the Singapore Michelin Guide. For us, the claypot yong tau foo (巧手三宝煲) is the main attraction of this restaurant.

Kok Sen Oddle Takeaway Menu

For more pictures of the restaurant and other types of food, you can refer to our previous post on Kok Sen restaurant before COVID. Until dining in resumes on 21 June 21, the only way to eat the nice Kok Seng yong tau foo is by takeaway. The Oddle online order platform provides a way to make an advance order for takeaway or delivery. The latter requires a minimum purchase of $50 and attracts a delivery service fee of $8. Since our order was small, we opted for the Oddle Kok Sen takeaway option. Here are sample pictures of portions from the Kok Seng delivery menu. You can see the whole menu here. We selected two items from the “Signature” dishes section and a seafood fried rice.

國成球記菜社

Our Kok Sen Zi Char Takeaway Lunch

Here is a picture of our simple zi char takeaway lunch from Kok Seng. The food containers were sturdy and the food survived the journey home very well.

Our main reason to buy lunch from Kok Sen – the claypot yong tau foo ($17.55). Eating this out of a plastic box instead of a claypot did reduce the experience a bit, but the taste of the items were still very good. Like the typical yong tau foo, they are pieces of beancurd, brinjal and chilli stuffed with a seafood paste. The difference lies in the seafood stuffing, which in the case of Kok Sen, had been prepared with all kinds of ingredients to create a complex flavour. It brought to mind the wonderful Hakka yong tau foo we ate at Plum Village – said to be the oldest Hakka restaurant in Singapore.

Kok Sen Zi Char Takeaway Lunch: claypot yong tau foo

The other Kok Sen Signature dish that we selected was the black bean beef horfun (豉汁牛肉河 $8.35). This was a nice ‘wet’ beef horfun dish, but not as memorable as the YTF. The gravy was tasty and the slices of beef were good as well. It is a dish we would order again.

Kok Sen Zi Char Takeaway Lunch: beef hor fun

The final item of our Kok Sen zi char takeaway lunch was seafood fried rice (海鲜炒饭, $7.20). We certainly like the look of it when we first opened the container. A fair amount of seafood was visible. The grains of rice were dry and granular and it looked overall like a very well prepared fried rice. But we found the taste to be rather bland. Our expectations of seafood flavour and the wok hei based on the look of the dish did not quite materialise. We borrowed some of the gravy from the beef hor fun to enhance its taste, and it worked quite well.