Seng Kee Black Chicken Herbal Soup – Big Zhi Char Place at Kembangan

Seng Kee Black Chicken Herbal Soup is a large zhi char restaurant near Kembangan MRT but we did not order herbal soup. It was a simple lunch with a few noodle dishes.

Big Zhi Char Place at Kembangan

This is one of the largest zhi char restaurants I have seen in Singapore. It occupies most of the ground floor of this building along Changi Road and is fully open on two sides. This lets in enough natural air and sunlight to keep the restaurant bright and cool even on a hot Singapore afternoon. The enclosed part is the kitchen which was very efficient. The dishes started being served within 10 minutes after we were seated.

Seng Kee Black Chicken Herbal Soup is a no frills restaurant with basic coffee shop style furniture. We were glad to note that the floors and tabletops were dry and clean. On a weekday lunch, there was more than enough seats for everyone, but I am told that the place fills up on weekends. Food ordering and payment takes place at the restaurant entrance. After that we were shown to our assigned table. There were many to choose from.

Seng Kee Black Chicken Herbal Soup Menu

The Seng Kee Black Chicken Herbal Soup menu is available at the entrance. A large wall-mounted version is also available to enable those at the back of the queue to study and decide before their turn to order. The range of food is wide and these are pictures of some segments of the menu.

Black chicken herbal soup (available in different versions) cost $13.80 each. Typical Singapore tze char restaurant classic dishes such as coffee pork ribs, honey pork and deep-fried prawn paste chicken are also available ($13.80 each for a small portion).

For those with bigger budgets, fresh fish is available. The pomfret and groupers looked rather attractive that day.

What We Ate For Lunch

We thought the picture of the seafood hor fun ($6.80 for small) looked nice in the menu picture and decided to try it. It turned out to be underwhelming. We did not detect any wok hei and the gravy flavour was rather sweet.

Noodle dishes such as mee sua are said to be good at this tze char restaurant. We tried one of them. It was better than the hor fun but not very memorable.

What we thought was the best was the crispy pan-fried bee hoon ($10.80 for small portion). It was a dish we saw on quite a few tables. We can see why. It was a rather unusual noodle fish. The bee hoon was fried till crisp and stuck together to make a pizza-like dish. Some flavourful broth was probably used in the process of frying, lending it a nice savoury flavour. This would be a good dish to go with a glass of cold beer, passing time in a breezy humid afternoon in a clean coffeeshop.

To break the onslaught of noodles we had a vegetable dish – money chye (sometimes referred to as mani chye or 马尼菜) with egg ($12.80).

Ratings:
Food: 3
Service: 3
Value: 3
Atmosphere: 3
Overall Rating: 3 TOPs

Seng Kee Chicken Herbal Soup
475 Changi Road, Singapore 419892

Opening Hours: 11.30 am to 1.30 am

Nearby MRT Station: Kembangan (EW6)

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