No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle Review: Bak Chor Mee With Super Gao, Tonkotsu-Inspired Soup

No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle has tonkotsu-inspired bak chor mee

Bak chor mee is one of my favourite local hawker dishes, and I have an unabashed love for rich, flavourful soups. So, ever since I first read about No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle when they first opened in Bukit Merah Central, I’ve wanted to have some. When I had the opportunity to visit One Punggol Hawker Centre, where their second stall is found, I got the chance that I’d long been waiting for.

For some context before we get to the food, No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle was founded by a young couple, Han and Chelsea, who were inspired by Chelsea’s love of BCM to create their very own version of it. Of the two, Han has been in the culinary scene for more than a decade, including a stint at Burger & Lobster!

Food at No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle

The star item on their menu is Signature Minced Meat Noodle, which comes in three sizes priced at $8, $10, and $12—whichever bowl you get, it’ll come with dry-tossed noodles and a large bowl of their famous soup. If it’s your first time at No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle, you might be tempted to order this, since you’ll get a bit of all the ingredients they have on offer.

If you don’t need the trimmings, there’s Minced Meat Noodle Dry ($4/$6), AKA your basic bowl of BCM.

Their soup is widely described at ‘tonkotsu-inspired’, but please do not dig into this while expecting the broth of your ramen dreams. It’s creamy and thick, thanks to the chicken feet and pork bones that are boiled for more than eight hours, but the similarities end there.

If you’re not a fan of tee poh, or dried sole fish, you probably won’t enjoy their broth—it’s super heavy on the tee poh, so much so that there’s a touch of bitterness to the soup and a strong saltiness.

The soup is also richly porky, especially with the copious amounts of pork ingredients cooked in it. Like any good collagen or tonkotsu broth, it’s extra fatty, and you’ll even find little bits of floating fat in this soup.

I’m no fan of liver, but the slices here were cooked to pinky doneness, without being dry and papery. It helped that they came in slightly thicker slices. If you like, they’ve got a la carte Pig Liver Soup ($5) so you can just have extra liver and soup.

The Signature Minced Meat Noodle comes with Fuzhou fish balls and Taiwan meatballs, both of which feature an extra meat filling within. These were tasty, but nothing particularly outstanding, especially since the broth was already very punchy. If you order bowls of these balls, they’re priced at $5 each.

Something to note before you tuck into your bowl of dry noodles here is that they don’t add vinegar to their BCM. They do provide it at the stall, however, so you can have it your way. We did add a dash of it, which livened up the whole bowl—in our opinion.

Even without, the mee pok was cooked just right, more than adequately coated in a super well-balanced sauce, robust with chilli and lard oil. You’ll also get texture from pops of pork lard, fried tee poh, and minced pork.

For a change, consider ordering their white kway teow instead of the standard mee pok or mee kia; it’s mixed with their house-made fried garlic sauce.

Strangely enough, the soup that came with our Minced Meat Noodle Soup ($5/$7) was much less flavoured with tee poh, and we found it more palatable instead. In fact, the robustness of No. 25’s broth went perfectly well with our choice of kway teow.

Even at just $5 for the smaller bowl, it was a significantly filling portion, full of tender pork slices, minced meat, liver, and the same garnishes. The fried shallots and garlic were more obvious here, and I appreciated the edge they brought to this broth.

Even after the kway teow had sat in the soup for a while, they were not mushy and overly soggy; rather, it was even tastier, and I couldn’t stop eating this. If No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle were more easily accessible for me, it would be perfect for our recent cooler weather.

Of the three bowls of soup we had, the broth in our Fish Maw Soup ($10) was the lightest and cleanest tasting, though still full of the stall’s signature flavourful kick. I believe that this is probably the most original taste of their soup base since the fish maw wouldn’t add as much flavour to it.

So it was pretty easy drinking; I enjoyed the slightly sponge-like finish of the hee peow, and how it soaked up the moreish soup.

Ambience at No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle

Being new, One Punggol Hawker Centre is very clean and spacious; even the tray return counters are automated. The hawker centre is just 650m away from Punggol MRT Station, and across the road from Sam Kee LRT Station. The queue at No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle didn’t die down for the four hours we were there, though off-peak times see shorter and quicker lines.

The verdict

This Punggol stall is meant to have an outlet-exclusive Seafood Abalone Noodle ($12), though it was unavailable when we visited. Other than the fact that our first bowl of soup was too strongly flavoured for our liking, I thoroughly enjoyed the other dishes we tried at No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle. It’s just a pity that both their locations are rather out of the way for me, or they’d see me around a lot more.

For more nosh in the relatively new hawker centre, we’ve got a guide to dining at One Punggol Hawker Centre; otherwise check out how we ranked some of the most popular and traditional bak chor mee stalls in Singapore, including the famous Tai Hwa and Tai Wah Pork Noodles!

One Punggol Hawker Centre
Address: 1 Punggol Drive, #02-28, One Punggol Hawker Centre, Singapore 828629
Opening hours: Tue, Fri-Sun 9am to 8:30pm, Wed-Thurs 11:30am to 8:30pm

Bukit Merah
Address: Block 161, #01-3749, Bukit Merah Central, Singapore 150161
Opening hours: Mon-Tue, Thurs-Sat 10am to 2pm

Tel: 9011 3616
Website
No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle is not a halal-certified eatery.

Photos taken by Tan Zi Hui.
This was a media tasting at No. 25 Minced Meat Noodle.