Famous Eunos Bak Chor Mee - Century-Old Recipe Still Served Today

At Hong Lee Coffeeshop in Eunos Crescent, a bowl of bak chor mee carries more history than most hawker dishes in Singapore. Famous Eunos Bak Chor Mee traces its recipe back to 1923, when the founder, a street hawker known as the “Hunchback Noodle” seller for the bent posture caused by years of carrying his portable kitchen on a bamboo pole, first sold the dish around the Kampung Chai Chee area. Five generations later, the family recipe is now run by Ler Jie Wei, who left a career in banking to take over the stall. The current rendition keeps closely to the original formula: pork and garlic broth, minced pork, handmade dumplings, and noodles, without the lettuce, braised mushrooms, or other modern additions found at many other stalls today. Several other well-known bak chor mee businesses across Bedok and Tampines, including those at Fengshan Food Centre, trace their lineage back to the same founding family. Here is what to order at the stall that many consider the origin point of Singapore’s soup-style bak chor mee.

What distinguishes Famous Eunos Bak Chor Mee is not just its age but its place at the root of an entire branch of Singapore’s hawker food history. The founder’s descendants and former apprentices went on to open stalls across Chai Chee, Tampines, and Bedok, several of which remain well known today. The Eunos Crescent stall itself moved to its current home at Hong Lee Coffeeshop in 1990 after a fire displaced its earlier location at Eunos Market, and has been run since by successive generations of the same family. The noodles served today follow the same basic composition the founder used a century ago: pork, garlic, dumplings, and noodles, with nothing added to chase contemporary trends.

Bak Chor Mee Soup

The signature bowl is built on a pork and garlic broth, simmered with pork bones for an extended period to draw out a rich stock. Mee kia, the thin noodles used in this rendition, is supplied by a noodle maker that has produced noodles for the founding family’s network of stalls since the 1950s, giving the noodles a consistent springy bite. The soup itself carries a noticeably garlicky depth, finished with a scattering of crisp pork lard and fried garlic. Minced pork sits throughout the broth in a generous ratio to noodles, giving the bowl a fuller texture than many other soup-based versions of the dish.

Bak Chor Mee Dry

The dry version uses the same noodles and minced pork base, tossed instead in a blend of caramelised garlic, sambal chilli, fish sauce, vinegar, and lard, finished with crisp lard cracklings. The garlic notes are more pronounced here than the vinegar, giving the dry version a savoury, fragrant profile rather than a sharply sour one. Every dry order is served together with a side bowl of the same pork and garlic soup, so the broth is never left out of the experience even when the noodles are eaten dry.

Dumpling Soup

The handmade dumplings, or giao, are a defining feature of this stall’s bak chor mee and the detail that sets it apart from dry, mee pok-based versions of the dish found elsewhere. Each dumpling is filled with finely minced pork, seasoned and wrapped daily in-house, then cooked directly in the same pork and garlic broth used for the noodle bowls. The filling holds a depth of seasoning rather than relying on the broth alone for flavour, and the dumpling skin remains thin enough not to overwhelm the meat inside.

Fishball Noodle

Available in both soup and dry format, this dish swaps the minced pork and dumplings for handmade fishballs, prepared fresh in the same kitchen. The fishballs carry a springy, bouncy texture typical of hand-pounded fish paste, and are paired with the same mee kia noodles and broth base used across the rest of the menu. It offers a lighter alternative for those who want the stall’s broth and noodle quality without the pork-forward profile of the signature bowl.

Fishball Soup

A simpler bowl built around the handmade fishballs and the pork and garlic broth, without noodles as the main component. This works well as a smaller order or a side dish to accompany a noodle bowl, and reflects the same emphasis on handmade, in-house ingredients found throughout the rest of the menu.

Fried Side Dishes

Beyond the noodle and soup bowls, the stall offers a range of fried sides intended as add-ons: handmade fishcake, cheese-stuffed fish paste, beancurd skin filled with fish paste, fried fishballs, crispy dumplings, and a prawn cake coated lightly in breadcrumbs. Each is fried to order and made from the same handmade fish paste and dumpling fillings used in the soup dishes, giving regular customers a way to customise their bowl with additional texture and flavour.

For a dish with such a long history behind it, Famous Eunos Bak Chor Mee remains an approachable, no-frills bowl of noodles. Whether in soup or dry form, paired with handmade dumplings or fishballs, it offers a direct link to one of the earliest known versions of a dish now considered a Singaporean staple.

Address: 7 Eunos Crescent, Stall 3, Hong Lee Coffeeshop, Singapore 400007
Opening Hours: Daily, approximately 6am to 7:30pm (sources vary slightly between 6am–7:30pm and 6:15am–7:15pm; recommend checking on the day)
Tel: +65 8100 6553
Email: [email protected]
Facebook & Instagram: @famouseunosbakchormee