Fab $3.30 Salted Egg Pork Rice, $8 Prawn Tang Hoon By Marriott Chef-Turned-Hawker

Ericson Ng has joined the ranks of ex-hotel chefs who ditched their whites to run their own hawker stalls. The 32-year-old boasts eleven years of experience cooking at Wan Hao Chinese Restaurant of Marriott Tang Plaza Hotel, where the Malaysian-born Singapore PR eventually became junior sous chef in the smart Cantonese joint. Now, the chef-turned-hawker serves up Cantonese-style steamed dishes and soups, along with curry fish head at Canton Delicacies in Geylang Bahru Food Centre.

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The young towkay cut his teeth back in Ipoh at the tender age of 13 in local restaurants. You could say it's in his blood – his father used to own a small eatery as well. “My family was on the poorer side, so I had to half-study, half-cook (sic),” he says. That culinary experience, though “exhausting”, proved invaluable when he snagged a job at Wan Hao Chinese Restaurant and relocated to Singapore.

He spent the next decade learning the ropes. “I learnt a lot from many great chefs. I would come to work an hour or two earlier to [complete my assigned tasks], so that I could watch and learn,” he says.

Photo: Canton Delicacies

Eventually, he decided to strike out on his own after meeting a Hong Kong-born hawker whom he refers to as his “shifu”. “After working for so long in [a hotel kitchen], I wanted to head in a new direction and challenge myself,” he says. He worked under the hawker for three years and eventually took over the lease of the corner unit in Geylang Bahru Food Centre from him last year when his mentor decided to focus on his second stall in the same market selling claypot dishes (called Guandong Claypot Rice). Ericson renamed his stall Canton Delicacies (it was formerly known as Guandong Steamed Soups and Steamed Fish). “My shifu taught me a lot of things about huo hou [steaming and fire control] that I didn’t know before,” says Ericson. “He was nearly at retirement age, so he didn’t want to be too exhausted handling two stalls.” The young towkay has since tweaked the recipes and menu items handed down to him by his shifu, making them “lighter, and less strong-tasting”.

His hours at Canton Delicacies are even longer than when he worked in a hotel. He now gets up at 6am to buy fresh seafood from a market in Tampines, before heading down to begin prep work at his stall. He’s ready for customers by 11am, and works all the way till closing time at 9.30pm.

“Working alone is always harder. But if you want something, you’ve got to fight for it,” he says. On the other hand, he sees that hard-fought independence as a blessing in disguise. “When you’re working for a boss, you’re always stressed. You need to [be] stressed about your manager, your chef. Now, you just work hard [for yourself].”

We ask if he misses working in a hotel kitchen. “Not really. I like the challenge. I had ex-colleagues who said that I was crazy to leave my position to be a hawker and do everything [like washing the woks and food prep] myself,” shares the young hawker.

The fight hasn’t been easy. Ericson first began managing the stall on his own in January last year, just a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world as we knew it. “The circuit breaker was easier for us. This recent [period of dine-in restrictions] was really pretty bad,” says the hawker’s 29-year-old wife, Candyce Tan, who helps coordinate deliveries for the hawker while working as a personal assistant at an insurance company. “I would say that business has dropped 50 per cent [during this period],” adds Ericson.

Though the couple had a pre-existing network of group buy hosts to publicise their stall, delivery charges were an issue. “It was harder to find ad-hoc delivery drivers this time around, which meant our deliveries were more expensive,” she says.

“I was worried, but I try to help where I can,” she says – though she previously stayed at home to take care of the couple’s two-year-old child, she took up her full-time job in January this year “for a more stable income”.

Now that dining in is back on the menu, “it will be a lot better, because nothing’s greater than eating food while it’s hot and served right away,” Ericson shares.

The offerings at Canton Delicacies are extensive: there’s over thirty items on the menu, some of which aren’t even listed. They can roughly be divided into three main categories: steamed dishes, double-boiled soups and fish head dishes to share (curry, as well as Canto style black bean sauce).

Since almost everything is steamed, mastery of the fire is paramount. “You need to be very aware of everything. “If you [take it out] too soon, it’ll be undercooked. If you cook [it for] too long, it won’t be juicy and moist,” he adds.

Prices start from $3.30 – a pair of steamed-meat-on-rice bowls for hungry office workers – and go up to $24 for curry fish head, served bubbling in a claypot. Soups are also wallet-friendly enough — from $3.50 to $6 for their most atas, medicinal herb-laden option.

The curry fish head is one of the best-sellers, despite being decidedly non-Cantonese. “It’s a recipe from my dad, with some tweaks to make it more ‘modern’,” the hawker tells us. What is Cantonese, however, is precision-cooked steamed fish to preserve the seafood’s delicate texture and inherent sweetness. The red snapper head halves get some time in the steamer before being simmered in a house-made curry gravy with tau pok, eggplants and other fixings.

Ericson brings the dish to a boil over a massive flame just before serving. We find the lemak gravy supremely slurpable. The curry has a thick, creamy mouthfeel – it contains a decadent mix of evaporated milk and coconut milk – while being sufficiently fiery with a subtle tangy zing from the assam. The meat toward the back of the head is moist and flaky, while the important bits – the cheek, face and eyes – are succulent and unctuous, with no hint of fishy odours.

Our only grouse is that the scales near said important bits aren’t removed consistently — we had to, er, fish out a few.

A tasty and cheap bowl. An 80-20 meat-to-fat blend of minced pork and salted egg white gets moulded into homely patties then perfectly steamed and served over rice, with a sweet-savoury kick from a luscious drizzle of dark soya sauce (and other “secret ingredients”). The salted egg yolk is thoughtfully flattened across the top of the patty, so you’re getting a little bit of umami-rich oomph with each bite. Simple but juicy, tender and very moreish.

Less impressive than the pork patties. While the pork belly here is generously sliced into thick chunks, it isn’t quite fatty enough. The meat isn’t tough, but not melt-in-your-mouth either.

A deceptively simple construction of smooth egg custard, century egg and salted egg that serves as a litmus test of steaming prowess. Ericson passes – the silky-smooth custard is scrumptious.

Sea-caught, fresh grey prawns are butterflied and steamed on a bed of glass noodles. They’re seasoned well in a classic Hong Kong-style sauce of Shaoxing wine, light soy and minced garlic. Superb value-for-money – you get six prawns for eight bucks.

Chicken, marinated with ginger, sesame oil and Shaoxing rice wine, is steamed with two types of lup cheong (Chinese waxed sausage) – a typical pork one, and a brown-hued duck liver sausage. There’s no need to be squeamish if you’re not a fan of offal, as both are sweet-savoury and yummy with a distinct bite. That sweetness spreads throughout the rest of the dish, so we’d only recommend this if you’re a fan of lup cheong.

A slightly darker, cornstarch-free version of the dim sum staple. The steamed spare ribs are a little too springy for our liking, though we enjoy its ginger, fermented black bean paste and tangerine skin marinade.

Meaty slices of freshwater snakehead murrel are steamed with black fungus and dried lily flowers. The clean-tasting fish is a testament to the hawker’s commitment to getting it fresh daily. There’s no muddines to speak of – though the light soya sauce and Shaoxing wine it gets steamed with dominates the milder-tasting seafood, as well as any woody notes from the flowers.

If you’re willing to shell out a bit more for soup, opt for one of the chicken soups. The skinned chicken thigh is wonderfully tender. We attempt to pick it up during our shoot, only to remove the bone with barely any effort (yes, we put it back for the pic). The earthy mix of wolfberries, angelica root and cordyceps flower isn’t too intense. Instead, you’ll taste the essence of chicken bolstered by herbs, and not the other way around.

Affordable Cantonese fare in a hawker centre, with a focus on steamed stuff instead of the usual fried zi char dishes. The massive menu can do with a little more focus — we recommend you zoom in on either the homely, cheaper rice bowls for a simple meal, or the more ‘lavish’ but still well-priced sharing dishes like steamed garlic prawn tang hoon. Do also leave room for the yummy curry fish head, a decadent foil to the healthier grub on offer.

Canton Delicacies is at #01-27 Geylang Bahru Market & Food Centre, 69 Geylang Bahru, S330069. Tel: 8459-0031. Open daily except Thur, 11am – 9pm. More info on Instagram. Available for delivery via Grabfood and Takeapp.

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Photos: Alvin Teo