charsiewfan

If you are in a restaurant/hawker cafe and have no idea what to order, hainanese chicken rice, bbq pork rice aka charsiewfan, and perhaps fried noodles aka horfun or charkuayteow are guaranteed to taste good and feed you well. Bbq pork and wonton noodles is also a good bet. Now what amazes me is that in Han's Cafe, nobody orders charsiewfan. They would rather go for the fried rice or ask for sweet n sour pork (which is not on the menu). Actually, its usually chicken or beef curries. Fools! Han's Cafe's bbq pork rice is one of the most wholesome of those that I have encountered. Most places just give you a hell of a lot of rice, about 10 slices of charsiew and some cucumber slices. Han's Cafe gives you the rice, the charsiew, and stirfried vegetables!! Sure, a direct translation of charsiewfan is bbq pork rice, that is pork that has been barbecued and steamed rice. But fan also means a dish or meal, and that should include vegetables, not just slices of cucumber.

Charsiewfan has no hot gravy that goes right up to the edge of the plate/bowl. By ordering it, it makes it easier on the waiter as there is no need to carefully balance it so that no gravy is spilt, and also fingers do not get scalded. Please order it, it's tasty. Some unknown guy says its "fully sick". =P

Another thing I noticed, a number of white people who come in cannot eat a bowl of rice. What's so hard? It's just a medium sized bowl of rice, and the dish they are eating is about 1.5 times larger. so in actual fact, the ratio of dish to rice they eat is something like 3:1. I tend to believe in a 1:1 ratio. Even then, some of them do not order rice at all!