Soon Wah Fishball Kway Teow Mee

Our verdict

Handmade fishballs are the measure of a serious Teochew noodle stall, and Soon Wah Fishball Kway Teow Mee has been pressing them by hand since the stall's origins at the old Orchard carpark hawker scene, before relocating to Newton Food Centre in 1977. That continuity places it among a shrinking number of stalls that carry a direct lineage from Singapore's pre-HDB street-food era into the present hawker-centre format. The menu centres on fishball noodles served in soup or tossed with sambal, alongside her-kiao, the Teochew fish-paste dumplings that require considerably more labour than a standard fishball and appear with decreasing frequency across Singapore's hawker centres. The fishballs here are hand-pressed rather than machine-formed, a distinction that affects both texture and density in ways that regulars track closely. Bowls have been cited at around S$4, a price point that reflects the hawker-centre setting rather than the craft involved. The stall received external validation when it was ranked 44th at the World Street Food Top 50 in 2017, a competition that draws entries from across Southeast Asia and gives some comparative weight to the claim that Soon Wah operates at a level above the average neighbourhood fishball stall. Food writers at Makan Sutra and Miss Tam Chiak have documented the stall's history and handmade production methods, adding to a record that goes well beyond the usual word-of-mouth currency of hawker-centre dining. Newton Food Centre draws a mixed crowd of tourists and long-term regulars, and stall #01-69 tends to attract the latter more than the former. The setting is functional and open-air, as it has always been, and the draw is purely the product. For anyone tracking the Teochew fishball tradition in Singapore, this stall represents one of the clearest surviving examples of how that tradition was practiced before industrialised fish-paste production became the norm.

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