Is it possible for a Singapore university student to go their entire university life without eating a bowl of mala xiangguo? If that person exists, I have not found them yet. There are perhaps few other experiences for a university student in Singapore as universal as picking up with a chopstick a piece of salty meat, vegetable, or bean curd that has been drenched in chillis and oil, confident in the promise of a stomachache the next day.
When one really thinks about it, mala xiangguo hardly seems like the type of dish that would take Singapore by storm. It is typically significantly spicier (and more numbing) than most other Singaporean dishes, it’s hardly the most photogenic dish, it’s more expensive than equivalent hawker dishes, and most of the time it is just a bunch of processed ingredients tossed around in a wok. But somehow, this dish that did not exist in Singapore twenty years ago is now an ubiquitous dish for everyone in Singapore under a certain age.
Here in university, the free market (or should I say Campus Services) has responded. In practically every canteen and food court at each of the autonomous universities, there is a mala stall somewhere, each with their own reputation that students share with each other in hushed voices. Within NUS itself, there is one mala stall that stands above the rest--the legendary ‘PGP Mala’. Nestled within the (formerly air-conditioned) canteen of ‘Prince George Park Residences’, itself at an isolated corner of the university, the stall attracts pilgrims from far and wide, drawing both the curious and the converted. So on any given day, you would likely see a long queue at lunch and dinner time at the PGP mala stall.
Well recently, something changed.
While within NUS the PGP mala has been known to be the best, over at NTU, there is also another famous mala stall. This is A Hot Hideout, a mala shop that takes everything Singaporeans like about mala and cranks it up to eleven. Like it because it’s unhealthy? It will deep fry everything. Need something to deal with the spice? It will sell you cups of sweet Thai milk tea. Students from NTU quickly found their friends from other universities travelling down to NTU, under the guise of meeting up, to get a taste of the mala at A Hot Hideout. The owners of A Hot Hideout must have known that they had something special on their hands when people are willing to travel all the way down to NTU for their food, and so they began to expand, with new outlets all over the island.
One of these new locations happened to be right at PGP itself.
I love A Hot Hideout myself, and I have travelled specially down to NTU just to eat there on multiple occasions. So I was beside myself when I heard that ‘A Hot Hideout’ was opening an outlet here in NUS. When I heard that they were offering discounts for ‘influencers’ to promote their new shop on social media, I jumped at the chance, getting our President, Nadine, to leverage on our ‘Justified’ name to try and get us access. I mean, we’re pretty influential, right..?
In any case, I wasn’t letting a lack of discounts stop me, and soon enough I managed to gather a couple of friends to go up to A Hot Hideout for dinner one evening.
We were greeted by a long queue out of the door. This was about 2 weeks after its opening in NUS.
Fun fact: When I first took this photo I was basically ordered by the people in this pictures to retake the photo again so that they could pose for it.
We walked past the original famous ‘PGP Mala’ stall on our way to A Hot Hideout. There were only a few people patronising the stall when ordinarily there would have been a long queue.
The queue moved reasonably quickly, and after about 15 minutes we got to go in. The interior gave off a very welcoming vibe and it was air-conditioned. It was clear that it had been designed to be quite the hip and modern-looking place.
In my opinion, it certainly looked nicer than the original ‘Hot Hideout’ in NTU. Save for a few of the restaurants in UTown, there probably aren’t any equivalent restaurants within NUS. Certainly none that serve mala.
There was a nice, well-lit area where you could pick your ingredients, which you took from a bowl that has been nicely kept within a sterilisation container.
There was also a very large selection of ingredients you could pick from. They include all forms of meat, vegetables, mushrooms, seafood, carbohydrates, and bean curds.
I began picking my ingredients. Similar to most Singaporeans (I would think), mala is not exactly a health meal for me. I loaded up on the instant noodles, pork belly, luncheon meat, eggs, bean curd skin etc.
A Hot Hideout is one of those places where you can choose your ‘base’ for your mala, which includes 3 non-spicy options for those who cannot take any spice. We picked the mala collagen soup, and we also got a small bowl of the mala xiang guo which is the dry, stir-fried version to get a taste.
Here is where A Hot Hideout differentiates itself from the competition: when paying for your meal, you get the options to separately ‘deep fry’ items, and to ‘scramble’ your egg, whereupon the potatoes, lotus roots, luncheon meat, and fish, are deep fried separately from the rest of your pot of food, and your egg is nicely scrambled and served on top of it all.
Here is the result.
Digging in, the soup mala was delicious and flavourful. We had ordered the ‘medium-spicy’ option, and it had a good kick of spice, but not so much so that it was overpowering. You can tell that the soup had some flavour underneath the spice and the numbness. The soup portion too was extremely generous, and there would be no concern of there not being enough to go around for a group of people eating together. That is one less reason for any intra-friend group tension to arise, so good on A Hot Hideout!
The dry mala was also stir-fried very well, and there was a good wok hei within the noodles. Likewise with the soup mala, it was spicy, but not overwhelmingly so, so you could taste the other ingredients too. In both dishes, the scrambled egg was soft and fluffy and added the right amount of balance to what were very heavy dishes.
However, for those who eat mala for the numbing sensation of the Sichuan peppercorns, they would likely be disappointed. While there is the option to adjust the amount of ‘numbness’ you want in your dish, that flavour was almost completely absent in both the soup and dry version under the default option.
The deep fried items, in my opinion, were a bit of a gimmick. While it is certainly a unique concept, and I would probably enjoy eating it from time to time, I would not say they were very well fried. The deep fried potatoes and lotus roots were quite greasy, in the sense that when I bit into it, I could taste the oil coming out from within. The oil also made the potatoes and the lotus root a little soggy. They also had little flavour, so I imagine that they weren’t seasoned at all. While there was a chilli powder and the peanut dip that I could add, they did not do too much to improve the flavour of the items. The deep fried fish and luncheon meat tasted better, but that was probably because of the inherent flavour within both ingredients. Obviously, fried luncheon meat is as salty as you would expect it to be, and I could feel my heart beating faster as I ate the deep fried dishes, and pictured the cholesterol from these dishes clogging up my arteries.
In total, between the three of us, the bill for these two bowls of mala and the Thai iced milk tea came up to just over $60 SGD, which in my opinion was pretty worthwhile, especially considering the comfortable environment and the fact that we had definitely overordered. Overall, I must say that it was a pretty good time at A Hot Hideout, but the combination of the high salt high oil mala dishes, the deep fried items and sweetened Thai ice milk tea meant that this was far from a healthy meal for me. As I left I could already feel the zits forming on my face. I must add however, that I do think that it is possible to order a much healthier meal at A Hot Hideout, although I suspect that most people would not.
All in all, I enjoyed myself.
Inter-Mala Competition
A couple of weeks after I ate at A Hot Hideout, I decided that I would interview the operator of the PGP Mala to get her thoughts on the new establishment that had just set up shop next to her stall.
In case you didn’t know, this person is none other than the Chinese Noodle stall operator right here at The Summit in BTC. Apparently she is quite the entrepreneur, seeing as she also runs a Wechat group popular with Mainland Chinese students that takes pre-orders and announces her weekly specials ahead of time.
In any case, when I went up to her stall and asked to interview her on behalf of Justified, she very enthusiastically agreed. According to her, the opening of A Hot Hideout had affected her PGP Mala business quite badly.
“It is very difficult for us to compete,” she said to me in Chinese. “It is an air-conditioned place, a very comfortable place. And I did send someone down to try out the new stall and feedback to me and she said that it really is a good place because of how nice the setting is compared to my stall.”
She claimed that when she first took up the lease at PGP, the school had told her that they would not be putting out any new tenders for similar “China-style” food, but lamented that now, “their considerations must have changed”.
“But I really do believe that the quality of my mala is better,” she added. With that, she pulled me into the back kitchen of her stall, where there was a giant pot boiling.
“You see here,” she said. “Our mala uses a special Chinese medicine. You won’t be able to taste it but what it does is that it is anti-inflammatory. So when you eat our mala you won’t get heaty and grow pimples.”
She also brought me through the process in which she prepared the sauces and pastes for her mala, the ingredients for which she said she imported the ingredients directly from China and assembled all on her own.
Additionally, she mentioned that her regular customers had given her feedback that despite the new mala shop opening, hers was still better. She apparently has four demographics that form her most ardent supporters: Mainland Chinese students, who prefer the more authentic taste of the PGP Mala and that she knows how to adjust the taste for; Indian students, who are often vegetarian and can apparently go for the maximum amount of spice; white exchange students who have gotten their first taste of mala from her stall; and gym bros, who apparently go for an all-protein mala.
She reflected that she was always adjusting her flavours to reflect the changing preferences of her customers, and expressed hope that over time, the PGP Mala will continue to do well. As for her future plans, she proudly announced that she was opening another Noodle stall over in the newly revamped Yusof Ishak House, where she asked me to spread the message so that Law students will visit her stall when we move over to UTown next year.
As an aside, she shared that her beef noodle soup, here at the Summit, had gained newfound popularity recently because a Japanese tourist visiting Botanic Gardens had eaten here and blogged about it. She spontaneously offered to make a bowl for me to try, but I politely declined as I had just eaten lunch.
Conclusion:
I must say, A Hot Hideout really does put quite a unique, localised spin on the ubiquitous mala. Given its comfortable setting, it will likely remain a popular spot for students to get together and have a meal. The quality and price point are pretty good too, and there are enough options for everyone to get what they want. Still, the entry of A Hot Hideout into NUS would undoubtedly eat into the margin of stalls like PGP Mala, and whether stalls like the latter can continue to survive and thrive remain to be seen. I must also add that for me personally, places like A Hot Hideout are places of maximalist enjoyment on special occasions, and probably not somewhere I can see myself going just for a meal. Even though it is much more convenient for me now, I don’t think I will go to A Hot Hideout any more frequently than I would when it was a singular shop in an isolated corner of NTU. However, as a celebration of the ultimate evolution of the sinful pleasure of eating mala in Singapore, it absolutely does its job, and then some.
