We Rated The Least Exciting Food Possible - Mixed Rice/Cai Fan/Cai Png
Sorry, This One Non-Halal.
Every canteen and food court has one, they provide arguably the most affordability and variability to your meal. But seriously though, have you ever stopped to wonder which mixed rice stall is truly worth your money? No? Um… Well screw you, because we’re going to be answering that question today. We’ve done water coolers and Ayam Penyets, you think we give a damn about what you think? After days of trying, testing, and tasting every Mixed Rice, Chai Png, Chai Fan, or as my Ah Ma calls it “Economy Rice” stall on Kent Ridge campus, we present you our very irrelevant findings.
To make this a fair assessment, we standardised every order as much as we could. Every test followed a 1 meat 2 veg rule, and we attempted to keep these dishes as similar as possible. We didn’t include sauce as we felt that it would affect the texture and taste of the dishes. Also we did not specify what type of vegetable, largely due to the stalls not having the same selection. But you know what? Variety is the spice of life friends, embrace it, taste it, love it. Now that we’re all on the same page let’s take a look at what we found.
Arts Canteen (The Deck)
As miserable as it gets
Price: $2.90
Taste: Pork was bearable, beans were overcooked and spinach was the definition of meh.
Bang For Your Buck: For a handful of change you could get away with something edible. Selection: Decent selection of chinese-y style dishes, also serves salted egg (why??!)
X-Factor: Cheap, Quick and Dirty. Like my first time in Bangkok.
As you can tell, this stall isn’t anything to write home to mummy about. The dishes lack any quality nor redeeming factor. You could argue that it truly represents the no frills side of mixed rice from its low price. And yes, it truly does offer a very inoffensive meal option when you’re down on your luck and cash is low.
6/10
Food Clique/Flavours @ uTown
Insta-worthy?
Price: $3.40
Taste: Pork was still crispy under the balanced sauce. The beans were AMAZING, crisp and tasty, Broccoli was pretty alright. But everything is covered in some sort of sauce.
Bang For Your Buck: Probably the most affordable stall in the canteen. If you don’t count ordering just toufu and rice at the Ayam Penyet stall.
Selection: Great choice of local style meat, seafood, vegetable and toufu dishes. But for some reasons most vegetable dishes had meat in them.
X-Factor: The brown rice variety they use is Red Rice. Apparently, the most nutritionally-rich variant.
This stall has a queue. In fact, it’s one of the longest queues for a mixed rice stall we’ve ever seen for a 12pm lunch period. While the rice did come out rather dry on the day we tried it, it was adequately compensated (like your dad’s mid-life crisis). The dishes were tasty and what was supposed to be crispy was crispy, and what wasn’t supposed to be crispy was not.
7/10
Engineering Canteen (Techno Edge)
Where’s the rice?
Price: $2.50 (w/o brown rice)
Taste: Practically everything was over-seasoned. Everything was too salty, like my ex when we broke up.
Bang For Your Buck: Definitely the most generous of all the mixed rice stalls.
Selection: Abysmal, really tiny selection of dishes in really small receptacles. They ran out of some dishes early (not due to overwhelming popularity) they didn’t have brown rice by the time we arrived at 1pm.
X-Factor: X-Factor? More like X this off your list of lunch options.
Their mixed rice stall definitely lacks any sort of sparkle. The severe overpopulation issues that the Engineering canteen faces (why I don’t know, Engineering students have problems with populating in the first place), coupled with the rather uninspired dishes, we would not recommend eating here. In fact, we would rate the vegetarian stall above this.
5/10 (Like most Engineering students)
Business/Computing Canteen (The Terrace)
Some mean greens
Price: $3.50
Taste: A weird mix of over-seasoned vegetables and under-seasoned meat.
Bang For Your Buck: As you can see the portion size is pretty decent. But the price is comparable to uTown, except there’s no aircon and the girls/guys aren’t as pretty.
Selection: Nothing spectacular, but they seem to have some spicier options than the other places.
X-Factor: They’re all starting to taste the same right now.
What is the deal with mixed rice stalls incorporating meat into almost all their vegetable dishes? Oh well… I guess it’s one way to get Timmy to eat his vegetables. I’m starting to think that maybe the appeal of mixed rice is that it’s so damn unspectacular that it appeals to everyone (not unlike that girl in your course whom you can't decide whether is pretty or not). Much like our orientation camp games, it’s so inoffensive and plain.
6/10
Koufu (@ Utown)
Now that kinda looks sad
Price: $3.90
Taste: The sweet and sour pork was pretty good, but why does it have sausage in it? Vegetables were sub-par, and the brown rice was so dry it felt like I was eating a cardboard cake.
Bang For Your Buck: The most expensive option, but not the best tasting.
Selection: These guys win in terms of selection, they have some really great choice. Lemon fried chicken, and even what we think is coffee pork ribs?
X-Factor: Coldest air con and unlike food clique, doesn’t smell like a Chinese restaurant in Malaysia.
Yes while most definitely the priciest, we can give kudos for the amount of effort that went into the selection of “proteins”. However, they could really improve in the quality of their vegetable dishes which seem to be neglected, both in selection and in quality. Not something we would go for to get a well-balanced meal.
6.5/10
Verdict:
As you can tell from the numbered score, Food Clique/Flavours @ uTown wins the coveted Best Mixed Rice Stall award from The Bullet Campus (woopeee). It struck a good balance of selection and taste despite not being the most affordable. Special shout out goes to the stall at Arts Canteen (The Deck) for being the most Bang For Your Buck. They managed to offer acceptable taste, while maintaining a relatively low price.
Agree or disagree with our review? Well it doesn’t matter. How about if you know of some other thing on campus that you’d like compared in a fair but unscientific style? Let us know at thebulletcampus@gmail.com! Also hit us up on Instagram @thebulletcampus
The Master Rater
The Master Rater can give you 5 stars if you take him for the right ride. He is always enthusiastic and eager to please - we once invited him to party, but he came too early. During his free time, he enjoys posting constructive comments on PornHub videos, like “The guy should have been louder.”
