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Story 8 – Ping Pong Beef Balls in Frankel Estate

This week we jump towards the end of our guidebook, picking Amy’s Story set in Frankel Estate. Amy is a wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law: and Amy is lost, correction, is at a loss. 

And so are we. Our day starts on Frankel Avenue, at one of the two remaining landmarks from Amy’s childhood, the Caltex station. From here we walk in the wrong direction to the other, the corner coffeeshop.

It is said (by Amy and so the author Sharon Lim) that the auntie at the coffeeshop serves Singapore’s best kor-lor mee - “noodles smothered in a delicious emulsion of chilli paste, oil, heh bee and other heavenly ingredients…”. We were determined to find it, and eventually we do. 

“All too soon, each plate was slurped dry and so too their words.”

After auntie delivers our dishes with a “good girl” nod and smile to Bridgit, we slurp and discuss the ins and outs of why Bridgit, the mother of two, gets “girl”, I “sister”, and what the age differential needs to be to be ordained “auntie”.  Noodles consumed, consensus not reached, we depart.

For two condo-dwelling ang mohs – Bridgit on the 14th floor, me on the second - walking this little pocket of landed houses was a garderner’s pleasure with not a high-rise in sight. La Salle Street, Siglap Walk, Siglap Rise; we stood, sighed and envied the gardens of the circa 1950 bungalows; mostly tropical, but a few neatly trimmed and European in style. 

As we walk we see the older streetscape give way to the new – tall glass, sleek vertical lines, polished concrete and gates. Like the bungalows before, it’s a style repeated, but with little room for green: as our guidebook notes Amy “loved her new kitchen at the back of their slick modernist three-story house that they had built on the site of her mother-in-law’s.”

We wander towards the potted row of shopfronts on Siglap Drive to be greeted by the neighbourhood’s newest arrival, Coast and Company – a bike shop/café come bike rack. The new is bookended by the old, a shop front that tickled Bridgit’s fancy, the Ping Pong Beef Ball shop, manufacturer of bouncy meatballs.

VL Eating House Wanton noodles & fishball noodles (dry) $5.00 Kopi & a glass of hot water $1.20

Coast and Company A cappuccino and iced latte (one shot) $11.00

Balik Kampung 2A, People and places, edited by Verena Tay Amy’s Story by Sharon Lim