群众 (Qun Zhong eating house)

Some time back, my girlfriend brought the few of us pals to this really yums eating place at Neil Road. It was simple, fuss-free, authentic northern style Chinese food at its best. One bonus point is that it was also cheap. :)

The place is reputed to be quite crowded at peak times (and also a bad service reputation to go along too). My girlfriend who brought us there said that there's always a long queue, and the place is frequented by a lot of Japanese people most of the time too. I arrived around 6-ish pm, I walked there after work as it is quite near my work place at Tanjong Pagar. I think I was the last of our group to arrive, and my friends were saying that the uncle wouldn't give us a table as not all of our party was present (whoops, sorry pals!). But thankfully, we only had to wait a while more before a table was available and we were ushered straight in.

Pictorial menu

With a menu of about 15 items, it didn't take long to decide what we were going to have. The picture menu above roughly illustrates what they have on offer, and I must say that it makes things so much easier as customers don't have to pore over a long menu, and spend time pondering on what to order.

炸酱面

The four of us split two bowls of noodles with minced pork in soya bean paste sauce and greens among ourselves. There was quite a generous amount of minced meat sauce (which I like!) and you are supposed to mix everything up in the bowl before tucking in. Delish hearty noodles to start off our meal...

三鲜锅貼

The panfried mixed seafood and pork dumplings arrived next. Wooots. They arrived piping hot and deep fried to max crunchiness. We had to wait for it to cool down a little bit before tucking in (it's okay, two of the girls brought their cameras to take photos so it works fine for me) as the filling was really hot. In fact, all of our food that day arrived freshly prepared and steaming hot. Thumbs up.

三鲜合子

Oh I love this dish! What looks like a deep fried Chinese pizza (or a ultra big round curry puff), is actually a mixture of minced meat and seafood and vegetables wrapped in a pastry, and then deep fried. (Yeah I know, all the oil that I consumed in that one meal...) The dough was extremely crunchy, it wasn't soggy at all, probably because all of us finished the thing quite quickly...

If you notice a trend here, most of the dishes at 群众 contains minced pork. I wonder is it usual for northern style Chinese food, but of the five dishes we ordered, all contained minced pork (except for our dessert pancake). Haha. Serious overkill on pork.

小笼包

Apparently the XLBs here are quite famous. Hmmm, they were okay I guess, I felt that the skin was just a tad too thick for my liking. I was more enamoured with the other dishes (think 三鲜合子 and 豆沙锅饼).

豆沙锅饼

The dessert (red bean paste pancake)was another favourite among my pals and I. Deep fried to a lovely dark brown shade, the skin was uber thin and crunchy and not overly thick nor doughy. A generous layer of red bean paste was enveloped within the thin crispy dough skin, with a smattering of sesame seeds adorning the dish. This is one red bean paste pancake that makes my mouth water at the mere mention of it.

I enjoyed my dining experience there, and I wasn't too bothered with the service. By all means, it was not the best I've encountered, but it's not the worst either. The staff were just curt, but still polite, and I didn't actually face the famed "grumpy" boss.

In fact, I made a repeat trip there with the girlfriend a few weeks after my first visit, and the service was still okay. No scary incident whatsoever. The place was as busy as the previous visit, and we had to share a table with a Japanese couple. We ordered a bowl of  炸酱面 to share, and the 三鲜合子 and 豆沙锅饼 of course! Though between the two of us, we did had a little trouble finishing the big red bean paste pancake...(it was like six pieces per person!)

Can't wait to go back again for the superb 豆沙锅饼. I dream of it all the time...(nah, just kiddin'!) :)