Mellben Seafood 龙海鲜螃蟹王

Been reading and hearing lots of rave reviews about this place, but this was my first time at this place and also my first time eating crab bee hoon. Read people have to wait like 2.5 hours before they can eat gives me a feeling like another Eng Seng (pepper crab).

When I was there, surprised the place is very well renovated and new with an open kitchen concept, where you can see the chef preparing the food! Something I've not seen before at any coffee shop at the void deck of a HDB. Looks like business must be really good here.

Surprising when we were there last night around 7+, we did not have to queue, but we do have to make our orders at the waiting / queue area before we were shown our seats. Interesting is that there are quite a few empty tables around, and wonder why they can't let the customers sit down first and then give their orders?

We order 3 crabs in total ($114), 2 for the bee hoon crab and one for the butter crab. We also ordered the mongolian pork ribs ($15) , one toufu ($8) and one vege ($8) and 10 man tou bun ($4). Total bill including GST and drinks (average $1.30) is $172.40, which works out to less than $29 per person, which was not too bad.

We did not have to wait very long before the food was served, though the crab hee hoon came last and came a little later than the rest.

Food wise, for the non crab dishes, they were pretty decent, though I won't come here if I just want to have a good zi char, and neither won't I want to wait just for zi char. The pork ribs is quite tender, but the sauce or gravvy was just average.

As for the crab, I would say I'm not very impressed actually. The butter crab was nice, but not that fantastic. The roe on the shell of the bee hoon crab was so hard, as if I was eating salted egg yolk biscuit... is so dry and hard. The soup for the crab bee hoon is sort of like fish head noodle, except you have the crab taste. The soup itself is pretty nice to drink, but somehow, I feel it does not really blend with the bee hoon and the crab was a bit tasteless in the bee hoon one.

Frankly, I'm actually not quite impress with the crabs here, though the price here I would say is quite reasonable, and definitely cheaper than places like no signboard, which seems to have gone "up market" with their pricing.

Well, I guess I'll leave it to my other friends who where there to leave their comments.