Kampung Curry Mee @ Bukit Mertajam – my childhood favorite

Uh oh, restaurant and Japanese food posts overload. Time to post something nice and cheap from my hometown – Bukit Mertajam for a change. What I am going to show you is a favorite Curry Mee of mine when I was in primary school.
Every Sunday, my father would buy a packet of this curry mee on his Honda Kap, which we used to (and still) refer as “Kampung Curry Mee”. Reason being the noodle is sold in a house in a kampung (village) without any shop name. It is located just behind my house which I used to cycle pass every morning on the way to my school. Now the area remains a kampung with many small roads, just that many trees nearby have been cut down to make way for new housing areas.

So last weekend I went back to BM to settle some long overdue stuff and while chatting with my sister we talked about the curry mee, which she still has occasionally.
Feeling a bit nostalgic and thinking that it has been more than ten years since I last had a bowl of Kampung Curry Mee, I went back there for breakfast. It was only my third time eating in the shop because, like I said earlier, we always ‘tar pao’ the curry mee.

If you ask me, I feel there’s nothing really outstanding about the curry mee but it tasted quite good. Well, at least for me. It could be a childhood thing though.
The soup is clear and light and not much coconut milk is used. Chili is placed on the table in a container and it’s up to the customers to put as much chili as they want into the noodle.

After mixing them up, certainly looked red fiery hot. Oh how I missed my curry mee with chunks of coagulated pork blood. Just add some light soya sauce to compensate the slight blandness and it’s all good to go!

The smallest serving like this with generous portions of tofu pok, long beans and cockles cost only RM2.30. Or add 50 cents for a larger bowl.

The dining area is separated into indoor (inside the house) and outdoor (beside the house in a wooden garage) – a typical home-based restaurant.

Food prices are listed on a dismantled cardboard box hanging in front of the stall, which also served as a shade. The long lists categorized into ‘small’ and ‘big’ are actually the prices for multiple bowl of noodles to help the boss’ calculation, heh.
And if you noticed, there’s a traditional ceramic stove with burning charcoal used to keep the curry soup hot. Too bad the boss went to refill the soup when I snapped the photo. If not, I could have shown you the whole pot of soup too.

Simple setup for a kampung noodle stall. Personally, I feel the taste is better if the noodle is taken away – because the noodle would absorb the flavors from the soup and chili nicely (albeit a little soggy).

This is how the curry mee shop (or house) looked like, which I think most people wouldn’t know or even expect curry mee to be sold there. In fact, I don’t think many BM people know about this stall too because it’s just too hidden, unless we went to the same primary school or stayed in the same area.
I will post the map to this stall later only if anyone’s interested to try it. Lazy to draw a map and I really suck at giving directions lol, it’s somewhere near High School though.