Good Chance Popiah

I frequented this place as a child, way before it stands at its current location. I think it used to be at Telok Ayer Street - that's what their website said and I have to believe them. A 7 years old little girl doesn't fully understand addresses and just eat where her parents drove her. Subsequently they moved, and my parents didn't know where they moved to, so we stopped patronising them.

Then in the recent years, I started working at the Outram Park area and found their (somewhat) new location at Silat Ave. Told my parents about it and we visited them once in 2010 maybe. We found the menu to be much more expensive than we remembered. To be fair, yes, food prices are rising and they have to adapt. But truth be told, it's also more expensive than other places of similar food types. Yet it's still the nice D-I-Y popiah I had when I was young. But parents never mentioned wanting to go back again, and I forgot all about it.

Recently, when we were pondering where to go for lunch, we walked pass Good Chance and thought, why not? So the few of us popped in and ordered a small popiah set, a hokkien mee, and a prawn paste chicken. The popiah set comes with the usual assortment of popiah fillings, served in a deconstructed manner. We were supposed to assemble everything ourselves. Sweet sauce, chilli, minced garlic, coriander, omelette strips, ground peanuts, lettuce, bean sprouts, popiah skins (chinese crepes if you will), and the main filling of stir fried Jicama (I learnt a new word today. We call it Mang Kwang in dialect. It's official English name is apparently Jicama, but also goes by Mexican Turnip.)

The set comes with only 6 pieces of skin, but the filling is more than enough for that, so we had to purchase additional skins at $1 apiece. The trick is not to overfill your popiah, since the skins are actually quite thin, and breaks easily if over filled. The filling used to be their star, but it's not as delicious as I remember. It felt a little MSG laden this time round. The hokkien noodles were forgettable. The boys didn't care much for it. And the prawn paste chicken was less-liked than Ka Soh's.

Thin popiah skins

Popiah fillings

Stir fried Jicama and carrots

My wrapped popiah

Prawn paste chicken wings

We left filling less than satisfied, both volume and yum wise. The hokkien mee and chicken costed a little more than other places serving similar foods, and wasn't even as nice. The popiah's standard definitely had dropped. And we all decided we will probably never be back.