Prata Wala: Part Two

This is the second time Makan Boy and Makan Girl came here for supper! Check out Part One if you missed it. So this time around, we wanted to try out their bryani to see how it fares. It seemed like every time we came here, there was always a bunch of people. So I guess it's a popular spot for people to have supper.

Since they don't have mutton bryani anymore so we just ordered their Dum mutton bryani ($7.30) which is more expensive than the normal one (I'll explain that later). I wanted to try their egg prata ($2.00) so we got that and rose limau ($2.30) for our drink.

Now, let me start with the egg prata first. As crispy as the plain prata. It was very thin as well since being too thick would prevent it from becoming crispy. But the thinness also meant I couldn't really taste any egg. The rose limau tasted quite awful, it simply wasn't something that we could really appreciate in any way.

Time for the focus: Dum mutton bryani. The rice was quite sticky and moist and the chunks of mutton in the rice tasted quite ok. There's a hard boiled egg and papadum (the keropok look-alike) as well. Nothing amazing about those two (how amazing can it get...). 

Being Makan Boy, I had to find out the difference between Dum bryani and just normal bryani. Through my research I found out a lot more than I expected. Firstly, briyani is often called biryani in other countries but the former is more often used in Singapore culture. Biryani is found in many countries including India, Arabia and some South East Asia countries and thus many local variants developed. It seems that Dum simply means that the meat, the spices and the rice are cooked and baked together so that the aromas are fused together to make a fabulous dish. Whereas the normal biryani is cooked with the rice and meat separate. That probably explains the price difference since the Dum biryani is supposed to be more fragrant.

Another thing is that the better biryanis use Basmati rice due to its extraordinary fragrance. Basmati means 'the fragrant one' in Sanskrit. Its grains are longer than other types of rice and when cooked it's not sticky like other rices. Apparently it also has a pandan-like flavour. There are many other imitated Basmati rice out there which is just long grain rice without the distinctive fragrance because the real Basmati rice is not cheap. 

Verdict:
The egg prata tasted crispy and quite good but a tad too expensive. The rose limau simply didn't perform at all. As for the Dum mutton bryani, I have tasted much better ones. So if I am coming here again, I would just stick to the plain prata.


Prata Wala
63 Jurong West Central 3 #01-71/72/73/74 JP2
Jurong Point Shopping Centre
Singapore 648331

24 hours