FANS of local hawker fare will remember the famous fried rice of Bukit Pasoh, and later, Erskine Road - the one that cost a princely $25, whipped up by the enterprising Chan sisters. Their imperial golden fried rice so fired the imagination of an accountant that he bought their business - along with the secret recipe, of course - in 1995, and started putting his own spin on Chen Fu Ji, the restaurant.

Today, there are five Chen Fu Ji outlets in Singapore and the company has just made its foray into Beijing with its fried rice as the signature dish - a dish that, as food history goes, originated from Beijing's imperial palace several dynasties ago. Will Beijing be conquered by this Singapore version?

Meanwhile in Singapore, Chen Fu Ji's rice has gone from being artisanal to commercial and while it's still tasty, there's none of the exotica it had when the three temperamental sisters were cooking it. The restaurant version looks inviting enough, with its shiny golden veneer. Every rice grain is indeed coated with egg, and the restaurant clearly has spared no expense on the ingredients - prime jasmine rice, premium eggs with large yolks from Singapore's own Seng Choon egg farm, and chunky crab meat. For two persons, the serving is $18, while the $25 portion serves four.

It's not bad, although the batch I sampled was lacking in wok hei (heat of the wok), while the crab meat didn't have the flavour of fresh, local crab. What was more unusual was the glutinous rice tea that accompanied the dish. A naturally sweet and mild tea with a unique flavour, it complemented the rice quite nicely.

What the restaurant chain has done is to create a host of local Chinese dishes around the fried rice. The San Bei chicken ($14) sees chicken cooked in a claypot, fragrant with basil leaves and with generous chunks of garlic and fried shallots. The coffee pork ($18.80) with whipped cream - generous swirls of whipped cream surrounding the pork - is a must for those who need a few shots of caffeine for the day. The pork is coated with sweetly thick, espresso-based gravy - no subtlety here, especially paired with the sweet whipped cream.

For something more savoury, the black pepper beef tenderloin ($16) is a bit more measured in its seasoning, and the beef was quite tender to the bite. The nourishing highlight was the fish soup, served in a hotpot. Now this had a more homey goodness to it, with fresh fish and lots of ginger slices to balance the soup. The milky texture also comes from long-boiled pork bones rather than evaporated milk.

Chen Fu Ji serves food that is familiar to Singaporeans on the whole, keeping it simple and straightforward.

Chen Fu Ji
#02-31 Riverside Point, 30 Merchant Road.
(S) 058282
Tel: 6533-0166
Rating: 6/10