P has a colleague visiting from Malaysia and needed good halal food for lunch. Someone in the office suggested Hjh Maimunah in Joo Chiat and off we went, all 7 of us girls.

Hjh Maimunah is a nice air-conditioned Nasi Padang eatery in the east of Singapore. For the uninitiated, Nasi Padang is a smorgasbord of Malay/Indonesian dishes and the ones at Hjh Maimunah were apparently mostly Javanese (so I'm told). There was certainly lots of selection with about 30-40 different dishes, including Ayam Bakar (Charcoal-grilled chicken), Sayur Lodeh (vegetables in savory coconut gravy), tapioca leaves stewed in coconut milk, various Rendang (dry curried beef or chicken; lots of grated coconut), Tempeh (Fermented soya beans) cooked with Ikan Bilis (anchovies), stuffed Sotong (squid) and the piece de resistance, the Lemak Siput Baba (kinda like escargot in whelk-like shells; you suck them out from the rear end). There were also individual dishes like gado gado and plenty of Kuih Kuih (local cakes) and sweets like Pisang Goreng (Fried bananas in crispy batter) and even Pulut Hitam (Black sticky rice in coconut milk) for dessert.

Hjh Maimunah has been around since the '90s and has two outlets, one at Jalan Pisang (near Arab Street) and the other at 20 Joo Chiat Road. P found the Joo Chiat eatery unpretentious, inexpensive and packed at lunchtime. We took a seat upstairs and thankfully the nice waiters agreed to carry our rice and dish selection up the stairs for us as P couldn't imagine balancing all those plates of rice, sambal belachan (prawn paste chilli) and dishes at one go! The food was good, but the chilli factor was pretty low for a place like this - a bit disappointing really. It did however mean that you could sample even the hottest looking dish (and the Sambal Brinjals looked plenty hot) without wincing. The food was very tasty and P particularly liked the Ayam Bakar and the Sotong. We also tried the beef lung, which P was rather leery of initially but found to be really tasty. We sadly didn't samplethe Lemak Siput Baba as it gets rather messy.

To plagiarise a famous Singaporean - Die, die must try!