Melaka's famous chicken rice balls were born - so the story goes - of hardship.
About fifty years ago, when Malaysia was in its infancy, a young woman from the southern town of Muar married a Melakan fisherman twelve years her senior. The couple lived an uneventful life until, one day, the fisherman pursued a catch into Indonesian waters. He was picked up and detained for months, his boat and net impounded.
While the fisherman, named Hoe Kee, languished in an Indonesian jail his wife struggled to feed their children. She did loads of laundry by hand for a pittance, and then took to peddling Hainanese chicken rice at Melaka's main jetty. Each morning she prepared rice and chicken at home and then transported the the food, in separate containers hung from either end of a kandar (shoulder pole), to the docks.
Her customers were the men who loaded and unloaded boats. There was no such thing as official meal breaks; time was money and food had to be dished up and eaten as quickly as possible. The housewife figured that she might be able to sell more rice if it were easier to handle, and so she began rolling it into compact, bite-sized balls. She sold them for ten Malaysian sen a ball, two balls and a portion of chicken for fifty sen.
A Melakan specialty was born.
Hoe Kee eventually managed to give his jailers the slip and make his way home, but without his boat and nets. He threw himself into his wife's business, which was already humming along nicely. Three years after Hoe Kee's wife began carrying fowl and rice to the jetty on her shoulders the couple expanded beyond a kandar and two pails, to a shop on a central Melakan street that local Chinese called Ji Chang Jie - 'chicken market street'. Pretenders soon opened copycat businesses serving the same twist on Hainanese chicken rice, but Mr. and Mrs. Hoe Kee had already cornered the market. Hoe Kee - the shop took the fisherman's name - maintains its lead position to this day.
Some time ago the wife (her husband has passed on) and her children, who now handle day-to-day operations, acquired a lovely former kapitan's house on Jalan Hang Jebat. After wrangling with Melaka's bureaucracy they attained the permits required to convert the house to a restaurant and undertook a restoration of the building, which is characterized by its typically Melakan central, open-air courtyard.
Mom, now in her seventies, pops into the shop on occasion to taste and reassure herself that everything is still up to snuff. Over the years she has introduced other dishes, like Malay assam fish and Chinese soups such as lotus root and peanut and black beans boiled with chicken feet and red dates, that have become as popular as her chicken rice specialty.
The balls are no mere gimmick. The rice, cooked with chicken stock and flavored with garlic, ginger, and spring onion, is rolled by hand while it is still hot, resulting in a firm but not leaden orb of pleasantly sticky rice. Hoe Kee's steamed chicken, though cooked beyond the still-pink-at-the-bone stage, is moist and juicy, and the accompanying chili sauce distinguishes itself from other versions with its pronounced kalamansi and vinegar-stoked tartness. Instead of the blanched bean sprouts served with Ipoh's version of Hainan chicken rice, Hoe Kee serves cooked shredded cabbage studded with slices of bouncy fish sausage.
Soups vary according to the day of the week. Lotus root features a mild, light, and comforting broth and slices of toothsome root.
Four second-generation siblings - three sisters and a brother - run the Hang Jebat restaurant together, while brother number two operates another business elsewhere. Of Hoe Kee's thirteen grandchildren, one (the eldest brother's eldest son) has also opened his own chicken rice shop. Hoe Kee's youngest daughter Tan Hin Ngoh is confident that Hoe Kee will one day be taken over by the third generation.
'The grandkids are keen to help out. We know that this business will stay in our family.'
Hoe Kee, Jalan Hang Jebat (aka Jonker Walk), Melaka. Open morning to evening. Closed one day a month.