[Watch] Kuantan’s 60-Year-Old Curry Mee Has An Eating Contest In TTDI This Weekend — And RM1,000 Goes To The Fastest Bowl
The eating contest isn’t just a stunt — it marks one year since Xiong Wor first opened its doors in TTDI. And the shop it’s celebrating carries weight: a 60-year-old family recipe from Kuantan, passed down to Jayden Ong through his mother, Foo Jun Ngoh, who spent decades building a following at a one-stall kopitiam back home.
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A Kuantan family recipe, six decades in the making, is celebrating its first year in KL with an eating contest.
To mark its first anniversary, Kedai Kopi Xiong Wor in TTDI is staging an eating contest this weekend — finish the ALL-IN Curry Mee in five minutes or less this weekend (16 and 17 May), and you’re competing for RM1,000 in first place cash.
Second place gets RM500, third gets RM100, and those who don’t podium still leave with a custom tote bag, a jar of GUA Kaya, or a RM50 voucher.
Pre-registration costs RM23.90; closes tonight at 9 pm; walk-ins not allowed.
Those details say something about what Xiong Wor has become in just 12 months.
But to understand why people are showing up — and coming all the way from Kuantan to do it — you have to go back 60 years.
The Recipe That Started Everything
Jayden Ong, 30, swapped an automotive engineering career for a curry pot when his mother, Foo Jun Ngoh, called him back to continue a 60-year-old family recipe — one she inherited from his uncle and spent decades perfecting at a beloved one-stall kopitiam in Kuantan.
The broth is the heart of it: sweet from fresh coconut milk, savoury from homemade anchovy stock, and layered with a rempah the family blends and fries themselves.
Bringing it to KL meant adapting — fresh harbour fish became fish paste, and the spice level was dialled back for a broader city audience — but Ong, who arrives two hours before the 9 am opening daily, insists the soul of the original stays intact.
The TTDI outpost, a pork- and alcohol-free collaboration with business partner Danial Yip, soft-opened on 19 April 2025 near the TTDI wet market.
The family legacy now runs in three directions: the mom back at the original Kuantan outlet, Ong’s younger sister running her own seafood-forward spin at MLT Cafe in Teluk Cempedak, and Xiong Wor in TTDI — with SS2 potentially next.
Sixty Years of Flavour in Every Spoonful
The ALL-IN bowl comes heavy — tofu puffs that have drunk deep from the broth, fish balls with a satisfying spring to them, crispy fried wonton, chicken, fu chuk (dried bean curd sheets) softened just enough, okra that still has some fight left, and cockles throughout.
Underneath it all: a broth that opens coconut-sweet, settles into anchovy savour, and closes with a rempah warmth that creeps up and stays; the kind of bowl that rewards patience — the longer you sit with it, the more the layers reveal themselves.
Customers choose their noodle base from four options: classic mee, hor fun, lo mein, or mee hoon, each carrying the broth differently.
Those who want to build around the bowl have options too — stuffed brinjal, soft-boiled kampung eggs, and extra noodles on the side, with housemade Gua Kaya and sambal available to take home in jars.
And if you’re starting light before the main event, the Kaya Butter Hainan Toast — golden, crisp, and oozing with housemade kaya — is the kind of side that quietly steals the table.
The interior is a considered nod to the Nanyang kopitiam of another era — cement-textured walls, Edison bulbs strung overhead, and iconic mosaic floor tiles underfoot — warm enough to feel familiar, busy enough to feel alive.
Every seat tends to fill fast, the hum of conversation mixing with the clatter of bowls, and a trilingual queue sign at the door that tells you everything you need to know about how the first year went.
It does not feel like a new restaurant trying to look old; it feels like a place that earned its patina — one curry mee bowl at a time.
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