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I have more than two decades of experience of ordering (and eating) caifan.
‘Caifan’（菜饭）or “vegetable rice” in Chinese is a common food dish found all over Singapore, such as coffee shops, hawker centres and even air-conditioned food courts. Essentially, diners start with a base of white rice (or a healthier brown rice option if the stall offers it) and select the dishes they wish, such as meat, vegetables, fish and so on. Most diners do not bother naming the dish they want, and they will just point at the items and say ‘zhe ge, na ge’（这个，那个), which means “this one, that one”.
There’s even a song dedicated to caifan by musicians Annette Lee and Benjamin Kheng:
My history with caifan
My earliest memories of caifan was from secondary school, especially as a lunch option if I needed to stay back in school for extracurricular activities. The caifan stall was the first stall in the entire line of stalls, and the kind elderly caifan stall lady usually would throw in additional vegetable curry on top of what I was ordering, all for the great price of S$1. For a student who only received about $2-$3 of pocket money daily then, the caifan is a lifesaver — it is filling and affordable.
These days I will get caifan if there are long queues at other stalls particularly during lunch times on working days at hawker centres, or if I am eating alone and I wanted something cheap and fast.
The ethos behind caifan is basically cheap, fast and relatively good food. However, there have been lots of online stories and accounts of customers being charged exorbitant prices for their caifan orders recently, with prices of $10 and up.
Prices and ordering caifan
According to a CNA commentary on fixing the online ruckus on caifan prices, the average retail price of caifan (one meat, two vegetable dishes) was indicated as S$3.74 by the Department of Statistics Singapore. Based on my extensive experience of ordering caifan in that combination, I would say that this is largely true — most caifan places will rarely charge more than S$4 for one meat and two vegetable dishes.
I don’t have any real strategies of ordering caifan but the general rule is to avoid fish and ‘fancy’ meat dishes (e.g. pork chops) as these will usually be marked up. The whole point of eating economy rice is to keep the budget to a low, so ordering ‘baller’ dishes defeats the purpose. If you want to eat fish or expensive meat, zhichar stalls will be a better option (more expensive too) because they are usually of higher quality compared to caifan stalls.
My suggestion would be stick to the one meat, two vegetable dishes ordering combo to keep the price low while satisfying your stomach. If you wanna have three vegetable dishes, it will bring the price down further.
Depending on your luck, some vegetable or beancurd dishes will have minced meat or morsels of meat so you might be able to get some meat without paying meat dish prices.
