Singapore Eat: Xiang Qin (湘琴湘菜馆) Mala Hotpot & Hunan Cuisine

8 September 2026

Update: Xiang Qin had closed its stall in Bukit Batok West. Its main outlet is located along Balestier Road with more dishes to offer.

Xiang Qin (湘琴湘菜馆), a Chinese food stall, offers mala hotpot (麻辣香锅) and spicy mala tang (麻辣烫) with different soup-bases as its main servings on top of Hunan cuisine and other Chinese-style dishes.

Xiang Qin (湘琴湘菜馆) @ Bukit Batok West

Aside from mala hotpot and mala tang, Xiang Qin’s other specialties include mostly Hunan-style dishes. There are cooked dishes for group dining and also various single-pax noodle dishes and stir-fried dishes with rice.

The Mala Xiang Guo (麻辣香锅), with “medium” spiciness, is more on the spicy side with lesser peppercorn flavour. The selected ingredients are cooked with certain soy bean sauce, dried chillies, garlic, ginger, etc, and added with crunchy peanuts before serving. I picked some beef slices and they are nicely-fried and still tender. The spiciness level is adequate — for me — without being too spicy to overwhelm the palate.

The flavourful hotpot dish can be paired with white rice, which uses fat, short-grain rice with some stickiness and can be picked up using chopsticks.

The Fish-Flavoured Pork Rice (鱼香肉丝盖饭) has a wonderful aroma when served. “Fish-flavoured” refers to the Sichuan-style of preparing the dish using condiments for frying fishes. There is no fish in the dish but it has the same flavours as a Sichuan fish dish. The aromatic sauce is sweet, savoury and spicy, and used to stir-fry strips of lean pork with carrot strips, spicy green bell pepper and black fungus. Served with similar short-grain rice, it is a tasty dish with rich flavours.

The Scallion Beef Rice (葱爆牛肉盖饭) is another rice dish topped with large amount of beef slices wok-fried with scallion. The beef slices are nicely-fried and tender with tasty, savoury sauce to flavour the rice. It is delicious as well.

Another tasty beef dish is the Hunan-style Cumin Beef Rice (孜然牛肉盖饭) where beef slices are wok-fried with green chilli, red chilli, green bell pepper, and coriander with cumin powder. The beef has strong flavour of cumin, comfortable saltiness and with some spiciness — reminded me of tasty Xinjiang meat skewers. Delicious!