I am meant to be off carbs. It’s a wonderfully lazy way to maintain your weight and I am quite strict about it during the week. But I do love pau.

I love it so much that when I heard about a place where you can buy huge, same-size-as your-head pau, I knew I had to try it. After all, it would still only count as one, right?

I have a post-swim breakfast at least once a week with a bunch of people at the Tanglin Club after we’ve all done our various morning’s exercises. They are good fun, mainly men and varying in age from about 40-75…seriously… actually BK may be even older than that! I’m not really sure how it came to pass that I got included and absorbed in to this group, but of course I’m very pleased to be their only angmoh charboh.  In return, these guys are one of my goldmines of wonderful local information…and it was through them that I discovered this pau place:

So to Maude Road it was.  Found on the corner of Maude and Jalan Besar, its speciality is the Amy Yip pau. Amy Yip, for those who don’t know (I didn’t) is a Hong Kong Chinese porn star; the idea being that these big, fluffy, pillowy, white steaming delicacies are the very same size as her…um…ample assets (or a 4-year-old’s head, see picture below).

Filled with very good quality, lean chicken and pork meat well marinated and cooked until it has absorbed all the sweet and salty seasonings, (I am fussy and hate a gristley, greasy pau) 1 Amy costs $3.  We had 1 between 4 for breakfast today, supplemented with some homemade dim sum that they also serve here as well as a weird but wonderful coffee pau which, like Amy, is their own special creation.

Pau picture at very top of page courtesy of Juji Chews