Is the 128Day Chicken from Chicken Rice Hub SS15 Worth It

When a chicken rice shop makes 128-day chicken its claim to fame, expectations naturally go up. Unfortunately, so does the price. Our delivery from in SS15 came as quite a spread.

We ordered the Half Chicken set, which included braised tofu, salad cucumber, shunde fish skin, bean sprouts and baby choy sum.

The chicken itself accounts for around RM90 for half a bird, and that's where the 128-day claim becomes important.

Most commercial broiler chickens are bred for rapid growth and are slaughtered considerably younger. Allowing a chicken to mature for much longer can develop firmer muscle structure and a more pronounced chicken flavour. In eating terms, the attraction isn't necessarily tenderness. It's that satisfying bite and deeper flavour that you tend to get from a more mature bird. Age alone doesn't automatically make a chicken better, of course. Breed, feed, rearing and cooking matter too.

And to give Chicken Rice Hub credit, I could taste what they were going for. The chicken was good. It had proper chicken flavour and a noticeably good bite rather than being merely soft. The skin was smooth and supple, while fried shallots added another aromatic layer.

I liked much of what came with it too. The vegetables were good, particularly the baby choy sum and bean sprouts.

The braised tofu had absorbed plenty of flavour, and I enjoyed the Shunde fish skin, with its curled, chewy texture.

Then there were the condiments. These were fantastic. Four different sauces arrived with the chicken and gave us plenty to play around with. The most intriguing was the sweetish-sourish yellow sauce. We spent quite some time trying to work out exactly what we were tasting. It had us in mental knots, which made it all the more interesting.

So this isn't a case of me disliking the food. Quite the opposite.

I liked the chicken. I liked the sides. I really liked the condiments.

The question is whether the 128-day chicken delivers enough of a difference to justify paying around RM90 for half a chicken.

For me, no.

There is better flavour and texture here than you get from an anonymous mass-produced bird, and I can appreciate why a slower-grown, more mature chicken costs more to produce. But when the premium becomes this substantial, the eating experience has to rise by a similar degree.

I didn't find the chicken that much better.