PM Lee queues 30 minutes for chicken wings at Redhill
When you’re someone like the Prime Minister, even queuing for food can cause a stir online — and that’s exactly what happened when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong visited Redhill Hawker Centre on Thursday night.
A photograph of him lining up at a fried chicken wing and economic bee hoon stall moved quickly online after it was posted on Facebook. The uploader, in the caption accompanying the photo, said the PM looked like any ordinary 50- or 60-something-year-old “uncle”.
He was “swarmed with guards”, though, “lots of (them)”, the uploader added, when a screengrab of his photo and caption ended up on a HardwareZone forum thread.
The uploader added that PM Lee stood in queue for a good half-hour before getting his food. Users online found themselves doing double-takes at the sight of the image, commenting in wonderment that he would queue for his own food, and at a hawker centre, just like anyone else.
If any of the diners who saw PM Lee there harboured doubt in their minds that it was indeed him they saw, he himself confirmed the visit in a Facebook post on Friday morning, where he shared a picture of a popular dessert stall bearing a “招财猫” (wealth-bringing kitten) and a sign about gaining and losing wealth.
“Judging by the popularity of the stall’s delicious desserts, the cat and the reminders are working,” he wrote, also thanking a passing diner who passed him a bowl of green bean soup from the stall.
According to Chinese-language daily Lianhe Wanbao, the hawker centre that the prime minister was at is in Block 85 Redhill Lane, and the stall he was queuing at is known as “Yan” in Mandarin, bearing the stall number #01-19. Bee hoon from there costs 60 cents, with a chicken wing costing $1.20, the report said.
