Small Potatoes Make The Steak Look Bigger

Really, that was a lot of work. It's definitely backbreaking sweat being a creator. Not to mention the Creator. From the arduous chopping of the steak and onions to the shaping of the patties. There was actually addition of half egg and breadcrumbs into the patty mix that I didn't manage to get into photo. I was hoping that they would work serve as a better binding agent for the mat. The end still resulted in a patty that wasn't firm enough, though it tasted much better then my previous attempts. This time round, it was very juicy too. I actually forgot about the salt so the patty tasted plainer than I would have liked. It was about 2 hours worth of preparation that was eaten up in 10 minutes. Phew!

I presume this to be another one of the stores that made their claim to fame back in the original location where they started off. There's so many of these supposedly famous noodle stores that I don't really take stock in whatever claims they make anymore. As long as they're good, I guess people will always flock through word of mouth. This prawn mee place attracts a pretty large crowd that dwarfs the Chai Chee Noodle Village place a few units down the road. For a prawn and a half and some pieces of pork ribs, this $8 bowl of prawn mee (which uses a mix of regular yellow noodle and the thick bee hoon) is pretty expensive. To be fair, the prawns are fresh tasting and the flesh is easily stripped off the shells. The soup base for the noodle is flavorful, though I think I recall having had better. What I don't know is whether the better one from my hazy memory contains MSG.

Perhaps it is because of the timing of the visit. The name of this place just reminds me of Barbossa and Jack Sparrow. Did I mention having caught the latest installment of Pirates and that you might want to stay till the end of the credits for something extra? I digress....Perle Noire (687 East Coast Road) located just beside Cheesecake Cafe is a western based restaurant that does an excellent pork. I must mention this above all else, the Yorkshire Pork Rack is simply exceptional. I'm not too sure of the cuisine direction of the restaurant because the mood tries to be Spanish. I don't remember paella being on the menu. And the lack of identity of the food makes me think Australian. Well, I'll not go into that.


The meats served in this restaurant are mostly from Australia from what I can recall. It's Australian beef, lamb, pork. And then there is a foie gras and a grilled French duck breast. And Japanese sweet potato mash. Ok, I'll really not go into that. Very pleasantly surprising start to the dinner we were served piping hot Hot Cross Buns. Seriously, I haven't seen these around much locally. My last recollection of these things were.....nursery rhymes. Lol. But the ones which the Black Pearl provided was fragant with onion bits in the bun and nicely hot. With the option of olive oil and butter. It was so good, we asked for more than the standard single serving.


The shared starter of foie gras and oysters was far from impressive. So these are a couple of things that I'll be avoiding if I come back. Incidentally, for the less perceptive, it also means that this place is good enough to return from my view of it in this visit. The selection on the menu is fairly large and it must be quite an effort for a fairly new place to be doing so many things in the kitchen. The unfortunate part comes with the foie gras with rice honey and soy which is done sliced and pan fried. Being sliced means to me that the timing of the pan fry must be impeccable or otherwise, it gets more cooked than required to maintain the creamy insides. I hear that it's goose liver there so that's a thumbs up. But that's all the thumb the liver gets. I very much prefer what I had at Ember. The Perle Noir Deluxe Oven Baked Oysters sounds pretty good on the menu with spinach, crab meat, topped with parmesan and mozarella cheese. The actual outcome of oysters sealed in cheese didn't have enough crab meat for them to be even noticeable and the oysters on the inside didn't taste as fresh and was a tad watery.

Moving on, I do have something good to say about the mains which are really highlights of the dinner.


This pork I must say again, is excellent. The only disruption to the experience was that it came slightly undercooked for our liking which the chef was rather apologetic about, explaining the reasons due to having a large and thick slice of meat and that the pork which is a grain fed white hog is actually fine being of medium doneness. It was brought back to be redone and the result comes out to be one of the best pork I've ever had. Honestly, I do not remember better of such a cooking. The only fat in the meat was along the edges of the meat with the rest of it being lean, very juicy for such a thick cut and tender. As with all well done meat, all the seasoning you get and need, is but salt and pepper. Along with a very nice cream sauce. This dish is highly recommended.


I generally do not expect much in the way of anything on a braised lamb shank except the lamb itself. I haven't personally had sauce of the meat that was exceptional and find it quite difficult to really imagine how such a sauce might be made. This place doesn't have exceptional sauce on the lamb neither, but the lamb is good. The flavor was almost subtle and the meat tender. A friend of mine who doesn't normally like them thinks this is good stuff. My minor gripe is thatI wished it had a bit more meat. And the japanese sweet potato that served as the bedding didn't taste as fragrant as I remember of them. With the gravy in the mix, it didn't help right there neither. Again, I compare this to Ember with their sweet potato mash that came with their rack of lamb which was presented in a way where you could just taste the potatoes, neat. Yeap, I said neat.


The pork knuckles are on the whole not exceptional. In fact the meat is a tad too dry placing it out of the leagues of the german places like Paulaners and Brotzeit. The only honey that was detected is the honey mustard that came on the side. The positive note to this dish is the excellent crispy skin which by far is the best I've ever had for pork knuckles. I find them far too thick and hard in most places, but this one, comes thin enough for the crispiness to be appreciated. Not to mention, the fragrance.

Would I come back again? I think so. If not for the pork rack, then the menu which contains more to entice.

I'm amused, Dragon Valley Eateries. It's actually a coffeeshop located across the road from the main vehicle entrance of Technopark @ Chai Chee. One of the food stalls does this pork trotter bee hoon. And the cooking standards remind me vividly of the cookhouses in SAF. I think you get my point. Noticeably, more than half of the pork trotters are actually bone, skin and fat. And those trotters are canned as displayed from the front of the said stall. The redemption factor is the wonderful chilli which makes the dish much more palateable.

I've been hearing aplenty about this place from friends. When one gets hit by raves of some good location, one inadvertently sets expectations beyond the norm. I'm quite acquainted with that phenomenon so generally when buzz comes to hype, I adjust and hope that it still meets a certain undefined experience I hope to get. I can comfortably say that Wan Hao hasn't met it and I genuinely think that the place can do better.

The food on the whole is not too bad. Service however, is sub-standard. That's as simple as it can described. From the reception to the delivery of menu, it started off on a bad foot. Yeap, a bad foot. The manager at the reception didn't look too interested in receiving and we were ushered in with the Golden 60s menu with the waitress looking at the border of confusion when I mentioned a la carte menu. To someone who is visiting the restaurant for the first time, it would appear that the Golden 60s menu is all they have. I understand that it happens to be the current promotion for the restaurant, but haven't they heard of options? I don't think it's unreasonable for them to present a regular menu without specific request. Maybe it's just me.




I'm seriously hard pressed to find the sliced Yunan ham in this one. Apart from being quite crunchy with the prawns, this dish is expensive and unremarkable. It tastes exactly as it looks.



The fried ribs I thought was not too bad. There wasn't an excess in oil in the ribs I could taste the strawberries from the sauce. Nothing on the Grand Marnier though, so if you're expecting some of it, you get zilch of that in taste. The residual sauce looked very suspiciously like jam that was thrown into the mix from the excessive sweetness. I'm fairly positive that a fresh strawberry with Grand Marnier doesn't produce a nectar that comes in a gel like consistency. But I have no proof that it was truly jam that was used. You decide what it is.



This is very regular fried chicken bolstered in fragrance by the sliced almonds. The supposed light tempura batter tasted like very regular flour coating in very regular fried chicken. Perhaps, my tongue is not discerning enough in the department of tempura batters. The orange liqueur sauce was the most vitalizing factor of the dish which came in diced orange pieces. The citrus tanginess being flavorful, however strongly suggested to me that this is just an upclass variant fried lemon chicken. I'm not saying that it is, however parallels can obviously be drawn if you strip away the almond slices and tasty orange sauce.


This is pretty good. The portions are pretty damn small too. It is definitely not the best cashew paste I've had. I'm quite sure the ones that cost 2 dollars or less in Chinatown taste as good if not better and comes in larger portions than this.


I'm not sure if this is experimental in nature, however the combination is actually not bad for the adventurous taste buds. Whom would have thought, black glutinous rice and soursop ice cream.


This is probably one of the worse desserts I've had. Apart from the light pastry, there's no appeal to this for me at all as a dessert.

Granted that there's probably a whole lot more options from the menu which I haven't tried. I'm sure a mark of a good chinese restaurant does not have to stem from sharks fin, expensive fishes and abalone just to mark their standards. This first visit definitely left me with little desire to patronize again. I'm not saying that's definite, but I could just give it another chance and try something else completely different from the menu. For now, this was one unanimous agreement at the table on a mediocre dining experience. And shame on that.

Home made meat in bread again. Again, the meat is bought minced. This pork patties are done with minimal seasoning. Just salt actually. I'm wondering if there are differences in how pork and beef patties are prepared. The bread are actually Gardenia butter rolls. So you get the idea of the sizes of these little burgers. The butter rolls are great because of their buttery flavor and they are lightly toasted with jam inside. A piece of lettuce and a slice of tomato in each. And little pigs little pigs let me in.

This place used to be Chicos & Charlies. I remember them from about 18 years or so ago which was the very first time I had Mexican food and magaritas. Since I hadn't had real Mexican food before and haven't had them locally in a really long time, I have no basis for comparisons beyond the fact that I think is place is very pricey for their food. I'll probably try out someplace like Cha Cha Cha for more of these stuff.


The food wasn't lousy, just isn't outstanding. The prawns are honestly, small. And the freshness of the wraps isn't top notch neither. And to be truthful, I tend to be a little prejudiced against food from Harry's anything. Because this place like Marrakesh, while greets with a very pleasant veneer which doesn't truly leave you true statisfaction in the gut. That's me. With a jug of margarita, the total bill was about $140. I think it's gotta be mexican't for this.

Dinner with Junie and Lea. Nestled in the little urban jungle of Tanjong Pagar in the tree lined streets of Duxton Hill, sits a quaint little Australian restaurant within the units of decades old colonial shophouses that stands behind an open space car park. Which many people probably doesn't even know exist. B.R.O.T.H. (21 Duxton Hill) is dressed in like a old English cottage. The place exudes a certain unique charm of the older world of its own by the interior coupled with their al fresco dining area that sings in a very recognizable tune of this country.....I meant the shophouses and tropical climated trees in the streets. Honestly, I like this place enough that I probably will want to come back again. It makes a very good place for a nice dinner date.

As with the other modern/fusion dining places, I tend to take more note on the execution of the actualy food because I don't think there is any established template of how it can be done. In truth, I was somewhat disappointed by the lacklustre starters that this place offers. I should have listened to my inner voice and gone for the goose liver. Doh! Apart from this little setback, the rest of dinner was enjoyable. The restaurant just needs to remember to get steak knives for steaks.





The mains here actually looked more appealing to me than the starters, which is quite out of the ordinary for me. Running through, the only memorable item was the spinach & mushroom salad which I felt was a good light starter drizzled with a very nice raspberry dressing and topped with what I believe to be very fragrant fried shallots. The crab cocktail was quite disappointing as it wasn't really chilled nor warm. The meat lacked flavor and body and the accompanied dressing wasn't of any exceptional note. The clam chowder's decent with a generous amount of clams and carrots. The soup's flavor is a bit more on the milky side. The pork and anchovy fritters are just really normal fried balls of pork. I didn't taste anchovies and for $18, I really thought little of it.




The macaroni's strange. It looks like a baked mash and it tasted more of potatos and cheese than macaroni. I didn't detect any macaroni at all. On the whole, if you like potatoes and cheese, this is really, very pleasant comfort food. It comes with an excellent flavored top crust. Excellent because it's rich with toasted cheese flavor. The seafood and pork chops are pretty good too. There's not much to fault with the cooking. It's probably just the herb that didn't agree very well with me. The pork is otherwise exceptionally tender. The steak with blue cheese is, if you've guessed, good stuff. Pity that the photo doesn't bring that out. I'm quite impressed at B.R.O.T.H.'s medium rare. It came as I liked it on the tender beef. A note on the steak is that the blue cheese was quite overwhelming in flavor and for me, it drowned out pretty much any other taste there. That includes any beefiness and the shiraz reduction. Which I thought is a pity, but otherwise, it's a good steak and recommended for those that like blue cheese.



The pavlova tastes better than it looks. It's a meringue with cream and fruits, however it's quite large. Sharing is advised. The sticky date pudding is recommended. This stuff is really fantastic. Maybe it's because it's been a while since I had warm butterscotch, but if you're thinking of desserts here, this is one warm cake to try.

If you're wondering where on the creator's green earth is Andrews Avenue, it's one of the lanes off Sembawang Road. If you're coming via Yishun, follow the road which the MRT track runs and just before it hits the newer estates where Sembawang MRT is, there is a junction where you can make a right. That places you in Sembawang road and you just have to keep going till you see Andrews Ave off on the right which is some distance down.

The place (at 12B Andrews Avenue Singapore 759930) is BBQ and grill setup like Blooies with one exception. The menu is much smaller and there is no air conditioning. The floor comes decorated with rickety wooden floorboards and ventilation is by fan only. This place serves food that looks Australian...reminds me of Outback Steakhouse with their ribs and fried onions and steak and whathaveyous. I have mixed feelings about this place. The attractive but shallow pull factor for me is that there is Hoegaarden on tab and this place serves Strongbow. Apart from it, it is secluded in a rather out of the way spot surrounded by private residences and the food, while comes in large portions here isn't what you would consider competitively priced. The ribs and fish & chips are quite passable in taste, really nothing extraordinary. I can offhand, think of two other places that does better ribs. Tony Romas and Brewerks.


Hefty is a good word to describe the fish & chips ($22.90) at Buckaroo. It's the largest single brick of fried fish in batter I've come across. Not only does it come with a thick batter, the fish on the inside ain't tiny too. It's not something that everyone can finish alone. For obvious reasons, it makes one feel greasy after eating so much fried surface. That being said, it's also pricier than in many other places.

I'm not likely to come back for various reasons. Inaccessbility being one of them. The other being $93.30 for the above and 2 Hoegaardens. The experience just doesn't justify the price for me. And I know of better and cheaper places for my beer.

I'm not a cook as some of you are aware. In fact, I barely qualify as a regular person who has some cooking skills. Almost the same can be said for my brother, so when there's things in the fridge and we want to eat something, we just make do with what we have at disposal. This time round, it's an omelette of sorts with ham (any kind you like, no specific cuts here) and feta cheese. Yep, I said feta cheese. I know it's now how you would eat them normally, but nothing said that there must be convention involved when I'm whipping up something at home to silence a growling stomach. 2 eggs, a few cubes of feta cheese and bits of ham. We use a mini frying pan (pre-heated) because they're easier to clean. You can also pre-fry the bits of ham on the pan to oil the base.

Do note that if you're using a tiny pan, 2 eggs pretty much fill it up. Because of the volume of the contents, the insides tend to cook slower so what you can do is lift up the edges of the cooked egg and let the runny parts spill over and get their turn on the hot pan. Doesn't take a lot of skill to do that.

Of course there reaches a point, where you have to flip the omelette to cook the topside. With a small pan like that, you would need acrobatic precision. Otherwise, I prefer to use a plate to transfer, then flip it back onto the pan from the plate. It's really a non-dexterous solution that non cooking people think of. Not rocket science.

Feta cheese melted in the omelette taste somewhat like a stronger flavored cream cheese, so there's nothing weird or unpleasant about it. It adds flavor to the omelette which if you have noticed, does not come prescribed with salt from my instructions. The cheese and ham is really enough sodium. It'll probably do better with some coarse grained pepper, sliced mushrooms and diced tomatos, but I didn't have those and it would have been much more trouble.

All the time, I couldn't think of another word but compact & dense to describe it. The feeling is like eating a solid piece of steak between the bread. And no, I didn't finish the fries. I slaughtered 2 fries and that's it. It's probably due to the nachos (I expected better toppings than that) and peanut shake. Talking about shakes, Seah Street Deli has pretty pricey ones. I don't know why they think a couple of scoops of ice cream and milk is worth $10, but it sure as hell ain't special in any sense. For a dollar top up, you get the extra thick option which really isn't even as good as they have it at Billy Bombers. Lacks viscosity for something that is described as extra thick. For a $11 shake, I honestly expected better. Shame on them. But now I don't have to imagine what a peanut shake taste like.

Central, located just above Clark Quay MRT station is peppered with little Japanese eating places. I noticed a couple of Waraku outlets just in this mall alone with one that does pasta to the fairly interesting looking Tom Ton and the recently hype laden Marutama Ramen with their ridiculous queue. This looks to be some place I'll be coming back again just for food. It's been quite some time since I last ate at Ma Maison and despite being packed, it looked like there was space for a couple of more seatings. I've had some good memories from this place that does western cuisine with a Japanese touch all enclosed within a cottage like furnishing with accompanying English looking tablecloth and tarnished crockery.

Ma Mason has a pretty good Plate Lunch set for $23.50++ that comes with its own bunch of goodies. There is soup, salad, bread (with butter and jam), the main of a hamburger steak with omelette tomato rice and al dente spaghetti (very well done), a drink and ice cream. I don't know if there's a better description for the works because it is pretty damn heavy for lunch.


A word of warning...the lunch is obviously carb heavy and if you should ever need to keep your eyelids up, you have been warned. The plus to this is that they make an excellent spaghetti if you like them al dente. I've lost count of numerous pasta places that fail to live up to that. The omelette wrapped tomato rice is one of the simple pleasures in the stomach. Mouth watering "feel good" meal that requires no elaborate makeup to taste good. I really didn't expect half doneness in the hamburger steak and not to my surprise, it certainly did come well done. It was good anyway with the sauce and egg.

It all looks rather pretty on the plate and in truth, it doesn't taste too bad. The prawns have always been a tad dry in Fish & Co. The rice used to be better. The peri peri part of the name here refers to the sauce that accompanies the prawn which didn't turn out to be as invigoratingly spicy as I thought it might have been. They could do with being much more generous with the lemon butter which I very much prefer over the peri peri sauce. And really, I got hungry a couple of hours after this. It's safer at Fish & Co for me at least, to just stick to fish and chips and the seafood platter for 2.

The one thing I like about prepared self cooked food, especially meat (actually, specifically beef) is that I get to decide on the spot how I want it done and since these Japanese grills serve them in dainty slices, it's so much easier to gauge the doneness. There's the added factor of being able to cook them as when you want them popped into your mouth. Freshly cooked cannot get fresher than that. Of course, one would have to deal with the oil fumes and the cloying scent that tends to cling persistently onto the fabrics above your skin and that is something that I really would not want to have wafting up my nostrils after I have eaten.

I make exceptions on occasions and Aburiya (17E Lorong Liput) is one of those Japanese/Korean? which I will do and come back another time just for the selection of grilled meats. I'm actually not too sure if it's just Japanese since they do bibimbap and have a bunch of other kimchee stuff here apart from the cuts of sliced beef, pork, chicken, vegetables and some seafood that you can put on the charcoal grill.

Between tare and shio dressing on the meat, I definitely favor shio (salt/pepper) since it allows the flavor of the beef to be appreciated instead of drowned. The wagyu ishiyaki chahan arrives in the scalding hot stone bowl and is mixed at the table with some curry and spicy sauce. The resultant rice comes up steaming hot, sticky and flavorful with the spice, but didn't quite go all the way through in the department of spiciness. The portions are also huge. I'm not sure how hot this stuff is suppose to get, but it had a tad too much ginger so I know it'll be something I'm avoiding if I ever come back.

Wild Rocket at Hangout Hotel (10a Upper Wilkie Road) is not an easy place to find. Even with an idea of where it is from the map, it was a much longer walk than expected from Selegie Road up Mt Emily. And the place looks much nicer in the photos that I've seen of it than actuality. Sort of reminds me of my visit to Jaan. Anyways, there is a lunch 3 course here at $26++ that comes with a starter, a main and a dessert. I'm actually here today for the Wild Rocket Burger which is only available for lunch.



The starters for the lunch menu didn't really hold much appeal, but since it came with lunch, we did pick something. I'll skip the grilled aubergines since it really isn't much more than what it looks like. I'll talk about the soft shell crab instead because it also looks to me to be another boring item. To my surprise it was pretty good. Instead of being deep fried and dry and oily and chewy, this one is actually juicy and very meaty. I'm quite impressed with this here, thinking just of how much more unimaginative it could get with sweet thai chilli sauce that is almost cliche. That sauce is really not bad with the crab. Never always trust what you perceive from what you read in the menus. Lol!


I like this and I can see possibilities in the future where I might just trek up this place to eat this again. The burger looks in reality a little smaller than I thought it would be, but the glistening patty is really thick as thick comes. Any thicker, I wouldn't be able to fit it into my mouth. And it's so juicy that each bite you make, should be accompanied with your lips wrapping round the bite to suck up all the leaking juices that will drip and trickle down your chins and onto the plate. Damn juiciest burger I've ever had. The only condiments in it are a supposed sun dried tomato relish, some light mustard and sprigs of wild rocket. The sides on the plate are strangely just some token salad of mixed leaves and papadum.

Desserts are a mixed bag with a very pleasant "fresh Pandan infused" panna cotta with gula melaka taking lead over a much less interesting chilled black glutinous rice topped with coconut ice cream. I'm not too sure what fresh pandan infusion would be like since I've never actually had it before, but this panna cotta does come with a very distinctive flavor of the leaf that can almost be described as 'awakening'. On it's own, I think stands well. The gula malaka is a bonus. Not sickeningly sweet and fragrant with minuscule bits of crystals in the robust brown body. Nothing too heavy. The glutinous rice on the other hand was quite uninteresting and the hint of coconut in the ice cream was....well, barely present. You can really just imagine how it tastes like. Nothing special.

This is actually quite good and fills you up quite a bit. And I counted 7 or 8 clams, a generous portion of squid and nice crunchy prawns. And you can tell that the rice is cooked the right way from ironically, the slight inconsistency in the doneness.