Ah Seng Teo Chew Minced Meat Noodle (亞誠潮州肉脞面), Hong Lim Food Centre

Ah Kow's minced meat noodle stall has ended their business. I'm not gonna miss them because I didn't have a good experience. That in spite of glowing reviews of their bak chor mee. A couple of months back, I noticed that in the unit that they used to occupy has become Ah Seng Teo Chew Minced Meat Noodle (#02-42 Hong Lim Food Centre, 531A Upper Cross Street) selling the same local minced meat noodle.

Ah Seng did significantly better in my opinion. Their mixture of sauces and chilli was deep and savoury. The vinegar wasn't potent but I guess that's just their style. This $6 bowl came with a couple of their in house wanton that had huge wings. I'm getting quite a bit of that dried sole (ti poh) flavour because the meat stuffings of the wanton, a piece of crispy one they threw in the noodles and the soup on the side had those flavours. Mee pok was well tossed and coated with their sauce.

Speaking of the soup, don't ignore it. This one had the blanket of savoury ti poh taste amidst a gentle sweetness and was robustly salted to bring out flavours. Those fishballs in the soup tender and fishy in a good way. Pleasantly surprised by that.

I like their cut chilli. If you need a bit of additional heat, these would do the job nicely.

More weekend specials at Etna

Like the title says, more weekend specials at Etna. By the time this post was published, this would have been last week. It's also been 10 years since we first ate here.

We were given some nice onion focaccia today and some chilli infused oil which they recommended. That had a bit of slow burning heat and a good fragrance from the chilli they used.

There were some fried sardines this weekend. They were beautifully done with a proper crisp and moist meat underneath. No excess oil and much better eating than most that we've tried. True story.

There was Prague ham. Not sure what exactly constitutes that but the ham had some leopard spotted charring and was deliciously salty like good ham is, stuffed with an also delicious bastardo del Grappa cheese. Like a ham steak foldover. Paired with light pickled onions along with some bitter and also charred endives that broke the banks of saltiness. Nice garlic bread to go with too.

The other thing we wanted to try from this weekend was their pizza special with Puzzone di Moena cheese and Lardo di Colonnata. Those and mozzarella with stracchino cheese topped with walnuts and a light drizzle of honey. Here's where I mention the umami savouriness from the creamy lardo pairing well with the bit of sweetness from the honey. This was one rich pizza. 

Same old pistachio tiramisu there. There's a layer of pistachio paste in the middle which I heard referred to as an Italian equivalent of Chinese/Japanese red bean paste. Make of that what you will.

Coffee has never been that great here but after all the cheeses and salt and sugar, the bitterness was welcomed.

TamJai SamGor Mixian (譚仔三哥), VivoCity

I've come across the mention of this shop online a number of times but for some reasons, had associated them with Thai food until I saw the Cantonese name 譚仔三哥 that I understood what the name was and also realized that it was a Chinese soup noodle shop from Hong Kong. We came across one of their shop at VivoCity (#B2-28 VivoCity, 1 HarbourFront Walk, tel : +65 62549803) and was intrigued by the broth options for their noodles.. 

This bowl was their SamGor hot and sour soup with pig's stomach, fish and premium sliced beef. Flavour was akin to Szechuan pickled mustard with a bit of mala styled heat. I think I went halfway up their spice meter because I had no idea how spicy things could get and I wasn't interested in not tasting the food. Heat was manageable so maybe I could up a notch in the future. 

While the menu described this as Hunan cumin mid wings, we were intrigued/amused by the Chinese 湖南土匪 (Hunan bandit) name. So we got some. Not bad. The wings were tender enough that we could slurp them off the bones and had a nice spice flavour topped with toasted sesame. Will come back another time to try another soup for their noodles.

Curry kolo mee from Traditional Sarawak Kolo Mee (传统砂拉越格罗面)

We saw curry kolo mee from Traditional Sarawak Kolo Mee (#B1-14 Connexis Building, 1 Fusionopolis Way) and immediately imagined the noodles soaking in curry gravy. But both the noodles and curry were served separately......

Curry looked not bad though. Nonya styled and creamy.

So after a couple of mouthful of noodles for the original flavour, the curry went in to reconcile what the mind had initially perceived with reality. Yummy.

Ko Ryo Jeong Korean Restaurant (고려정), International Plaza

I noticed this Korean restaurant (#02-59 International Plaza, 10 Anson Road, tel : +65 6324 3120) the past couple of times we were at Enishi as they were literally strides apart. We managed to make it down today. I supposed the initial plan was to give what might look nice on the menu a try. 

We never made it to the menu items. We've seen a few mukbangs featuring ganjang gejang on YouTube that we kinda knew what to expect and was curious enough to want to try them.

There's banchan. The left bottom banchan was wood ear fungus with thinly sliced beef which was pretty good. Kimchi was also refreshingly sour. Those chilled pickled chilli things on the bottom right were also invigoratingly sour, sweet and spicy at the same time.

Rice was saved for the sweet flesh raw marinated crabs and the tomalley/roe we could squeeze out from them. Like I mentioned, we kinda knew what to expect with how to manage the ganjang gejang.

Part of the ganjang gejang set came with dak bulgogi. I haven't had/ordered these things since...I can't remember when. I guess these were decent tasting.

A steaming gyeran jjim. Light, savoury and we finished it at the end so it wasn't bad.

Need to get used to calling these godeungeo gui rather than saba shioyaki. Heh! The meat was firm and flaky. Not a bad grilled mackerel at all.

That's a sundubu jjigae that had quite a bit of clams and shrimps. Something we enjoyed and demolished at the end. But at this point, we were already started to fill up even before the crabs were served.

These were their anticipated ganjang gejang. While I had some idea how to eat them, I didn't have much of a clue how to work the claws which were a little thorny if you catch my drift. In contrast with the steamed Sri Lankan mud crabs where the claws were easier to eat, these flower crabs had bodies which were less of a pain to get meat from compared to the claws.

Not a bad try for a first time. The meat had a crustacean sweetness that paired with that soy marinade which tasted like it had some sort of wine in them. I've got a couple of nicks from the dead crabs but I'll learn to do better the next time.

Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Noodle Rice (香港玫瑰油鸡麵饭), Beauty World Food Centre

Wanted to try this particular Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Noodle stall (#04-48 Beauty World Food Centre, 144 Upper Bukit Timah Road) because have heard good things about them. Believe it or not, there are a least a few other stalls that do soya sauce chicken and have similar stall names. The fallen Hawker Chan was one of them.

What I was curious about mostly was their sui gao/shui jiao/水饺. That didn't mean I wasn't interested in trying out their soya sauce chicken though. We arrived at about 11am and were the 3rd in line. The lights in the stall were curiously still not switched on and would never get switched on even when we had finished and left. 

The proprietress had shared that we had to wait through a 21 order takeaway just before our turn and the one after ours had 30 packets - she did not switch on the lights in the hopes of not attracting more people to queue up. 😱

Anyways, their sui gao was a solid one and worth going a little out of the way for. The silky smooth dumplings were large and packed with minced pork, whole shrimps and strips of wood ear fungus (木耳). I'm going to rank the ones Xiang Jiang Soya Sauce Chicken (香江豉油鸡) above this because that one has water chestnuts in the stuffings as well - the fourth cardinal ingredient in sui gao epitome.

Soya sauce chicken was slurp off the bone tender. There was more meat than the picture suggested because half of it was under the dumplings and noodles.

There's a chilli sauce which one could help themselves to which packed a sharp tangy prickle with a hint of ginger. Was a nice complement to the chilli paste they already included in the noodles.

Don't forget the soup on the side. I tasted some umami and sweetness from dried scallops and it was delicious that I drained my bowl.