Waraku, Marina Square

I remember the first time Lbrought me to this place. I was quite impressed and it's one of the places where I took a look at the menu and was overwhelmed by the options they had. I really had some difficulty deciding what I wanted because so many things looked interesting. My feelings of this place has somewhat changed since then. Some of the old sentiments that accompanied the first visit still remains though. Amongst them, this was the first place I tasted uni. It is still a nice little Japanese place in my heart even half the menu doesn't look so Japanese anymore.

We got a bunch of stuff that seems to be favorites, at least of ours. This on the right is the Scallop Hooba Yaki. Junie if you are reading this, well, here's a close up you can look at. As you can see, the leaf really does not burn. Lol. For the rest of you who are wondering, it's a sort of specialty this place has where you get your meats cooked on a rather dried leave over a pot with a small flame that is topped with a grill. The meats are served raw on a bed of miso paste and basically, you leave them there to be cooked which doesn't really take that long for seafood. You do need to turn them over once in a while so that the upside of the meat gets the heat. This stuff is quite nice, but ultimately is just either seafood or beef cooked over miso paste that is quite salty. The plus point to this gimmicky dish is that it keeps the meats really warm and if you chose the Beef Hooba Yaki, you can decide on the doneness of the meat. So you don't have to worry about stuff that gets overcooked and dried up. You decide when.

The two dishes over on the top are Puri Ebi Guratan (top) and the Coro Coro Steak. The Coro Coro Steak isn't really steak. They're chunks of marinated beef, in a small cast iron hot pan that is served bubbling in the sweet peppery brown sauce. The meat is barely cooked when served, so again, there is some small measure of how much you want the meat to be done. I don't think they arrive early enough to be medium rare, but this isn't the high quality stuff you're expecting from steak places. What mattered was that the meat tasted beefy and the sweet black pepper sauce is quite nice. All of it remains hot in the iron pan.

The Puri Ebi Guratan is a sort of really cheesy prawn casserole with onions. It's actually like a sort of cheese and prawn baked rice without the rice. This dish fills one up quite a bit. So for a very small eater, this one alone probably spells the end of dinner. There are a few prawns in this thing. I can't comment on the freshness of the prawns, but they aren't tiny shrimps if you're suspecting and they have enough bite in the meat and are somewhat crunchy. If you love cheese and prawns and charred cheese, this should not be missed.

This dessert on the left is actually ice cream with a white chocolate skin. The skin is painted red and the interior is actually apple flavored ice cream with a brown chocolate core. I've seen it on the menu numerous times, but this is the first time I've had it. I didn't really think much of it. I think that if it's apple flavored, sorbet should be the way to go.