Yi Jia South Village Seafood Restaurant, Toa Payoh

Heard about this tze char from a friend and decided to check out the scene from their outlet up north (#01-298, 21 Toa Payoh Lorong 7, tel : +65 6250 6537). Most of the plates of food from what we had observed from the neighbouring orders looked good. But I think we made a few mistakes ordering as newbies here.

Their stir fried sweet potato leaves with garlic, ginger and fermented bean curd was pretty good. Really appreciated the fact that the leaves were not fibrous.

Stir fried kang kong with garlic was competently done as well. There was enough savouriness and the vegetable had the prerequisite crunch to denote freshness.

This was when things started becoming a little "off the main path". These deep fried prawn balls in Thousand Island sauce were a little too single dimensionally sweet. So that meant that you probably wouldn't want to eat more than a couple before all that cloy gets to you. Oddly, their Thousand Island sauce actually tasted like greasy Sugus. Don't know what that is? Go Wiki it. 

Funky dish number two was deep fried chicken with strawberry sauce. This and the previous item were in the orders because they sounded interesting and were also signature dishes by Yi Jia. It turned out that these experimental pairings didn't work together well. At all. There was too little balancing tart from the strawberry of their creamy/milky sauce. Couldn't even pretend it was lemon chicken and the cloy manifested again after a couple of pieces. To top that off, the quality of the meat was really mediocre. This was mistake order number two.

Thankfully, their royal pot which was their take on a sort of traditional Chinese frutti di mare made the cut. Am pretty sure I would like to come back judging from the crowd and what we spied coming out from the kitchen. Hey, no fake crab sticks in the fried rice here! We'll stick to more conventional items from the menu the next time.