Paddy Hills, South Buona Vista Road

This spot used to be Lim Seng Lee Duck Rice which has relocated to somewhere in Little India. Today, it's Paddy Hills (38 South Buona Vista Road, tel : +65 6479 0800) - I suppose contemporary international fusion kinda fits the description of what they do. Food that's more fun than serious. One could simply also drop a moniker like 'a cafe' to describe them as well. Albeit one with a little more interesting food than the run of the mill establishments that we have everywhere.

What have we here? A sheet of seaweed with a bit of wet rice poking out at the corner, some white powder and an ivory dollop of something? 

It's what they're selling as ramen risotto. A tonkotsu ramen in risotto form. A paradigm shift of a dish with ingredients that many of us are familiar with.

It took some seconds for my mind to register, but in the end, I thought it was quite good. It's a lot less heavy than most risotto because there's no cheese and butter. The stock was pretty flavourful and it came with thinly sliced Japanese styled kurobuta charshu that was torched briefly and pickled shimeiji mushrooms. I rather liked this.

The powder is what the menu described as tonkotsu powder. I have no idea what it was and it didn't register as anything familiar when I tasted it. The ivory globule was a quail egg's yolk.

Here's their crab roll. Real crab meat stuffed between a sweet squid ink roll topped with ebiko and some other fish roe. Came with a kimchi slaw on the side. This roll was quite good. It's all crab meat and the sweetness of the buns work with all the toppings. I liked this too.

That's some Parmesan croquette served with jam. Couldn't taste much of the Parmesan to be honest and the potatoes are chunkier and less creamy than the usual Japanese croquettes. That's not a bad thing though.