Round 2 at The Public Izakaya

We thought the last visit showed some promise so we came back to try more of their food. To be honest, these guys look like the part of an izakaya and didn't quite feel like one. The word 'contrived' comes to mind. But I would not begrudge the food on that.

First to arrive was their moyashi itame. Boiled bean sprouts with a pretty tasty, nutty minced meat sauce. 

Followed up by some delicious shoyu flavoured baigai. I found these snails pretty addictive and even saved the broth for later.

The only disappointing item we had was their maguro yukke. Maybe I had incorrect expectations. There was some Korean-ish tasting sweet and spicy sauce that kinda ruined it. The only marinade we expected was shoyu and maybe sesame oil.

There was kani miso, baked I believe in the oven, served in the shell with crackers. One can imagine these to be great drinking food.

More of those bacon hotate and hatsu which we liked from the previous visit.

We saw these big assed tori karaage the last time on the neighbouring tables and decided to try them. These were actually pretty well fried. Their crusty skin had sealed in all the juices and heat in the meat. This was what I had saved my baigai broth for, but they're easily as good with mayo or on their own.

And some cheesy raclette potatoes to end.

Accept no substitutes. Just kidding....but this was definitely a good drink to throw back in our warm evenings.

Chicken dumplings and stuffed guinea fowl at Le Bistrot du Sommelier

The chicken dumplings are back in the garbure at Le Bistrot du Sommelier! We've been waiting for those dumplings to be rotated back in since they've been replaced with garlic pork sausages. Not that the sausages were bad but we liked this better.

These dumplings were precious. Only a pair in a pot and they're really good in a tender chicken-y manner.

I think it's the spring menu currently, hence the sugar snap peas, asparaguses and green peas. That's a half guinea fowl stuffed with mushroom paste on creamy rice. Enjoyed the bird. The meat was tender and had a gamier profile than chicken. Those creamy rice weren't very creamy though. The only thing that flavoured them was the sauce for the fowl and they tasted like they were a little undercooked.

Ye Shang Hai Teochew Porridge (夜上海潮洲粥), Lengkok Bahru

This was a lot of food and rather inexpensive for both the quality and quantity that we had at Ye Shang Hai (55 Lengkok Bahru, #01-387). Clearly, there are corners in the vicinity of places I pass by with some frequency that I haven't discovered. In case you were wondering, the spread fed five.

Note to self - the curry was watery and beware the shreds of ginger in the minced pork.

minced pork with fermented black beans

stewed cabbage

stewed pig intestines

eggplant

some steamed fish

fried chicken

hae bi hiam (spicy minced dried shrimp)

stewed hairy gourd

lion's head meatball

luncheon meat

braised/stewed pig skin

stir fried egg

tau kee (stewed dried beancurd skin)

tau kwa (stewed beancurd)

tau pok (stewed dried beancurd)

Uruguay Black Angus ribeye from Astons

So Astons (#04-03 The Cathay, 2 Handy Road, tel : +65 6887 5889) has Uruguayan Black Angus ribeye on the menu. Grass fed meat and apparently a premium export from the country that accounts for more than a billion dollars of bovine meat sales per year. It was a seasonal item and I was curious enough to try it. 

Warning bells should have gone off when it arrived with that chunk of rosemary butter. The reason that extra fat and flavour was needed was because the meat didn't have much of those. It tasted bland compared to their regular ribeye and wasn't as tender. Well, now I know for sure these aren't my thing.

A tai shioyaki teishoku and shishamo from Nakajima Suisan

If my memory serves, there was some 25th anniversary thing going on and Nakajima Suisan was offering grilled sea bream because of it. It was the most expensive set they had on the non-regular menu and also the largest whole grilled fish they've ever had on teishoku. It's not bad if one didn't mind the bones and tasty slimy bits.

I've been curious about some of the additional grilled items they have started offering in recent times. One of those were the shishamo and while it might not have been visually apparent, they were filled with roe unlike many cheaper places that served barren fishes out of season. Smoky and even juicy these things were. 

Omakase Burger @ Picnic

We hadn't had Omakase Burger (#03-15 Wisma Atria, 435 Orchard Road) in a while and I thought it would be a good idea to re-visit our local artisanal-bunned-smash-grilled-secret-blended-burger with American cheese for comparison since the memory from the joints in the US of A were still fresh. Somewhat. 

It's still as tasty as I remember. The short of it was that Omakase Burger would be a legit competitor as far as the burger went in terms of flavour. The buns were still not holding up very well with the juices though. By the way, did their burgers become bigger?

What's not to be overlooked was that they were noticeably more expensive. This double cheese burger was already $22.85 before tax.

A taste of home

I was looking forward to Hainanese curry rice so one of the first things I got myself after returning was a packet from the stall at Beo Crescent. Such a specific craving it was amongst so many things I could have missed. Braised cabbage, fried egg, pork chops and curried squid ladled over with their curry concoction and dark soy sauce. Yummy!

The Stinking Rose, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

Faced with the prospect of seeking alternative dinner plans, The Stinking Rose (55 North La Cienega Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90211, tel : +310 652 7673), a garlic themed restaurant came up as a suggestion. As it turned out, all of us liked garlic. What coincidence! 

While waiting, we filled up on bread and beer with their garlic rose relish - the latter a pretty darned good concoction of chopped garlic and parsley with salt and vinegar in olive oil.

Since we were prepared to be garlick-ed up for the night, we got ourselves a portion of their bagna cauda - roasted garlic in extra virgin olive oil and anchovies. Those garlic were sweet and just slightly pungent. Made an excellent spread since they were also pretty soft after all that roasting.

Made also good eating with even more bread along with the garlic rose relish.

Almost everything on menu was supposed to be flavoured with garlic. I couldn't taste any of it from their chilled asparagus with blue cheese bits. But I liked them because they were tender without being fibrous and of course, those blue cheese. 

More munching came in the form of fried calamari. These were crispy and had a good squid-y chew.

Here's a garlic prime rib which featured some of the roasted garlic cloves on top of the meat. That prime rib wasn't too bad. Probably not as tender as Lawry's across the road but I couldn't complain.

We couldn't leave the restaurant without giving their garlic ice cream a go even though we were stuffed. The topping if you were wondering wasn't some roasted/burnt garlic sauce of some sort. It's salted caramel. The garlic came from the ice cream and the flavour came through without being excessive or weird. It's actually kinda nice.

Philippe the Original, Los Angeles

I normally keep faces out of the pictures but we had such a friendly and chirpy counter lady today at Philippe the Original (1001 North Alameda, Los Angeles, CA 9001, tel : +213 628 3781) that I thought she deserved to be featured in recognition for it. Here's her getting us some pickled eggs.

Anyways, Philippe's is an institution in these parts and has been opened since 1908. That would make them a century and a decade old. They've been said to be the inventor of the French dip sandwich and those were what we were here for.

I got the double dipped lamb and bleu cheese - with meat that was sliced off the leg of the lamb on order and assembled right in front of us. Unpretentiously hearty and delicious it was that the sandwich went down easy peasy lemon squeezy. I liked this.

Some potato salad on the side and pickled yellow hot chilli peppers that had a bit of bite. Awesome with those French dips.

These pink eggs have been pickled in beet juice, red wine and vinegar. Hence the colour. They were just sour hard boiled eggs if you were still wondering what they tasted like.

We had an order of their chocolate cream pie which was chocolate cream piled with even more cream. It's kinda nice though.

The counter lady told us that their baked apples used to be bigger. Not that we could tell since we've never been here. This was like an apple pie without the pie. Apple, sugar and cinnamon. It's not bad.