Aburi-EN, Guoco Tower

The group En Holdings which runs Aburi-EN (#B2-09 Guoco Tower, 1 Wallich Street, tel : +65 6214 3570) are probably disorganized or are hiding something rather than not being proud of themselves. They run a slew of restaurants like En Dining Bar, Z'en, Monster Curry and En Sakabar to name a few so they've got to be doing something right. How all these restaurants were even related was information that took a little sniffing online.

But enough of that. Aburi-EN mostly does grilled kurobuta and Miyazaki wagyu donburi. That above was their premium yukke jyu which the menu described with lightly torched marinated wagyu strips. Gimmicky and we fell for it. Could taste the wagyu if the meat was eaten by itself. With the rice and anything else, it somehow magically crosses the too-much-flavour line where none of the wagyu-ism mattered because it couldn't be discerned. For what they charged, the yukke portion felt stingy. 

But their kurobuta hoho don was delicious. Most of it because of those nicely grilled fatty and tender slices of pork jowl. The kind that unimaginative people all over like to call "melt in your mouth" because they still think that they can appear marginally more knowledgeable that way. Of course it doesn't really melt in the mouth. It's meat. The fat to meat ratio isn't quite unbalance to that point. But one could feel that parts of it were dissolving away.

That's the sumibi tori yaki. The picture on the menu looked golden brown with nice looking burnt ends. This one looked carcinogenic. It even tasted carcinogenic. In a strangely addictive manner from that grilled infused aroma. I'd order this again.