Kailash Parbat & Anjappar, Changi Airport Terminal 1

Kailash Parbat and Anjappar are in the same space in Changi Airport Terminal 1 (#03-20 Public Area, Terminal 1, 80 Airport Boulevard) with a common seating area and ordering counter. We've been to both restaurants at Syed Alwi Road years ago and didn't expect to see them together in Terminal 1. The former seem to be offering mostly chaat. The latter - it's been more than a decade.

Sweet lassi. Okay tasting.

These dahi puri were from the Kailash Parbat section. Not getting the competency vibe from the guy in the stall and while these weren't bad tasting, it didn't feel as properly made as those we had at Syed Alwi.

There've a pretty competent mutton fried rice in the Anjappar section. The generously portioned rice (it's $15 by the way) was much lighter than the looks suggested. Mutton was tender and some of them had tendon-y/fatty bits. Nice.

There's also something call Anjappar Popular Meals which was a rice meal with a few vegetables dishes, curd, rasam, chapati, a dessert (we got a halwa) and a meat of choice. Our meat of choice today was the fish and the spicy/savoury/tangy curry for it was outstanding. Now I know where I can fall back to if I ever have to eat in Terminal 1 again.

Sweet glutinous rice with fried shallots from Millennium Glutinous Rice (千年糯米饭)

I seem to recall that the salty glutinous rice from Millennium Glutinous Rice came with the fried shallots while the sweet one has peanuts. Don't know if I remembered that correctly now because I've gotten portions that were mixture of sweet and salty and also have gotten servings with both fried shallots and peanuts. Are there even relations? 😅 Anyways, I got a sweet portion today with just shallots. The aromatic shallots and the tender sweet rice was... a delicious combination.

Burger King's Ultimate Angus Classic BBQ

So this was basically the child of Burger King's BBQ Turkey Bacon and a Whopper. For some reasons, I had never noticed from their menu that this has 'BBQ' in the name until today. I doubled the meat. Tasted pretty much like how it looked. Didn't over do the sauce. Burger was chunky, hefty and the patty's a bit dry-ish. With all the other stuff in there, I could barely register the cheese. Between this and the Ultimate Angus Mushroom Swiss, I prefer the latter.

A 350g Australian 'Steakhouse Char' ribeye from iSteaks

I've previously tried the New Zealand grass/pasture fed ribeye so here's the Australian 100 day grain fed meat (Bindaree). It was more expensive ($55) and I didn't think it was noticeably better tasting even though grain fed implied that they are suppose to be fattier. Quite a bit of silver skin and sinewy bits though.

Now that I've tried their "heavier cuts", I'm no longer curious and I'll just stick to the lamb.

Margaret Drive Chicken Rice, Holland Drive

I don't remember if Sin Kee ever had the name Margaret Drive featured so prominently on their signboard. I do recall that there was a time that they kinda disappeared not very long after they had relocated from Mei Ling Food Centre to Holland Drive some years back. They've obviously rebranded after and even had a branch at Havelock Road Food Centre that had inconsistent standards which eventually folded during the pandemic.

Anyways, this Margaret Drive Sin Kee is located in a different unit from their original one when they as Sin Kee Famous Cantonese Chicken Rice first moved to this coffeeshop (40 Holland Drive). That original unit is currently King of Pao Fan.

Here's the part where I exclaim, damn the chicken is still great! Slurp off the bone tender chilled bird drizzled with their concoction of chicken stock/sesame oil/light soya sauce. There's no metics to any of these quality but this stall is definitely of better standards than the defunct Margaret Drive Chicken Rice branch at Havelock Road.

I've always classed Sin Kee's chicken rice a league above many others. Or was that all others in my experience. I don't actually remember any one which I felt was better than their's which is again, sufficiently flavourful without being excessively oily.

Um Yong Baek (엄용백), Boon Tat Street

Finally got a table for lunch at Um Yong Baek (27 Boon Tat Street, tel : +65 8843 5968). They're the current Korean darling in town these days. Between procrastinations and that it wasn't so easy for find a time slot because everyone else was also trying to get a seat in the early days, it was only now that we managed to eat here.

There wasn't much of variety for their banchan. The kimchi was good enough that we had a couple of helpings, buchu kimchi was kinda fibrous and the green chilli/garlic/gochujang was good with the boiled pork that we had. The last item tasted like local pickled green chilli.

There were only a couple of daejigukbab (plus a couple boiled pork dishes and pollack roe) available during lunch. The Busan styled daejigukbab had clear broth while the Milyang style has a cloudy broth.

I couldn't decide which I liked better between the two. Both were delicious and had good quality sliced pork (belly, shoulder and tripe) in them. Both were also light on the salt. 

What works for flavouring were the myeongran-jeot/pollack roe that you could order on the side like we did, saeujeot (think chinchalok) or just salt flakes. The latter two were available on every table.

British Hainan, Purvis Street

Dinner at British Hainan (23 Purvis Street, #01-01, tel  : +65 6977 9711). What's with the name you might wonder? The food's local Hainanese, which is not the same as food from the province of Hainan in China. Dishes here stem from the era of British colonial rule where Hainanese here often work as cooks. It's Asian with a bit of English influences to varying degrees and uniquely local. 

Not so different form places like Han's, Colbar or Silom (in Bangkok).

Brother's Toffee Apple cider is available here. Not as nice as the Honeycomb flavour.

We ordered a couple of items that are signatures of local Hainanese. Like Hainanese curry. This one had potatoes, beef brisket, tendon and tripe. Nothing was particularly tender which is the way we generally prefer it these days. Tripe was chewy and the tendon was much harder than I was hoping for. Brisket was a little tough even. I don't know if that was how it was done in the past but the meat's not impressive. Curry's not bad though.

A pricey small portion of mutton soup ($32 if anyone wants to know). Good for about 4 small bowls. Other than lamb, there's wood ear fungus and tau kee in it. There's very noticeable sweetness from the herbs and also flavour from the nam yu (red fermented bean curd) in both the broth and the meat. Not bad tasting.

Menu says grilled chicken but the common local term is chicken chop. This was nicely done with a smokiness from the grill on the chicken that's slathered with a savoury sweet apricot sauce. The salad on the side was dressed with something that tasted like canned fruit syrup with dried mint leaves.

Triple cheeseburger from McD

I knew how these would taste like but I just wanted to get one. The kiosk didn't have the option for extra onions like they do for the double cheeseburger so the double cheeseburger kinda wins for flavour if you appreciated their diced onions. Definitely heftier than the double but it is obviously also not the quadruple which we once could zhng for cheaper in the past.

Aw's Signature Minced Pork Noodle (胡家招牌肉脞面), Tanglin Halt Market

This signature bowl from Aw's Signature Minced Pork Noodle (Stall #21 Tanglin Halt Market, 48A Tanglin Halt Road) was nice. Flavours were basic and clean - a bit of savoury, light tanginess from vinegar and a humming warmth from the chilli. Loads of ingredients and noodles weren't too soft. I guess the word shiok would be appropriate. Will not mind coming back again. 

黔莊贵州牛羊粉 (Noodle Villa), 313 Somerset

The name's a little confusing for this one (#B3-10, 313@Somerset, 313 Orchard Road). As I interpret it, the name of the shop is 黔莊 (Qian Zhuang) and they do 黔莊贵州牛羊粉 which is Guizhou styled beef and lamb rice noodles. There are individual sign boards which prints 贵州牛肉粉 (beef pho rice noodle) and 贵州羊肉粉 (beef pho rice noodle). Even though the shop is selling rice noodles and there's the mention of pho, there's no relation to Vietnamese phở. The English name at the front is just Noodle Villa.

Couldn't Google much information about them. We were mostly intrigued by their lamb noodles......

......and didn't mind some lamb skewers (羊肉串) while at it. The server reminded us that these should be eaten while they're hot because we all know what happens when they cool down. These were not bad tasting but they appear to be fried rather than grilled.

No bad at all. I enjoyed it. Liked the fatty tender cuts of lamb they used for the meat. Noodles were smooth, slurpy and had absorbed the flavour from the broth. I added a fried egg which had molten yolk. But I did think there were a couple of things that could have made it better in my opinion.

A stronger lamb flavour to the broth would have made this bowl amazing. The broth to noodle/ingredient ratio also could have been improved by having less broth. Even though I enjoyed it, it was a lot more soup than noodles and meat in the bowl.

One of our bowls of noodle was supposed to come with lamb offal, not meat, which they overlooked and we ended up with two bowls with meat. Service recovery was immediate. As soon as we told them, they offered an additional serving of offal on the side for the wrong order.

There's some pretty smokey "firewood chilli powder" at each table. Not bad with the meats. Will try it with their broth another time.

Mala charshu kombo noodles and duck karaage from Chen's Mapo Tofu

So Chen's Mapo Tofu has aburi mala charshu. Couldn't help but to compare them to the one from Ch叉r because there aren't any others. At least not that I am aware of.

I like the sweet smokiness in these thin slices of pork belly. Not especially tender considering that they weren't chunky cuts and had a bit of bite to them. No disintegrating fat as well. Like Ch叉r, it was mostly sweet with a light heat that's layered with the flavour of mala spicing. I didn't think it was bad tasting. Nicely done aji tamago with shoyu infusion on the side and I don't know what's up with the kombu noodles because it neither looked nor tasted like kombu. Or are those not made with kombu? 🤔

We grabbed the duck karaage because we've never had one. Batter wasn't so much like what we know of tori karaage. It's thicker, was suitably crispy and had a nice taste to it. What pleasantly surprised me was how tender the meat was. I might not have known it was duck.

McGriddlestacked

I cannot help but feel that McGriddles seem to get smaller as the years go by. This one also looked stumpy compared to the one from last year.

Tokyo Soba at their new shop

This was our first visit to Tokyo Soba after they've relocated to the unit nearby (#01-12/13/14 Icon Village, 12 Gopeng Street, tel  : +65 6410 9353) from their old spot which has been taken over by AmiYaki.

A mushroom-y mushroom soba. Hah!

There's a black sesame soba on limited run. No black sesame flavour in it if anyone was wondering. In any case, the dominant flavour for their cold soba will always be the savoury smokiness from the tsuyu. Not a fan of the basa tempura which had a texture like the overly soft dory that's used in many local fish and chips.

I mentioned their natto tsutsumi age previously.

These were loaded.