Surrey Hills Grocer, One Holland Village

Surrey Hills Grocer opened up at Holland Village (#03-29 One Holland Village Mall, 7 Holland Village Way, tel  : +65 8189 6372) recently and the venue's pet friendly. All things considered, it's a good place if one enjoys canine voyeurism which involves spontaneous butt sniffing greeting exchange between dogs. 

One of the main motivations coming here was definitely not the queue we had to endure nor the chance to catch glimpses of many a cute corgi within petting range but the tapas from MoVida from Melbourne which I was curious about.

We tried the anchoa which featured Cantabrian anchovy on crouton and smoked tomato sorbet. It was for a brief moment refreshing from the sorbet but ended up being mostly salty because of the anchovies. Also kinda awkward to eat with utensils or with hands because those thin crotons crumbled easily while the anchovies don't yield as kindly with the sorbet melting.

That's the pez real with smoked kingfish, pine nut sorbet and pine nut gazpacho. Sorbet's tangy...which I did not expect out of a pine nut sorbet. Not bad tasting.

Tartar on almond & horseradish cracker and pickled turnips. I could only taste the beef tartare. The rest were all textures.

Pleasantly surprised by their orange caramel bacon benny. There's an orange caramel fish sauce glaze on that thick cut of belly bacon - that was nice. The Hollandaise sauce was also orangey and buttery - found that quite addictive. Too little glaze and sauce methinks. We asked for more of the Hollandaise and they obliged.

Wagyu truffled donut was pretty overpriced in retrospect. Sauce on the side tasted like a truffled mushroom soup. Meat was passable as long as one doesn't think wagyu - it was properly seared on the exterior with a medium doneness on the inside. What was really bad about it was the lack of salt that could have brought out the flavour of the meat. 

Menu also described a Poolish donut. Didn't know what it was. Was thinking it would be sugared or glazed but it was neither.

Something did not agree with me for their honey earl grey wild lavender cake. It was kept somewhere sufficiently cold that the lavender infused buttercream had texture like cold butter, not buttercream. I like buttercream to have texture like cream. Leaving this out for a half hour just to let it get there did not make sense.

Yuzu sparkling coffee's delicious. Yuja tea marmalade, coffee and sparkling water. Nice! 👍🏼