Small Potatoes Make The Steak Look Bigger : Year Eighteen

Year XVII. 24.M2. Happy sweet 18th, Small Potatoes Make The Steak Look Bigger! 🥩 Vulkan lives and more years to go!

Revisiting Wooloomooloo Steakhouse

Back at our favourite Australian themed Hong Kong steakhouse. If you've appreciated the veracity in the previous statement, you know it. 😏 Took a while for the fact sink in that it's been a dozen years since we first/last ate at Wooloomooloo? Time sure flew by stealthily. 😓

Focaccia looked the same as the last time. Just more onions. Great munching with butter.

Treated myself to a dirty martini with olives stuffed with blue cheese. Drink's a little salty from the brine and I was hoping for more blue cheese in those olives.

We give thanks to the rabbit holes in YouTube for the subliminal spurring to order a jumbo shrimp/prawn cocktail. I do not even remember if I've ever had one of these.

For some reasons, I had expected jumbo shrimps/prawns to be......you know, jumbo. These were large but not enough for my imagination apparently. But they were nicely chilled and meaty with a light sweetness. What made me enjoy this was their cocktail sauce with avocado mousse and cream cheese. The latter two I guess aren't traditional to these but hell yeah they worked and we liked it.

Lobster bisque which didn't seem to be as great as I remembered it. Maybe the recipe changed or perhaps I remembered wrong, guess I'll never know.

Got a claw in this one.

300-day grain fed I 48 hours marination I 4 weeks wet aged I illinois

I've always been curious about the cajun ribeye in steakhouses so today was the day the cat died. Not a bad experience with that little bit of heat from what I feel tasted like barbeque dry rub. Much prefer the steak without it. Didn't regret ordering this though because now we know. It's tender from the wet aging and very moist unlike dry aged ones which tends to be not juicy. Where wet aging pales in comparison is flavour intensity.

550-day grain fed I marble score 8-9 I south australia

Because we were splurging, Mayura Station chocolate fed wagyu ribeye. 

Meat's tender with texture, laced with melty intramuscular fat and the flavouring was nice with just salt.

I remember their sweet peppercorn sauce from the last time and it tasted like how I remembered it. Still my favourite among the four followed by the red wine Madeira. The au jus and ginger ponzu ties in the third place though that au jus seemed just appropriate with the Mayura Station wagyu. Maybe the ginger ponzu is last then. It's not bad tasting, just not so much my thing with steaks.

Coffee's bitter and not bad.

This dessert was called Gorgonzola & Figs. So it's an elderflower cake with Gorgonzola ice cream and a fruity fig compote. Nice.

The first floor at Komala Vilas

In all the times we've eaten at Komala Vilas (一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九), we've never been seated on the first floor until today. A first time on the first floor.

Got ourselves a poori set. Air filled, slightly crusty and with the lightest crisp on the fried bread which was accompanied with dal and spicy chana masala (curried chickpeas).

More dal in an order of dal butter fry. This one was piping hot compared to those ladled over onto the side of ordered dishes. Note to self : Gotta remember to inform them to leave out the coriander.

I've been curious about their Kashmiri pulao for some time now and I've finally ordered one. There's toasted cashews, green & red maraschino cherry bits and finely diced apples with a light ghee flavour in the rice. Not bad tasting per se but also not memorable. Will not be getting it from them anymore.

Some hot masala tea to end.

A recent McGriddles Stack

So the last one was during the first quarter of this year. 

These are back for a while again. Eating them with pepper this time.

Revisiting Casa Vostra

It's twenty to five on a Friday a few weeks after Casa Vostra has opened. There was a queue. Don't these people have to...😕

Calamari fritti had a crunchy batter and was otherwise edible. Nothing special about the squids here. Caper mayo on the side did not taste fresh. Will not be getting again.

Meatballs had a fine grind, was dense and has a fennel-y taste. Would prefer a coarser grind for texture but that's just our preference. Will not be getting again. 

According to the menu, it's Argentinian prawns and prawn reduction on their pizza gamberi. Not getting much out of the latter. I was expecting a taste much more robust from the word 'reduction'. As to the former...for prawns that were apparently known for their sweetness, I couldn't tell. But it was a nice pizza with prawns that were decent and chunky. Even though for some odd reasons, the pie had something in it that reminded me of nachos. Cornicione was still fantastically puffy and tender.

SKAI, Swissôtel The Stamford

SKAI (#70-01 Swissôtel The Stamford, 2 Stamford Road, tel : +65 6837 3322) - Swissôtel describes it as a contemporary grill. One that is also accompanied with a view at City Hall, that by virtue of its location, encompasses the Marina Bay. We were here for lunch to celebrate a couple of occasions and decided to splurge.

Matcha Hiromeru - made with giffard ginger, nori green tea and tonic water. According to the menu. The nori green tea was just powder on the side of the glass. The drink was refreshingly tangy with something that reminded me of tamarind and just a little bit spicy from the ginger.

Apple Chizukeki's nice. Glenfiddich 12, Calvados, cheesecake foam, vanilla and something described as spiced cloudy apple milk punch. Foam's pretty creamy and smooth. I liked it.

The brioche here was so good. Each serving appeared to be fresh out of the oven. We had about five. Sweet and fluffy which paired harmoniously with that salted butter it came with.

That's the chicken liver and foie gras parfait. Never did I imagine that they'd be presented in the form of three gold flecked obsidian spheres.

There's suppose to be black truffle, sherry vinegar and Timut pepper from what the menu described. Pretty sure there's some other fruity stuff in there that's not mentioned. The sauce was tangy and umami at the same time. Timut pepper kinda reminded us of Sichuan peppercorn. It's that flavour which we associate with mala.

The chicken liver and foie gras parfait was as good as any we've had so that's that.

Their prime sirloin steak tartare that is suppose to contain gochujang. Couldn't taste gochujang. The seasoning was restrained to that point that we could actually taste the intrinsic flavour from beef and the meat was delicious. Flavour's nothing like the French tartare de boeuf. Portion was also kinda tiny.

Their crispy bread that came with the starters were salted so it's not the bland thin crusty stuff.

The bringing out of the more serious looking knives marked the start of the mains. Look at the pretty acid etching on them.

Black cod's superb. Meat was flaky and firm that you could scoop it out by layers. Creamy sauce had ikura, dill and capers and tasted like that. 👍🏼

Lamb was infused with enough cumin to remind us of 羊肉串儿 and mint to remind us that it wasn't 羊肉串儿. 😬 That romesco at the bottom tasted like a muhammara we once had.

Nice racks. Meat was tender, adequately spiced and yet still possessing the natural lamb-y flavour.

SKAI's Waldorf salad's pretty good. Properly tossed endive, apple and candied walnut with Tête de Moine.

This was creamed corn, not mac & cheese. Was a lot tastier than it looked. There was a bit of heat from togarashi and those black stripes were mushrooms. Don't know what kind but they've a nice flavour and a light toasty bitter that's seeped into the corn. 

We finished with Brillat-Savarin and coffee. Cheese was rich and creamy with earthiness from the rind - accompanied by cubes of Manuka honey, fig jam, chestnuts and I wonder why, a token sprinkle of buckwheat. That thick bitter coffee was just the pairing needed.

Sek Tong Gai (食通街), Commonwealth Crescent Food Centre

Sek Tong Gai (#02-76 Commonwealth Crescent Food Centre, 31 Commonwealth Crescent) has been around for years. We've heard them mentioned numerous times over those years but for reasons, their location at Commonwealth Crescent never registered. Noticed the stall recently and we decided to try.

Operation appeared to be a one man show apparently and the wait can be long. We also noticed that proprietor making effort, trying to get our food to us even though he was unwilling to commit to how long a wait we'd have to go through. Our dishes started rolling in after a relatively short 20 minutes...

First in was their claypot chicken with salted fish (咸鱼砂煲鸡). The name of the dish in no way described the dark savoury caramel soy intensity in the sauce. Reminded me of gong bao gravy minus the heat and sweetness. All chicken chunks were boneless. Awesome dish.

Sweet and sour pork tasted different from most. This sesame seed sprinkled rendition had sauce that seemed to be missing something which I cannot put a finger too. Pork was deep fried with a crusty surface there was more crunch to them than we expected. Not bad tasting but the overall taste and texture profile kinda threw me off.

This was called poached kailan in Two Ways. The vegetable's poached with a delicious soy (maybe oyster) sauce and then topped with its deep fried julienned leaves and crispy whitebait. The crispy toppings had a seafood-y umami and the quality of the kailan itself was exceptional. Stems weren't fibrous. 👍🏼

咸鱼蟹肉炒饭. Or fried rice with fresh crab meat and salted fish. It's worth noting that 'fresh' is an operative word here. Meat's not bottled/jarred/canned and tasted like it had been extracted not long ago. There's also plenty of dried scallop bits as well.

The initial impression as that the fried rice was bland. The taste grew onto us as we ate and we also slowly realized that it was pretty lightweight as fried rice that didn't settle heavily as many are wont to. Not bad.