Cenzo, Club Street

Cenzo (81 Club Street, tel : +65 9155 8374) opened a couple of years back and is helmed a Drew Nocente, the force previously behind the kitchen at the defunct Salted & Hung. I was given the impression that there was a nose to tail representation they were cultivating back then but I'm not seeing that here in Cenzo. Anywayysss......

This was their vitello tonnato. The dish is traditionally Piedmontese and uses thinly sliced veal covered in tuna sauce. Cenzo's rendition uses grilled veal tongue. Damn. Fricking. Good. Nice sear going on the outside and tender on the inside.

That's lardo tigelle with truffle honey. Bread tasted freshly made and much lighter than appearances suggested. Delicious porcine meltiness with the sweetness of honey cut through with pickled fennel I think. Will be hard pressed not to want to get this again.

Pastrami sandwich's pretty good. Meat's made in house and thinly sliced - more SweetSpot. than Katz's. Layered with slaw, pickles and in between some brioche-y bread. While I understand the acid, I prefer less of it. 

Awesome pappardelle white ragu. It's a rich cream version of a pasta Bolognese minus tomato, addition of guanciale among the minced veal along with liquorice notes from fennel seeds. Served piping hot. Nice. 👍🏼

Love the prawn risotto too. Stock infusion was thick with a rich crustacean sweetness coupled with some spiciness. Luxuriant is the appropriate word here. And charred prawns. 

Hmmm....charred prawns.

So we decided that it would be tiramisu.

Not bad. 

Coffee's decent.

Would love to come back again.

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! 👍🏼

Boomarang, The Quayside

Have finally gotten over my curiosity about Boomarang (#01-15 The Quayside, 60 Robertson Quay, tel  : +65 6738 1077) today. Part of the reason why the curiosity was because, I've never been able to definitively describe what's Australian about Australian food due to the cultural confluence that has been part of their cuisine.

I won't pretend that Boomerang is a definitive of that because it won't be and cannot be. But it is still a casual representative? Superficially?

There's Suntory Black on tap. Did not expect this.

These are known as prawn cutlets on the menu. Deep fried coconut crumbed prawns is what they were. No coconut taste so it was pretty meh. Overpriced for it's portion but I won't complain because I came here of my own accord and didn't have a gun over my head to order them.

Kangaroo burger was....kinda boring. I've had kangaroo before and have enjoyed it. This one wasn't delicious. At least I didn't think it was. Won't find excuses for it. I'm not sure what to make out of that patty but it didn't taste satisfying. For some reasons, they didn't salt the meat much.

Pizza's called Far North Queensland. Prawns, salmon, calamari and spinach on a mango chutney base. Did not expect the crust to be so biscuit thin. It was okay. Okay meaning that if I ever came back I won't be ordering it again. The accompanying yoghurt on the side was nice though.

The closest place I could relate to in Melbourne was The General Assembly and those guys were way better for what we ate.

Cowaramup, Telok Blangah Road

Heard about Cowaramup (404 Telok Blangah Road, tel : +65 8500 1111) a while ago. They're apparently Australian styled and set up with the chef Jimmy Teo who's also responsible for Meat 4 Meet at East Coast Road so there're parallels in the menu which I had initially thought to be the same dishes. Didn't taste so. Sadly by the time we visited, the fried sweetbread that used to be on the menu a couple of months back were not longer available.

I remember this as the double bacon cheese burger pappardelle on their older menu and it's been renamed to omit the 'double bacon cheese burger'. Someone must have noticed that it was outright misleading because this was just a bolognese with some cheese sauce. No onions, or pickles or cheese burger cheese in there that would have made it cheeseburger-y.  

One of the parallels in the menu mentioned earlier was their lamb cutlet. Looked very similar to the one at Meet 4 Meat. Just more expensive and smaller portions. The flavour from one at Meet 4 Meat made me think of balsamic glaze while the sweetness of this one tasted more sugary like char siew. Not bad tasting but I felt the lamb flavour was a tad subdued. Menu also mention corn ribs but this was obviously some generic mesclun salad on the side. Would have been basic courtesy for them to mention what they're failing to deliver.

The ordering person registered medium rare but it arrived more like medium well.

Duck Wellington's not bad. The crust looked like it had a nicer egg wash and was more buttery than the one on the Beef Wellington at Meet 4 Meat. Generous portions of duck and foie gras in this one. Not bad.

Santi's, Telok Ayer

Santi's (138 Telok Ayer Street, tel : +65 8405 6112) is by the folks running Sarnies right around the corner. Food's Australian-sy by my measure with their brand of combinations featuring ingredients from the east and west.

Nicely done sea bream crudo. The collective of smoked feta, trout roe and EVOO was an effective flavour bomb of richness that paired with the fish. I thought it was a great combination of tangy and umami that was relatively clean.

Picked a pizza call Marge Simpson. Basically their variant of a pizza Margherita using yellow Datterini tomatoes instead of San Marzano. There's also Scamorza for the smokiness. Flavours from the toppings were not bad. What wasn't so great was the crust which was quite heavy and dense at the cornicione. We've been spoilt by the airy puffy ones at Zazz Pizza. 

We ordered their octopus and bean ragù pici thinking that we probably understood the flavour profile and knew what we were getting. We were so wrong. 😂

The base flavour tasted like savoury Chinese glutinous rice with boiled beans. For some reasons the diced bits of guanciale added to that. 

While I understood that pici was a thick noodle (I imagine udon-ish), these were thick like pig's intestines. 😂 Cooked "al dente", they were also heavy and tasted like a dense mee hoon kueh (面粉粿). Lots of textures going on with the ingredietns including some spicy fried shallots that had mala flavour. Then there's hazelnuts.

Don't know if we'll be back. Have mixed feelings. Having Brooklyn Larger is nice but not opening during weekends automatically relegates them to the bottom of my list.

Do you Lokal?

It's been some time since we last ate at The Lokal. They had venison on menu for the end year season so we found ourselves getting a table one evening.

But first a refreshing cold yuzu shandy or two - made with Pilsner Urquell.

Much like the chicken liver parfait we had previously, there was also a creamy and smooth goose liver parfait with toasts and onion jam. Nice.

That's a mettbrötchen - minced raw pork served on toast. The pork had a taste that was quite similar to pate/sausage. The meat was spiced with pepper (among other things I couldn't tell) and topped with diced onions & chopped spring onions. We liked this.

Their seared venison loin looked awesome. That's their picture above by the way. The one that lured me into getting a reservation. 😬

What we got looked different. The venison loin looked much smaller than the picture led us to believe but at least we got the delicious seared spatzle. Would have loved a bit more sear/charring on the venison to up the flavour game but I'm not complaining. If anyone's confused, this plate was delicious!

Smoked wild trout - also delicious. There's a Bearnaise-y potato salad on the side with pickles and capers that was awesome. What's more, this came with shaven horseradish. I wonder if this is a permanent item on the menu.

Lovely sticky date pudding to end. Wished it was bigger. Heh.

Burger, pasta and Ryan's Kitchen

This was their three cheese burger - Cheddar, Parmigiano Reggiano and Mozzarella. There was an option to add cheese on their order tablet and I was wondering if all the three cheese would be added in that option. After clarifying, they said that only the Cheddar would be but one could choose to add any one of the other two instead. 

Liked their beef patty. Could have done without the onions since they added little to the burger. Didn't mind the tomato relish at all. But if you asked me, the burger didn't feel very integrated as much as a bunch of ingredients that were piled on.

There's truffle pasta where they've added white wine vinegar - something which I haven't had in truffled pasta. That made the noodles pretty refreshing. Oh, it was chilled too.

Lamb shoulder chops from Ryan's Kitchen

I didn't enjoy this. The meat was chewy and had quite a bit of sinews. In spite of appearances, I also think it didn't stay long enough on the grill to have enough charring for flavour. Now I know what to avoid or not from them.