Pho99, Amoy Street

This trip to Pho99 (57/58 Amoy St, tel : +65 6410 9600) was triggered by an unexplained bout of craving for some Vietnamese food. The truth is, there isn't much variety for Vietnamese food around as most of the places do the same things. We do have quite a few pho shops. Long Phung is just out of the way for me. I've seen the lunch crowd here at Pho99 so I thought they would be worth a try.

We had an order of their nui xào bò - macaroni with stir fried beef. It was tastier than it looked with all the fried shallots. A part of the appeal came from the fact that it tasted very homely.

We had pho bo too. Rare beef, sliced briskets and beef balls with smooth rice noodles. It's not bad. I just found the broth to be a little sweet and I was hoping for it to be more savoury. No real complains though.

And we also had some gỏi cuốn and chả giò. Summer rolls and fried spring rolls which were also pretty nicely done. The menu had described the latter to contain pork, prawns, beans, black fungus and yam. I'm surprised that they could stuff so much things in those rolls. I couldn't taste the meat, but I'm sure I got black fungus, yam and carrots. 

The sous vide Iberico pork jowl from Chalong

Here's back to our homegrown Thai/Japanese/French fusion charcoal grilled meat and rice shop featuring Spanish Iberian pork. 18 hours sous-vide Iberico pork jowl to be precise. Wow, this was nice. The tender strips of pork was fat laced and nicely charred. This pork jowl option came with a delicious Thai-ish sauce on the side that packed some heat too. I'm definitely coming back again. Two meat down with the gai left to go or until their dry aged prime rib actually arrives. 

Jade coin crodo from Da Paolo Gastronomia

I've just discovered the sugared and custard filled crodo from Da Paolo Gastronomia recently and rather liked them. That's led me to peeking at their crodo display whenever I happen by their shops and we saw this green icing glazed version which they described as jade coin. Heh! Green tea flavour it was, they mentioned. Apparently, Da Paolo isn't very good with working with green tea flavouring because we couldn't get much of that. I'm going to stick to the sugared and custard filled one for the time being.

Two Men Bagel House, Icon Village

I've been hearing about this shop (#01-12 Icon Village Altez, 16 Enggor Street, tel : +65 +65 65094125) on how they have the bagels in town and the great ingredients that's between their sliced bagels. Decided to come back to see if they're good. Honestly, we weren't too impressed. Maybe we had expected too much.

We had their Cow King - something with pastrami and the works. Certainly not the type of pastrami I had imagined though. It's not a bad bagel. Just a little hard, dry and badly constructed because everything just started falling apart as we tried to eat them. We've definitely had better bagels which held up better and weren't dry and hard.

The Salted which had their house brined briskets was pretty much in the same boat. Those briskets weren't very fatty and tasted like it had been cooked in dark soy sauce - which was pretty much the only flavour in them.

White chocolate nori ice cream from Tom's Palette

We haven't been in this area for a while and since we did, it was also a time to get re-acquainted with whatever's current news at Tom's Palette.

So we had this white chocolate nori (seaweed) which was unusual to say the least. There was a little bit of that umami from the seaweed that balanced off the rich sweetness from the white chocolate. Which was a good thing because for without, the white chocolate would have been much too cloying after a few mouthfuls. Interesting flavour with enough seaweed to match the creamy sweetness. I was glad that there was another chocolate sorbet which we used to "cleanse the palate" so to speak before getting back to more of the white chocolate.

Noodle Café, Golden Mile Complex

This hole in the wall (#B1-08 Golden Mile Complex, 5001 Beach Road, tel : +65 3113 2003) joint for Thai boat noodles was a good find at the basement of Golden Mile Complex. While one cannot reasonably expect the same standards that can be gotten in Thailand, Noodle Café's rendition wasn't too shabby. We had some noodles and a couple of sides.

The first thing that reached our table was a bowl of fried lard.

Noodles come in regular portions or small ones. These are the small ones which are good for about two big mouthfuls. The above comes with broth. I could taste coconut in it and the rest was a little too complicated to describe. While the broth was not what I would have hoped for, it was pretty satisfying.

The dry option kicked ass from their chilli paste and ground peanuts. I got the bowl with beef liver. I should come back for the full sized portion of one of these because it was so damned good.

Because the portions of the previous bowls were really small, we moved on to a regular bowl of their tom yum egg noodle. The bowl came with ground peanuts, a handful of boiled bean sprouts, minced pork, a half cooked egg and a wedge of lime. Tasted like it had roasted chilli in it and the heat was respectably sweat inducing, but oddly didn't taste like tom yum at all. The whole tang and lemongrass thing was missing. Still, it stood on its own as a tasty bowl of spicy noodles that'll send tingles up the scalp.

Revisiting Cugini

We remembered liking Cugini and chance whisked us back. Three years sure went by fast.

Things seemed to have changed though. The menu got streamlined so it wasn't so much fun looking through wondering what else to try next. The people felt different and the food seemed to have changed as well. Did management change too?

One of the things we thought was exceptional was their calamari. The operative word here is 'was'. Today's order didn't quite feel like that exceptional one that we had the first time. I didn't use the wrong verb. I meant feel, not taste. Which is the sum of the experience with the calamari rather than being just about the flavour.

I got duped into getting their regolare pizza because prawns, Gorgonzola and Italian sausage sounded good. My mind was assuming Gorgonzola piccante but they were using Gorgonzola dolce - the younger creamier variety which doesn't pack as much pungence. Couldn't tell that the cheese was in the pizza.

The only real gripe I had was for the crust of the pizza. It was so thin that it tore up as we tried to lift up a slice. So thin that it turned soggy in short order and didn't have the strength to hold even just tomato paste. 

Asked for extra Gorgonzola and it didn't help very much with the blue cheese flavours.

There was a risotto alla Siciliana which had lobster, asparagus and green apples. The flavours were pretty nice. It wasn't as lobster-ly as I had thought but that didn't preclude it from being tasty. I'm pretty sure there was some form of cream or cheese though.

Honestly, there was a let down because of the pizza and the calamari. We had expected those to be their solid performers. While I'm not writing Cugini off for the time being, my impression of them has undoubtedly diminished.

Kam's Roast, Pacific Plaza

This would be the much hyped about Kam's Roast (#01-04/05/06/07 Pacific Plaza, 9 Scotts Road), offshoot of the Michelin starred Kam's Roast Goose in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Obviously, the name of the restaurant doesn't have the word 'goose' because the AVA does not allow the geese from China they are using to be imported. Geese has been replaced with duck here.

We happened to be in the vicinity looking for dinner and I decided to walk over to see if there was a crowd. It happened that there wasn't a queue so I thought I'd lay my notions of this place to rest.

By the way, I'd advise anyone interested in their shrimp roe noodles to give them a pass. If I had to make comparisons knowing where these guys came from, this was just pathetically embarrassing. Even the local Imperial Treasure beats this hands down. The portion of the roe was just sad and it wasn't worth half of the $7.80 that they charged.

So in Singapore, it's Kam's roast duck. It is understandably not in the same league as the roast goose in Hong Kong which was fattier and more flavourful. While this was a nicely done roast with tender meat, the same could be said for a number of other roast ducks in town as well. Thus the decision to use ducks might have reduced Kam's allure since we are pretty sure that we can find something similar as good elsewhere and sometimes, without paying as much. 

Kam's wanton mee was Crystal Jade standard. By that, I had meant that it wasn't on par with the ones that one can quite easily get in Hong Kong. Not the texture of those noodles nor the wanton which were not very flavourful. And the funny thing is, I hear that the noodles are imported. Hong Kong Wanton Noodle makes better wanton mee.

What was outstanding (and rather pricey) was their toro char siew. A belly cut of barbecued pork where the most of it was actually fat - the type that disintegrates in your mouth diffusing its meaty aroma along with the sticky caramelized sweetness from the glaze. One must love fat and pork to enjoy this.

I had inadvertently looked back at Kam's in Hong Kong feeling that this local shop is a 'trying to be' rather than an 'is'. For all the publicity and their unabashed eagerness to exploit the Michelin branding, I had expected better.

Tiong Bahru Hainanese Boneless Chicken Rice (中峇鲁海南起骨雞飯), Tiong Bahru Market Food Centre

I gather that this stall (#02-82 Tiong Bahru Market and Food Centre, 30 Seng Poh Road) is pretty popular judging from the queue. What's more, this shop had been awarded the Bib Gourmand by Michelin last year. Now I'm not sure if I've ever had chicken rice from them before but from this first impressions, I quite like this. The rice had managed to be both light yet quite flavourful at the same time. Chicken was tender, decently done but nothing very much out of the ordinary. Still, this looks to be a reliable place for me to get a plate when the craving hits.

What is different about these guys are the salted vegetables that they add on the side and an accompanying bowl of salted vegetable soup instead of the usual tasteless cabbage broth most people do.

Nanjing Impressions (南京大牌檔), Plaza Singapura

Here's something that's different from the usual Chinese eateries that have been opening up. Nanjing Impressions (#04-46-51, Plaza Singapura, 68 Orchard Road, tel : +65 6352 7877) is a chain of restaurants from China and they've apparently picked our sunny island for their first venture overseas. The food from what I gather is suppose to be a representation of what's heritage of the cuisine from Nanjing. Which while I know nothing about, was interesting to explore.

This was known as Madam Chiang's Nutritious Beauty Porridge. We ordered it because it sounded interesting and little did we realised that it might have been dessert. Anyways, we were informed by the wait staff that this need not be treated as a dessert. The porridge (millet maybe) is cooked in soy milk with lily bulbs and Chinese yam. It's a little sweet and the flavour was aromatically rice-y. It turned out to be one of those things which we told ourselves we'd order again if we came back.

I think this was called Chilled Drunken Virgin Crayfish. Not the crayfish that is known in this part of the world, but rather crawfish or yabbies. I don't know how the virgin part of their name came about them but these weren't too bad if one didn't minded those things that made you work for relatively little meat. The bugs have been marinated with Nu'er Hong - a Chinese wine. And plums were involved too I think because I could taste them both.

These are lotus roots stuffed with glutinous rice and slow cooked in pear honey. This was again something sweet. And chilled. What we liked was that the sweetness was manageable and not overbearing.

I ordered this because it said shrimp roe custard on the menu. Tasted like savoury steamed egg pudding flavoured with the head fat from prawns. Nice.

We decided on some salted duck (盐水鸭) because these are suppose to be a thing from Nanjing. If word were to be believed, this was prepared with a 400 year old recipe with an arduous 10 step process.  It's not bad. The meat had a hearty bite like meat should and was flavoured with some spices. But the complexities had eluded me at this point because we've been eating a bunch of prior stuff that were already pretty flavourful.

This was chilled julienned bean curd, not noodles. The menu mentioned that it was sesame scented but I wasn't getting any of it. There was a lot of flavour from the soy based sauce and dried shrimp. Refreshing and slurpy smooth would be the right words for them.

And some sweet spring plum yellow wine which tasted very much like that marinade of those crawfish that we had. I'll need to remember to pick something else the next time. The alcohol content in this drink was supposed to be very low. Lower than the usual lager kind of low but it warmed the body pretty fast.

Hot mentai cream soba from Nadai Fujisoba Ni-Hachi

This was the “soup” version of the mentai soba from Nadai Fujisoba Ni-Hachi. Previously we had the mazesoba which was the “dry” bowl. This broth was initially slightly viscous and I’m venturing a guess that it’s actually mentaiko cream mixed in their regular soba broth rather than just mentaiko cream alone. Not like what I had imagined. Halfway through the bowl, that little viscosity was gone.

I’m liking how they did the mentai broth for this because it wasn’t overly rich and at the same time, it was sufficiently flavourful of the roe. I liked it enough to slurp up till almost the last drop. The only comparison I would make of this to the mazesoba bowl was that this broth wouldn’t really bring much flavour to the soba because of the mentioned lack of viscosity (hence no hold onto noodles) as opposed to the latter where the noodles were full of mentaiko flavour.

I can see that both were meant to be approached differently and I couldn’t say which one I preferred more. Perhaps the one with broth for those cold days and the mazesoba for regular ones.

BBQ Station has become BBQ Box

Wow, these fellas have certainly upgraded since the last time we were here. The furnishing and decor have gotten an overhaul from a relatively frills free looking Chinese skewer joint to something that was slightly steampunk-ish. Yeah, you did read steampunk.

These days each table is provided a wooden bbq box, albeit heated by just tea lights under aluminium foil to keep your skewers warm.

Here’s a look at some of those skewers. Obviously we had ordered much more but it was a pain in the ass trying to get a picture for each small batch that arrived. The pig intestines and pig skin were delicious. So was the shishamo even though it hadn’t as much eggs as we were hoping for. That cumin certainly transformed things. Interestingly, there were also squid beaks!

These were their lamb ribs. Pretty decent and nicely dry rubbed with the spices but obviously not the same standards as those from Restaurant Manchurian. 

We had scallops too. While it looked a little sad, they actually tasted pretty good. The shellfish was not overcooked at all and certainly didn’t taste stale while the spicy sauce on the shell was kickass spicy. That kind of kickass spicy that was also savoury, flavourful and would be excellent accompaniment to steamed white rice.

The Prosperity Burger is back at McD

McD has been doing these prosperity burger for annual Chinese New Year season for some time now. It's the only time of the year where one can get the gloopy, messy, sweet and peppery sauced sandwich which comes with the sidekick of curly fries. Does anyone still remember that it all began with the humble $2 McPepper? I'm not sure if I'm imagining things but the one this year seemed a little sweeter than before and some of the edge from that black paper sauce seems to have been whittled away.