Fei Lou Porridge, Telok Blangah Crescent Market & Food Centre

Although the name goes by Fei Lou Porridge (#01-116 Telok Blangah Crescent Food Centre, 11 Telok Blangah Crescent), this shop serves much more than just porridge.

The stall does serve up a variety of porridges. This one that I had comes with ham and century egg. The texture was smooth and the flavours lightweight with a dash of soy sauce and sesame oil. Comfort food it was.

Here's some boiled cabbage with cuttlefish. This was nicely done too. The cabbage were just soft enough with a light residual crunch and the flavours of the cuttlefish permeated the dish. The only thing we didn't like were the fried shallots. It came from a plastic pack which meant that apart from a little texture, there wasn't much flavour to speak of. This dish would have been much better served without those shallots.

Fei Lou does poached chicken as well. This came on a bed of toasted peanuts which was a nice addition. The meat was pretty tender but the skin was a tad dimply and for some parts, too thick for my preferences. Decently done but otherwise, nothing to raise brows over.

I read that they were famous for their deboned fried chicken wings and since this was a first visit, we tried them out. I don't think this works for us. This was greasier than I had been hoping for and the flavour of the batter wasn't my thing. Another reminder telling us that long queues sometimes doesn't mean what we think it means.

On the side, the braised tau kee (dried bean curd sheets) with pig stomach was excellent. Both the bean curd and tripe were suitably tender from all the braising sauce.

And because there was bee hoon, we ordered some and it actually quite nice. Both with and without the chilli sauce on the side. The texture had a good bite and the flavours were present. Best of all, it didn't make me feel overly greased up.

Both proprietors of the stall looked dour, worked quietly and never did I see them speak to each other. I don't think telepathy is at play here though.

Kaiware Japanese Restaurant, TripleOne Somerset

shiro maguro don

some pretty smooth seafood dumplings

gindara mentaikoyaki

I found out about this place (#02-15 TripleOne Somerset, 111 Somerset Road, tel : +65 6735 2345) from a tip off. The location was actually where Ikkousha used be in the same building. Would not have gotten my attention to if not for that fact that I had been informed that Peter Ho - formerly of Wasabi Tei and Chikuwa Tei, runs this joint. I never understood the reasons for his patterns of running restaurants and then leaving them. But I'm not here to understand his business model. I'm just visiting for a hit of nostalgia.

There's a shiro maguro don on menu here. They only response they could give to my inquiry was oil fish but I'm pretty convinced it's escolar. So proceed to eat with caution and responsibility. The bone white slices of the fish were smooth and buttery, comparable to chutoro. There's some rather tasty seafood shu mai which I've never seen them do before and a very decent gindara mentaikoyaki to be had too. One can even get a similar cod hotpot just like the ones they used to do that came with a fantastic lemon/chilli/soy  sauce dip.

Nobu-ya (信屋), Middle Road

baigai

soy braised hijiki

 what the menu describes as grilled squid tentacles and guts

Miyazaki beef tataki 

tamagoyaki 

 buta kakuni

tempura hamo (pike eel)

tempura maitake 

suji nikomi (soy braised beef tendon stew) 

oden mori

If I had to gripe, I thought the maitake tempura had a bit too much batter and was more grease logged than I liked. That kinda robbed the mushroom of its delicate flavours. But otherwise, I think we rather enjoyed all the other food that we had at Nobu-ya (#01-05 Fortune Centre, 190 Middle Road, tel : +65 6338 3450). Special mention goes to the baigai, the rich livery broth that the squids came in and those braised pork belly that simply fell apart even from the chopstick. Will be back. 

Brrrreaaakkkfassst!

Yes please, more lontong from Kampong Corner.

Nantsuttei, Orchard Central

I had been wanting to visit Nantsuttei since they moved over to Orchard Central (#07-12/13 Central, 181 Orchard Rd, tel : +65 6337 7166) and had been planning to get myself reacquainted with their tonkotsu bowl to remind myself why I liked them so much previously. But as things went, I got suckered into ordering their spicy tomato miso bowl which ran for a limited 20 bowls a day.

On hindsight, it wasn't such a good decision. I didn't enjoy this as much as I hoped, leaving unsatisfied. The flavours were a muddle which resulted in.....well, nothing I had really recognized or expected. I certainly didn't get much tomato out of the broth and the measly slice of processed cheese didn't do really anything at all. The hard noodles were also softer than what I had been hoping for texture. I'm definitely going for the tonkotsu the next time and staying off miso for a while.

Some bites from this year's Ramadan bazaar

I hadn't visited the Ramadan bazaars for years. In retrospect, I didn't miss much in those years. Everything was pretty much the same as the last ones that I remember. There wasn't even much to look forward to to eat because little of the food stalls have changed. I could visit one of those roving pasar malam and pretty much find the same stuff for the most of it.  But here's a couple of items which we had.

These are deep fried Oreos. I had been expecting the cookies in the batter to be crunchy, but for some reasons, they were as soft as the batter. These are probably only good as a novelty snack.

The same stall that did the deep fried Oreos also did deep fried mac & cheese. The heart clogging street snack stalls might have made some progress beyond fried chicken parts after all.

This was unexpectedly tasty and it came with nacho cheese dips. I didn't think that I would enjoy it but I did.