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. 

CiBO Italiano, River Valley Road

CiBO (#01-01 Loft @ Nathan, 428 River Valley Road, tel : +65 6385 1310) I have gathered is run by the folks from Donna Carmela. An Italian deli/bistro incidentally similar to what the defunct Riciotti used to do years ago.

The menu has antipasti plates that one can choose from what they're selling at the counter. I hope to see some rotation there. Those mini peppers stuffed with goat's cheese were quite good. A nice catch hovering between the aroma of the peppers, pungence from the cheese and some sweetness. The baby octopuses were oddly kinda stiff.

There's a sandwich on the menu called puccia - apparently a savoury flatbread indigenous to the region of Puglia in Italy. This felt/looked/tasted like foccacia; stuffed with rocket, mortadella and some pickled peppers. The menu doesn't quite specify what goes into them so I'm guessing it's what they feel like for the day.

One of the uncommon occasions that vongole is featured in this blog. I love clams, I just never thought very well of vongole that's done locally from past experiences and that has perhaps rubbed off onto me for a very long time. This one was quite good even though the there was quite a bit of the residual tang from the perhaps, generous use of wine. Clams were plump and tasty. Wouldn't mind eating again.

When we ordered the carciofi fritti, we didn't expect the portions to be so big. While I'm no expert, this item felt Roman - something that's not such a common sight around these parts. And it was a lot easier to eat than they looked. The fried batter was thin and we don't get fresh artichokes so quite often around here.

Tiramisu here is ok. Not a bad one, but not particularly memorable neither.

Ju Hao, Tiong Bahru Plaza

I first noticed Ju Hao (#02-112 Tiong Bahru Plaza, 302 Tiong Bahru Road) when I saw them at Square 2 at Novena some time ago. From what I read, they were previously operating in the food court at Lavender and had worked with MOF to reinvent their business. 

The first thing that struck me while looking at the menu was the reminder of Din Tai Fung. There were enough similarities that one could be forgiven if they were to think them a clone of DTF. With the number of parallels that could have been drawn, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the kitchen people actually came from DTF. 

They are even priced quite similarly.

Here's some garlic spicy pork with cucumber thing. These aren't bad, but it's not exactly very mention worthy either. It's a lot less spicy than it looked.

Behold that pork chop fried rice. Doesn't it just look DTF? Well actually, there was a difference. Ju Hao is less heavy handed on the five spice marinade on their pork chops. I'm considering this a serious alternative though.

Even the xiao long bao looks similar, but one can tell that the DTF ones are made with more delicate skin and greater finesse with the folds. These above are actually salted yolk xiao long bao and they're pretty good. Blows the salted yolk sauce shit that's been going around out of the water.

That's some three treasure signature noodle. Not very tasty at all and their beef briskets were kinda tough. That "special" sauce with the noodles didn't taste so special. I wonder if restaurants these days even understand what the word 'signature' means. Note to self, never order this again.