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.