The Daily Cut, Tanjong Pagar Centre

I've seen this The Daily Cut (#B2-16 Tanjong Pagar Centre, 7 Wallich Street) around but haven't actually tried their food until recently. I guess it would make things easy to just describe them as one of those places like Grain Traders. Albeit one that is a little less expensive, bigger portion for similar prices but less flavoursome. Service comes with a look like I owed them big time. 

I don't mind eating these if I'm in the vicinity but I'll definitely pass on the beef for protein the next time. They obviously didn't care that the meat they chose to put out were tough and sinewy.

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.