Gyu Nami, Amoy Street Food Centre

Woah, this seems to be a relatively new stall (#02-126 Amoy Street Food Centre, 7 Maxwell Road) just a couple of units away from Taste Affair, run by a bunch of young gentlemen. The only item on the menu was their wagyu roast beef donburi which goes for $10. 

While the bowl isn't cheap by hawker centre standards, I could see how this represents a good value by the ingredients they provide and the care they took to prepare each bowl. One of the guys was carefully folding and stacking the thin slices of beef onto each bowl of rice that came out. The donburi then gets topped by a molten yolked egg and doled with some of their home made yoghurt sauce.

I enjoyed it. Don't think wagyu. Think moist and tender slices of medium done beef. Not a fatty section but I'm tasting some kind of soy marinate to make up for the flavour. Can't figure out what's in the yoghurt sauce though. Egg yolk made an awesome dip for the slices of beef. There's some kind of tare that they ladle over the rice. I thought that sweetness wasn't necessary but I'm not complaining.

Lentil soup, blue cheese sauce steak and more from Huber's

Here's another trip down to the butcher. Which meant another stopover at their bistro.

Lentil soup's pretty good. Flavoured with bits of sausages.

That's an Australian Angus fillet served with what they describe as German blue cheese sauce. I never asked what was that German blue cheese but I thought this tasted a little different from what had in mind because it was slightly sweet rather than just salty. In retrospect, I didn't mind it at all. I was happy with the steak. In fact, I mean to return and have another go someday and also perhaps ask them what cheese it was that they used for the sauce.

We ordered a pastrami sandwich off the menu. Apparently what they have isn't quite like the American deli styled version. There's a lot less pastrami with meat that was not as spiced up served in a dense grainy ciabatta with some truffle mayo and caramelized onions. There's a fried egg and what appeared to be obligatory pieces of lettuce. It didn't taste bad, it was not what I was looking for.

More hon maguro-ing at Kuro Maguro

Back in Kuro Maguro for a quiet weekend lunch. It seems that the menu has expanded from the last time we were here.

There's a zuke meshi which features their hon maguro akami marinated in shoyu and sesame oil over vinegared rice. That aroma and flavour from the sesame oil on those tuna slices were delicious. I could definitely come back for this.

We had a chutoro aburi meshi that came with a truffle shoyu sauce. Also on vinegared rice. That aburi could have been better done for a more robust char aroma. Still the quality of the fatty bluefin belly was apparent. While truffled stuff has been overdone in recent years, this truffled shoyu worked. 

Stir fried pork with cumin from Tian Fu Ren Jia (天府人家)

孜然猪肉

The menu has this item for chicken and beef but they were willing to do a pork version of the stir fry which was pretty good. There's a nice cumin flavour on the meat while the green chillis added a bit of heat and aroma. Liked those softened onions too. It's such a pity that there's no lamb on the menu.

Tonkotsu Pink from Tonkotsu Ikkyu from Ramen Champion

Ramen Champion has a new outlet at Clark Quay Central (#03-97/98, 6 Eu Tong Sen St) which operates a little differently from their other premises. There are actually wait staff around that take orders and deliver the food to you instead of having to wait on the buzzer to collect your own. However, this seemed to have inadvertently taken away the options that the ramen-ya ask of order preferences. At least I wasn't asked when I ordered. But then again, maybe they've decided that they're not letting you choose the strength of your broth, how much oil you want and the doneness of your noodles. Not that most of them get my preferred harigane right anyway.

So here's a refreshing dusky pink bowl of Tonkotsu Pink from Ikkyu's shop. I've had their green bowl a couple of years back. The most obvious difference apart from the colours was that the broth today had less viscosity. That tonkotsu broth - infused with blueberry and beetroot was light yet creamy. There's no berry or grassy beetroot flavour. It was just a tiny bit sweeter. I actually didn't mind that at all. And there's happiness to be found in the bowl if you finish your broth. Double happiness.

Joyden Canton, Shaw House

Joyden Canton (#04-00 Isetan Scotts, 350 Orchard Road, tel : +65 6908 3833) is part of the Joyden Concepts group, a local group which manages a few Chinese/Cantonese restaurants which bear the Joyden name. I've heard of them for a while but this would be my first visit to any of their restaurants.

These guys serve a lor mee with quail eggs. It's part of a bunch of local inspired dishes that they're doing for a limited time. The menu states that it serves 4 but if one were to order nothing else, it barely feeds two. Pretty decent rendition that got better once the vinegar and chilli paste are kicked in. My gripes include the portions and the misleading pictures on the menu which suckered us into ordering it.

This picture.

Along with the lor mee threading the local flavours is a Chinese carrot cake stir fried in rojak sauce. Not bad.

To fulfil the obligatory greens quota, we had some braised luffa with egg white and conpoy. Actually, I didn't order this just out of any obligation for having vegetables in the meal. I like these.

If I remember correctly the name of this dish was something along the lines of twiced baked egg gratin with you tiao. The fried crullers are embedded in baked eggs which was filled with vermicelli, jellyfish and some stuff which reminded me of Khong Guan lemon cream biscuits.  

What kicked ass was their "Hak Gam" (黑金) olive fried rice. I hear that those olives that they used are imported from China. The generous application of dark soya sauce and pork floss made the flavours while the minced pork and prawns that were in them barely registered. But this was very delicious. I would come back for this.

That's grilled slow-braised ribs with an aged mandarin peel sauce. There's a very good flavour from the mandarin peel in the sauce. The meat was unexpectedly lean but still fork tender. I'd eat this again.