Ye Shang Hai Teochew Porridge (夜上海潮洲粥), Lengkok Bahru

This was a lot of food and rather inexpensive for both the quality and quantity that we had at Ye Shang Hai (55 Lengkok Bahru, #01-387). Clearly, there are corners in the vicinity of places I pass by with some frequency that I haven't discovered. In case you were wondering, the spread fed five.

Note to self - the curry was watery and beware the shreds of ginger in the minced pork.

minced pork with fermented black beans

stewed cabbage

stewed pig intestines

eggplant

some steamed fish

fried chicken

hae bi hiam (spicy minced dried shrimp)

stewed hairy gourd

lion's head meatball

luncheon meat

braised/stewed pig skin

stir fried egg

tau kee (stewed dried beancurd skin)

tau kwa (stewed beancurd)

tau pok (stewed dried beancurd)

Uruguay Black Angus ribeye from Astons

So Astons (#04-03 The Cathay, 2 Handy Road, tel : +65 6887 5889) has Uruguayan Black Angus ribeye on the menu. Grass fed meat and apparently a premium export from the country that accounts for more than a billion dollars of bovine meat sales per year. It was a seasonal item and I was curious enough to try it. 

Warning bells should have gone off when it arrived with that chunk of rosemary butter. The reason that extra fat and flavour was needed was because the meat didn't have much of those. It tasted bland compared to their regular ribeye and wasn't as tender. Well, now I know for sure these aren't my thing.

A tai shioyaki teishoku and shishamo from Nakajima Suisan

If my memory serves, there was some 25th anniversary thing going on and Nakajima Suisan was offering grilled sea bream because of it. It was the most expensive set they had on the non-regular menu and also the largest whole grilled fish they've ever had on teishoku. It's not bad if one didn't mind the bones and tasty slimy bits.

I've been curious about some of the additional grilled items they have started offering in recent times. One of those were the shishamo and while it might not have been visually apparent, they were filled with roe unlike many cheaper places that served barren fishes out of season. Smoky and even juicy these things were. 

Omakase Burger @ Picnic

We hadn't had Omakase Burger (#03-15 Wisma Atria, 435 Orchard Road) in a while and I thought it would be a good idea to re-visit our local artisanal-bunned-smash-grilled-secret-blended-burger with American cheese for comparison since the memory from the joints in the US of A were still fresh. Somewhat. 

It's still as tasty as I remember. The short of it was that Omakase Burger would be a legit competitor as far as the burger went in terms of flavour. The buns were still not holding up very well with the juices though. By the way, did their burgers become bigger?

What's not to be overlooked was that they were noticeably more expensive. This double cheese burger was already $22.85 before tax.

A taste of home

I was looking forward to Hainanese curry rice so one of the first things I got myself after returning was a packet from the stall at Beo Crescent. Such a specific craving it was amongst so many things I could have missed. Braised cabbage, fried egg, pork chops and curried squid ladled over with their curry concoction and dark soy sauce. Yummy!

The Stinking Rose, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

Faced with the prospect of seeking alternative dinner plans, The Stinking Rose (55 North La Cienega Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90211, tel : +310 652 7673), a garlic themed restaurant came up as a suggestion. As it turned out, all of us liked garlic. What coincidence! 

While waiting, we filled up on bread and beer with their garlic rose relish - the latter a pretty darned good concoction of chopped garlic and parsley with salt and vinegar in olive oil.

Since we were prepared to be garlick-ed up for the night, we got ourselves a portion of their bagna cauda - roasted garlic in extra virgin olive oil and anchovies. Those garlic were sweet and just slightly pungent. Made an excellent spread since they were also pretty soft after all that roasting.

Made also good eating with even more bread along with the garlic rose relish.

Almost everything on menu was supposed to be flavoured with garlic. I couldn't taste any of it from their chilled asparagus with blue cheese bits. But I liked them because they were tender without being fibrous and of course, those blue cheese. 

More munching came in the form of fried calamari. These were crispy and had a good squid-y chew.

Here's a garlic prime rib which featured some of the roasted garlic cloves on top of the meat. That prime rib wasn't too bad. Probably not as tender as Lawry's across the road but I couldn't complain.

We couldn't leave the restaurant without giving their garlic ice cream a go even though we were stuffed. The topping if you were wondering wasn't some roasted/burnt garlic sauce of some sort. It's salted caramel. The garlic came from the ice cream and the flavour came through without being excessive or weird. It's actually kinda nice.