Kampong Chicken Eating House, Outram Road

Another chicken rice shop (247 Outram Road, tel : +65 6221 2522) we've been passing by on numerous occasions telling ourselves we'd try them. That obviously had happened and we're kind glad we did because this was not bad.

We had a side of stir fried sweet potato leaves with....well, that's either their sambal or hae bi hiam. Either ways, there's spicy dried shrimps in there which totally made the dish. I would come back for this. This by the way was served from the kitchen in surprising quick order. Less than 5 minutes after we had ordered. Hmmm......

To get a better sensing of their range, we had an order of boiled chicken livers on the side. Creamy chicken livers they served, doused in sesame oil and light soy sauce. Not bad at all.

Those yellow skin are a characteristic of kampong chicken if you didn't already know. Meat's pretty tender and it doesn't taste very different from regular chicken if anyone was wondering. It's just a leaner and smaller bird with more intense looking skin.

On the side, those braised eggs had quite a bit of flavour having absorbed all the braising liquid. The rice that they had was nicely flavoured, clean tasting and not overly greasy. 

Didn't have any particularly strong feelings about the chilli. It's zesty and had a bit more ginger than I normally prefer. But that's definitely not a deal breaker for me.

More from Imperial Treasure Fine Teochew Cuisine

It's normally difficult to pass on the dim sum on the weekends at this place so we got a little something on the side plus dim sum so that we could have both. Their braised cuts of offal/meat were tasty as usual. Today was pig's tongue, some duck and duck liver. All nice. Thinly sliced for tenderness and to pick up the spiced braising sauce.

We tried a kuey teow dish which presumably is what's also commonly referred to as chai por kuey teow from restaurants that do Teochew food. This was more refined, had a lighter hand with the salt and altogether pretty enjoyable even though I could barely detect any of the preserved radish bits in there. Pretty sure the bits of deep fried pork lard helped.

A pizza with prosciutto di Parma, burrata and figs from CiBO

The menu at CiBO doesn't change. At least it looked like it didn't change. There's nothing in particular that they do that's outstanding that it gives us a reason to come back much. They do have specials and in my opinion, they aren't very special most of the time. But I got suckered back by a pizza with prosciutto di Parma, figs and burrata. A crusted configuration of meaty saltiness, a light fruitiness from the figs/tomato paste and creaminess from the cheese.

Meatsmith Western BBQ, Makansutra Glutton Bay

I was intrigued by this stall (#01-15G Makansutra Gluttons Bay, 8 Raffles Avenue) after reading about them because it was a venture by Dave Pynt of Burnt Ends and the name of the stall was a also reference to his other joint Meat Smith - both of which are from Loh Lik Peng's Unlisted Collections.

I hadn't been to Glutton Bay for years. I didn't think much of them the last time I was here. It looked a little better these days. Prices have gone up and it still felt like it's meant for tourists.

Before I digress further - this stall was neither Meat Smith nor Burnt Ends. While those represented higher end barbeque somewhat and the obligatory name dropping had already been done, one shouldn't expect a similar standard. It's a hawker stall in a expensive touristy spot trying to do better than the regular western food stall.

The salted egg chicken chop was pretty good though. Not going to comment on the quality of the salted egg sauce beyond saying that it's not bad. The chicken was properly grilled with the prerequisite char aroma and some juiciness. Garlic rice was okay. Those sour that seeped from the pickled cucumbers actually elevated the rice. Too bad about the coriander. No idea why they had even thought that coriander would have made this any better.

Didn't think much of their suckling pig. I wouldn't eat this again. Meat was a stiff, dry and tasted like it was prepared hours ago to be reheated on serving. The texture of the skin was more hard than crisp. Nothing like the properly done Spanish or Chinese versions. Glutinous rice was okay. I found myself missing the ones from Ikea while eating this though. My thoughts speak hidden volumes. *gasp*

Since Makansutra's review was pretty positive, I will only attribute this experience of the food as either inconsistency or incompetency.

PS. Cafe, Raffles City

PS Cafe has a spiffy location at Raffles City (#03-37, 252 North Bridge Road, tel : +65 6708 9288). We were here for a quick dinner. That dish on top was their Szechuan chilli pepper chicken fried rice. Didn't taste like fried rice to me. The gong bao sauce didn't pack much heat. While I don't know much about cooking, I'm pretty qualified to comment that those chicken that they used would have turned out much better if they had been stir fried rather than boiled. Nothing was caramelized and the cashews weren't toasted; the result was that much of flavour that made gong bao chicken simply didn't exist. While it didn't taste bad, it did feel like an imitation of a Chinese dish that felt stereotypically American Chinese.

But maybe that was their point.

Their hae mee was still outstanding like we remembered it. Probably the only food from this region that they did right by.

Aburi-EN, Guoco Tower

The group En Holdings which runs Aburi-EN (#B2-09 Guoco Tower, 1 Wallich Street, tel : +65 6214 3570) are probably disorganized or are hiding something rather than not being proud of themselves. They run a slew of restaurants like En Dining Bar, Z'en, Monster Curry and En Sakabar to name a few so they've got to be doing something right. How all these restaurants were even related was information that took a little sniffing online.

But enough of that. Aburi-EN mostly does grilled kurobuta and Miyazaki wagyu donburi. That above was their premium yukke jyu which the menu described with lightly torched marinated wagyu strips. Gimmicky and we fell for it. Could taste the wagyu if the meat was eaten by itself. With the rice and anything else, it somehow magically crosses the too-much-flavour line where none of the wagyu-ism mattered because it couldn't be discerned. For what they charged, the yukke portion felt stingy. 

But their kurobuta hoho don was delicious. Most of it because of those nicely grilled fatty and tender slices of pork jowl. The kind that unimaginative people all over like to call "melt in your mouth" because they still think that they can appear marginally more knowledgeable that way. Of course it doesn't really melt in the mouth. It's meat. The fat to meat ratio isn't quite unbalance to that point. But one could feel that parts of it were dissolving away.

That's the sumibi tori yaki. The picture on the menu looked golden brown with nice looking burnt ends. This one looked carcinogenic. It even tasted carcinogenic. In a strangely addictive manner from that grilled infused aroma. I'd order this again.