Sausage McMuffin with misshapen egg from McD

McD as a business in its delivery is consistent. That, is understandably a need to manage a global franchise of many thousands of outlets. What's also consistent is how withered their product looks compared to the pictures on their menu. What's not consistent was an egg that I got recently when I up-pattied a sausage muffin with egg. The egg looked....for a lack of a better word, mutated in the the context of McD and the usual disc shaped egg that they slip into their muffins.

Red Sparrow, Dempsey Road

Red Guardian, Crimson Dynamo, Omega Red, Black Widow; all these "reddish" names (except Reddington) remind me of those old Russian/commie code names for superhumans and assassins. Like the Red Army. Definitely Red Sparrow (#01-18,  11 Dempsey Road, tel : +65 6776 6118) as well. As if the connotations weren't already enough, there was even an old Soviet Union sickle and hammer emblazoned across at the back of their bar.

But enough of communists and imagined Russian super humans from the dusty pages of comics. We're doing Vietnamese today. We began with a glass of their chanh muối - a hot drink made with preserved/salted lime. 

I struggle with pronunciation of Vietnamese words even for the food. So today, we learnt that the bánh xèo has an enunciation that sounds something like 'bun shao'. Their pancake by the way, was huge. Largest we've ever had in our limited experience and stuffed with mushrooms, bean sprouts, pork belly and shrimp. The skin was nicely greased, light and very crisp at the edges like paper thosai.

Red Sparrow has possibly the largest selection of rice paper rolls on menu we've come across. We tried their bò bía which featured something like lup cheong with omelette and stewed turnip - very much like our local poh piah. Liked it. What we didn't see coming was that it had been the pan fried omelette tied brought the roll together with its flavour.

The other roll which they had which I thought was outstanding was their cá cuốn. The grilled snapper and fermented anchovies had already killed it. The tangy and mildly spicy pineapple dip on the side pedestal-ized it as something I'd come back for.

This dish as we learnt was stir fried Tonkin jasmine flower. Kinda like those cowslip creepers that we used to get in Bangkok. Stir fried with shrimps and bean sprouts in what might have been oyster sauce and lots of black pepper. One of those things that one just had to go with steamed rice.

We had a soup called canh cá thì la. The menu mentioned it had tomato but we saw slices of starfruit. The other items in it was a bouncy fish paste and lots of dill. Very nice.

Ordered some scallops which were sweet. Wished there was a bit more of the char to round it up a notch though.

I mentioned steamed rice earlier.

So here be my virgin experience with the cà phê trứng - Vietnamese egg coffee. Egg yolk was sweeten and beaten in to a froth, kinda like a sabayon which would be layered over what I thought was a Vietnamese espresso. Not bad. 

Mixed beef kuey teow from Gubak Kia

I might have gone a little overboard with the peanuts there but the stall was closing up soon for the long weekend so why waste them right? Anyways, I liked this dry kuey teow from Gubak Kia. Wished they were a bit more generous with the mixed beef parts though. If I had to pick what I thought to be the better bowl, I'm pretty sure I enjoyed the Empress Place bowl a bit more. What ultimately made a difference between this guys versus Empress Place and MooTeow were the peanuts.

Getting grilled cheese and hotdog from Five Guys

So we're back at Five Guys. This time with a cheese dog and a grilled cheese sandwich where we've added a beef patty. Hotdog's pretty salty and not particularly memorable. But that nicely browned and appropriately greasy grilled cheese....I'm coming back for.

Today's strawberry and vanilla shake. Another day another flavour.

River Valley Nasi Lemak, Lucky Plaza

Came across this stall (#B1-99/101 Lucky Plaza, 304 Orchard Road) that is opened in the morning early enough for breakfast in one of those uncommon times we were in Lucky Plaza early enough for breakfast. I'm guessing by their name that they used to operate somewhere off River Valley in the past.

The nasi lemak was okay. I felt that the standards of their rice aren't great just like everyone else's. Drumstick was dry and sinewy. Otah's actually not bad. Ditto for the dry-ish potato patty thingy (begedil?). Egg's very thin, sambal's sweet and the fish was more crisp than meat. It's not bad that I wouldn't mind eating again if I'm here but I'm not coming back specially for this.

Alijiang (阿里疆) Silk Road Cuisine, VivoCity

These guys (#03-11B VivoCity, 1 Harbour Front Walk, tel : +65 6252 4979) are relatively new and the menu from appearances is focused on Silk Road Cuisine. If I had to summarize into laymen's terms, north western China/Muslim/Middle Eastern would be pretty accurate no matter how one looked at it. I'm pretty sure that there are influences from other parts of Asia that they didn't bother to mention as part of their marketing as well.

I was interested because this meant that the food from the regions of Chinese Muslim regions like Xinjiang would be represented.

Li Guang apricot tea was kinda nice. Tasted very much like regular apricots if anyone was wondering.

We started off with some of their lamb skewers (羊肉串). Flavour was pretty good. While the quality wasn't questionable, they were also more expensive than what I'm used to seeing them go for.

There was a mushroom dish which the English translation called tricholoma matsutake. They looked like regular brown/button mushrooms but were very flavourful. An umami heavyweight that was perfumed by dill. Very delicious.

Followed by a chilled lychee and cherry tomato salad which was refreshing in its own citrus-y manner. Very nice too.

Their 'lamb in a cage' looked like it was meat from the rib. They were served in a contraption with hooks.

Then removed from the contraption and sliced into bite size pieces. Very nice lamb-y flavour with bits of fat.

We ordered some grilled pineapple to go with it and it was sweet and delicious as well from the grilling.

We tried a dish called Xinjiang specialty rice. It was rice cooked in a pot on order after some yellow peppers, carrots, onions and bits of lamb were sizzled in oil. Not much else went into it. 

There was a sweetness from the vegetables that was infused into the rice along with the fat from the lamb. I liked this.

Tried a bunch of their desserts. This rice cake was translated as 'fragrant concubine pastry'. It's not so much pastry than it was layers of sticky rice. In between the rice were cranberries and raisins. The yellow stuff on the top might have been millet. There was osmanthus honey drizzled over it. Not bad.

We also tried something called Turkish milk rice. Rice that was cooked with sweetened milk and flavoured with vanilla. Tasted like how it sounded. This stuff is good when it's hot.

Some fruity yoghurt that has a caramelized sugar top like crème brûlée. The other brown stuff tasted like Coke flavoured pop rocks. Cool. But this was not the end to the yoghurt.

The new flavour to me was what they called 'Imperial pea pastry'. Again, it wasn't a pastry but a gelatinous pudding of sorts that was made from beans. Tasted like mung bean or chick pea but lightly sweetened. Intriguing which kinda latched onto me.

When we got the bill, we were given more yoghurt. With honey. Nice.