Revisiting Wicked Garlic and maybe this is it

Here's a second go at The Wicked Garlic. The aglio olio has very little garlic flavour. The bacon they used didn't taste so much like bacon as it did crumpled strips of pork belly. Where's all the salt and smoke? I recall (albeit from a long while ago) that even Pasta Mania made much better aglio olio. At this price point, pasta from Saizeriya blows this out of the water. 

Their penne al granchio tasted better than it looked. The tomato cream sauce isn't Valentino's or Da Paolo and neither are the portions of crab but I suppose there's a good reason why this place costs less.

That's a quattro formaggi and it would be understandable if no one recognized it for what it was. It looked uniform. Taleggio the menu said. Gorgonzola the menu said. Mozzarella the menu said. Goat cheese the menu said. I tasted none of those. The flavour was just generic cheese and I couldn't tell what type it was from taste. For a four cheese, this was just sad.

Slow roasted ribeye from Marché

A roast by any other name would taste......the picture in front of the grill station at Marché showed the regular ribeye which they've always been doing and that kept me wondering what was the difference between that and their regular steak. We eventually figured it's the prime rib that they had on their board. For $19.90, I couldn't complain. Reasonably tender and well seasoned. I know it's not fair to compare so I won't. Heh!

The green goddess beneath Parma

No need for me to advertise where this came from.

It's the green goddess inside.

Packaging is obvious.

Used half the packet on the pizza.

In retrospect, I should have used the entire pack of 150g for more flavour from the prosciutto. Now I know.

Revisiting the Red Sparrow

We enjoyed the food from Red Sparrow from the last visit. So we came back.

The restaurant whips up a deliciously flavourful seafood fried rice. The portions aren't big for what they charged but there's scallops, some crab meat and shrimps in it. A little greasy but big on flavour. Would eat it again.

Their bún chả featured pretty impressive grilled and charred meatballs and pork belly from Berkshire pig. Not something traditionally found in the streets of Vietnam I'm sure but the pig they used isn't the talking point here. The sweet glaze the used was kickass. It even made the broth taste like spicy bak kwa. Would have loved for this to have more vegetables and rice noodles though.

Xào bông kim châm - stir fried daylily flower. Tasted leek-y with a hint of bitterness along with a deliciously savouriness from the sauce they concocted for the stir fry. One of those things to be had with steamed white rice.

Guess what they have on tap here?

Chico Loco, Amoy Street

Chico Loco's (102 Amoy Street, tel  : +65 9738 7828) a Mexican styled rotisserie run by The Loco Group - the amigos who gave us Lucha Loco and Super Loco. From what I've read, one gets hormone-, antibiotic-, cage-free 42 day old chickens sourced from our neighbour Johor Bahru.

I just realized that we had been ordering elote every visit to the Loco restaurants. To their credit, they were nicely done. Corn was sweet and juicy pairing with saltiness from the cotija cheese. On top of that, a bit of heat from the spices along with citrus from the squeeze of lime. Very likeable combinations.

Chicken's not bad. The bird's been marinated and it showed in the meat. Spice rub/crust was not bad. All in all, it was good enough that the dips that they were selling was almost (I'll explain why it's almost) unnecessary. But we still enjoyed their chimichurri yoghurt (say raita-ish!) and the habenero mango.

Nicely done leg of lamb as well. Couldn't tell what was the gravy they used but it worked. Like the chicken, it did well enough on its own without any of the dips.

Got their Chico slaw because we needed some vegetables in our diet. Texturally loaded with different types of crunches from both the nuts, fruits and vegetables. Something in it oddly reminded me of chicken rice. Now was that sesame or chicken oil? The menu mentioned spiced macadamia granola - I detected what might have been candied macadamia and walnuts. Loved those nuts in the slaw. And the mint too.

This was where the dip came in handy. The rotisserie fat rice which possibly had the drippings from the roasts but were lacking in salt. Not so nice to eat until I doused some of the habanero mango dip into them. Speaking of which I liked that habanero mango sauce.  

King of Fried Rice, Golden Mile Tower

We've been coming across mentions of this DTF-esque fried rice from King of Fried Rice (#B1-56 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road) for a while. Amusingly audacious name. Finally got to try them out. They don't really do anything except for fried rice and to address the unasked question, theirs do look and taste like the stuff you get from Din Tai Fung without costing as much. 

Service was slow though. Even though we were fourth on the queue, we still had to wait about half an hour after ordering. We heard that the guy in the kitchen only fries small batches at a time to maintain quality.

The one with pork chop was the egg fried rice. Pork chop tasted like it had more five spice powder (not my thing) and was juicer than than the ones from DTF. With a little finesse, the plastic spoons they provided could actually cut through those pork chops. Tobiko was an add on.

The other plate is XO fried rice with shrimps. Nice flavour coming from the XO sauce. Shrimps were firm and pretty good quality.