Old Nonya, Maxwell Food Centre

We were getting dinner from Maxwell Food Centre over the weekend. Old Nonya's (#01-04 Maxwell Food Centre, 1 Kadayanallur Steet, tel : +65 8366 9311) chicken rendang with rice looked appealing.

Nice. The rendang was nutty and lemak - not much heat but the spices in the rempah had a good balance within all the rich creaminess which was delicious with the white rice. Their tangy achar tasted like the ones my late grandmother used to make and I liked it.

Hammee's - from a cheeseburger experience to a nasi ayam goreng experience

Talk about change. Hammee's no longer makes burgers. Or at least they aren't making them now. They did mention that it is not the end yet for those burger. Meanwhile, they've unveiled something that has been working on the side for some time apparently - nasi ayam goreng a.k.a. fried chicken rice. Came with an updated stall sign to match.

I wanted to leave things with 'it's not bad' but I thought that sounded a little detached. I enjoyed it. 

One got to choose between chicken rice or coconut rice - mine was the latter. Needed a bit more salt but otherwise pretty well done with the coconut flavour. Fried chicken had a nice crisp turmeric batter that sealed in the juices in the meat. Loved the dried shrimp flavour from their home made sambal. At least I thought it was dried shrimp. Achar also nice. Will come back again to try their chicken rice.

 

Chocolate Whopper from Burger King

A colleague suggested BK for lunch today and the first thought was that I'll probably end up with their Ultimate Angus Double Mushroom Swiss. Then I saw this on the splash page of their order kiosk and immediately decided this might be more interesting to try instead.

It's a Whopper minus mayo and lettuce. I've also just noticed that their sesame bun doesn't have that much sesame. Looked cheap. There's some chocolate sauce drizzled in. Don't know what kind but it didn't taste or look like the watery Hershey's that normally gets used. Didn't taste bad with the light chocolate sweetness. That being said, this has to be taken with the understanding that BK's Whopper had never been good since ages ago so they're still that.

More stuff from Treasures Yi Dian Xin (一点心)

Breakfast-y Cantonese food for dinner at Treasures Yi Dian Xin (一点心). That's what's been happening lately. We ordered their pork glutinous rice dumpling for the first time. 

The dumpling was very tender. Filled with mung beans, bits of pork, pork fat and chestnuts. Deliciously savoury with the sauce that came with it.

Their bbq pork collar was okay-ish. The meat was marinated that the flavour from the marinade was mostly it along with some of the caramelized bits. It wasn't bad tasting, just won't be ordering them again.

There's mushroom dumplings. Good mushroom-y flavour going on. As much as we enjoyed them, I felt the ones from Imperial Treasure Fine Teochew Cuisine were better tasting.

A lontong special for breakfast from IAAI Malay Food

It's not a special from the stall per se. Just their lontong to which I added a couple of epok epok because I wanted to have both and not have to choose between the two. What I also wanted was to be able to dip those puffs into their hae bi flavoured lontong gravy for that extra flavour.

Trying the strong dashi broth at Enishi

Enishi has changed. Shaken up a little. Seems that they're doing 100 bowls a day now. I wanted to try the stronger dashi broth from them because we picked the regular option previously and thought a bit more intensity in the flavour would be great. This stronger broth was not bad. But that's not all to the story. Enishi has really changed. The knee jerk was to attribute it to the fact that the Japanese chef wasn't/is no longer around and the current person just did things differently. 

How exactly was it different you might wonder? Different enough that I regretted ordering the 'special' bowl for the extra ingredients.

Charshu was disappointing. I upsized my bowl to the 'special' imagining that the charshu would be as I recalled, the tender and crumbing in your mouth experience. This was thick sliced and hard. Wasn't sure if the long torching session had anything to do with it. I tried to finish it but in the end, I had to leave that bit behind because it simply wasn't worth it. Duck was tender and chewy. The rest of the bowl was fine. Today's dan dan noodles has crushed peanuts in it which I didn't recall from our last bowl. Seemed that they've decided to go crunchy instead of just smooth - like peanut butter.