Kyoten Japanese Cuisine, Yong Siak Street

I have mixed feelings over Kyoten Japanese Cuisine (5 Yong Siak Street, tel : +65 6223 0213). First that comes to mind was that they're pretty expensive for a representative experience. That being said, we picked their Kyoten omakase at $280. Second highest tier in terms of cost and I would assume, what they choose to deliver with us leaving up to them.

To be clear, the food's not bad. For what they charged, we weren't expecting entry level ingredients and they did deliver on that front. Ambience is pretty local, not so much Japanese-y. Or at least it was for the night we ate with raised volumes of conversation from whom appeared to be regulars in Cantonese and Hokkien punctuated by occasional hyena-ish guffaws. We were sharing the counter with a rich old uncle and a Rolex wearing ah beng character that were buying rounds of drinks for the staff.

Anyways, here're the pics. I missed out one of the ishigaki gai nigiri.  

No alcohol tonight, just iced matcha.

First of the starters was some citrus-y jellyfish and squid with roe.

Followed by uni tofu with...some shiso flower buds, dashi jelly and a tiny bit of wasabi. I couldn't taste the uni in the tofu.

The otoro appeared fast. Oily and melts mostly in the mouth as one would expect. Again, shiso flower.

There was kanpachi with a blob of house made seaweed puree. That puree was quite nice. Punchy flavour but it kinda overwhelmed the fish.

Pretty impressed by their Kumamoto abalone topped with abalone liver sauce. Both the abalone and sauce were good though the latter reminded me a bit of pureed century egg yolk that's common in pitan tofu. I liked the tender chewiness of the abalone.

This we did not see coming. Shark's fin in seaweed soup. Since it was part of the omakase, we ate it.

Their grilled nodoguro (blackthroat sea perch) was delicious. Tender and flaky. I had embarrassingly thought that the pink squiggle for some sort of sauce (maybe beetroot?) and attempted to prod it with my chopsticks. The chef noticed and added that I'm not the first to have mistaken the plate design for something edible. 

This was tachiuo (silver belt fish). Another white fish with flaky tender meat which happens to look like a silver belt. Hence the name...ahem. This was the item I liked least because it was fried like a katsu with in my opinion, bad ratio of fish to crust. What's worse, it was drizzled with tonkatsu sauce which overwhelmed the fish.

A5 wagyu. Portions were small. But delicious. 

Tsukemono was served at this point as a palate cleanser. This was a citrus-y daikon with a bit of yuzu zest. The chef mentioned that we need not finish them. But I liked it so much that I cleared my plate fast. It must not have gone unnoticed and they gave me another portion.

The sushi starts at this point. They're all a little petite if you asked me. The first was a nicely done akami with shari that was a little lukewarm. This has got to be one of the better akami nigiri I've had.

Next was botan ebi. So so.

The smoky kamasu (barracuda) was tender and delicious.

Tai with kinome (pepper leaf). As I've discovered kinome are harvested young leaves from sansho.

This was a briefly torched kinmedai. I've previously voiced my opinion on preferring them cooked to raw in sushi. I guess this might constitute semi-grilled because it wasn't entirely raw. This was good.

Nodoguro - liked this.

I was told that the uni handroll is their pièce de résistance. T'was a yummy uni surge. Never had so much in a portion before.

The sweet tamago castella marks the end of the sushis. Cake egg cake. I've been confused about what these things are called. There's the term atsuyaki tamago which I've come across and I'm not sure if that's the name for them. I've also been told that they can be simply referred to as tamago.

There's fish in their miso soup and that flavour from the fish came through. I liked this.

Dessert was musk melon and peach. Both were sweet and juicy but the peach wasn't as fragrant as those Yamanishi ones I've previously gotten.

Lawry's 2021

We were so looking forward to our annual trip to Lawry's. Pretty glad that the dine out restrictions has been relaxed a little for the people who have been vaccinated.

So, the bread has changed. For some reasons, it's not longer those hard dinner rolls. It's some soft sweet buns now.

We had a new carver today who was grappling with getting sliced prime rib off the cart. It could have been because today's meat was more sinewy than usual. Never had them so sinewy previously (一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九, 十, 十一, 十二, 十三, 十四, 十五, 十六, 十七).

They even dripped mashed potato gravy over the creamed corn while serving. New carver needs to be more careful with that.

Covent Garden Prawn Noodle (哥文園蝦麵), Havelock Road Food Centre

First meal out after the end of the 2nd phase of HA. This stall (#01-24, Havelock Road Cooked Food Centre, 22B Havelock Road) has always had a queue which had previously discouraged me from trying. They were closed for some time and had just recently re-opened so we thought it was time we gave them a try. After all, we've had almost everything else in this food centre.

Their prawn noodles tasted old school. The ingredients included thin sliced prawns, sliced pork and fish cake. Just like how prawn noodles were many years ago before the more luxurious renditions with big assed prawns started turning up. Broth had a pleasant savoury sweet crustacean flavour that was more lightweight than a punch in the face. I like the dry bowl with chilli.

Bukit Merah View Kway Chap

First time doing group buy for kway chap. We were interested in this stall (346A Kang Ching Road) because on top of the regular braises that the other kway chap stalls do, this one also has pig's tongue and hearts. Couldn't resist not trying.

The braising from Bukit Merah View Kway Chap has much less intensity than I had been expecting. The meats/offal hadn't as much savoury saltiness which I normally preferred. So what about those hearts and tongue? The former were sliced, a little raggedly and chewy while the latter was just textured pretty much like other tongues. They exceptional items I thought were the pork belly, boiled eggs and the pickled mustard. The kuey was also tender yet firm.

Between this and You Fa, I prefer the latter which had better flavours from the braise and broth going on.

McRambling

So I tried the Kopi Frappé today. While they claim that it tastes like local coffee, we've had enough local coffee in our lives to distinguish the nuances of their flavours to tell that it doesn't totally pass off as one. Don't have the words to describe it now. It was a good attempt at kopi though and I didn't think it tasted bad.

The Big Mac is nostalgia. For me that is. It remains one of my earliest memory of a sandwich from McD as a kid besides their hamburger. While hazy, I still recall the first times I've had it not knowing then that it had sunk its insidious eldritch claws into me, threading into me the spores of happiness that will be triggered years later. This one tasted very much like how I remember them - even though the kiosk has options for customization these days where I could remove 1 unit of sauce and add another unit of onions to it.

I got the limited time banana pie hoping to be at least be able to pretend it was goreng pisang. The operative word here is 'pretend'. Which many of us do many times for varying reasons. I like bananas anyway.

Somewhat worked but this sauce and banana chunks will obviously never replace actual goreng pisang. 

What I couldn't fathom was what has Ben Yeo to do with chicken rice in any degree at all to even coalesce into a collaboration that made sense. McDonald's X Ben Yeo? How does that even compute? As far as gimmicks went, this was flaccid. 

Yanti Authentic Nasi Padang, Keong Saik Road

I've seen this nasi padang shop (45 Keong Saik Road, tel : +65 6324 9268) countless times. They're another one of those I've been meaning to eat at and has never happened until recently. 

The ordering was a little worrying because they had gotten one of my dishes wrong and forgotten another item in spite of appearances of having diligently written them down on a notepad. On top of that, there was an obviously angry delivery driver who looked like he was on the verge of lashing out because they had packed orders with missing items to him and he as the messenger delivery person had been blamed for the mistake and had his time wasted by the return to correct the order.

Food's not bad. 

Opor ayam was quite coconut-y and had chicken thigh meat that was slurp off the bone tender.

A decently done sotong hitam. What was strange was that towards the end, there was a burst of lime flavour in the gravy. I had no idea where that came from.

Paru belado was moist and tender. The chilli wasn't as fiery as appearances would suggest.

Sambal goreng nice.

Sambal petai packed a bit of heat, was slightly sweet and also savoury. Liked the flavours that the ikan bilis added to the sambal. Delicious with rice. Not much petai in it though.

I liked their garlic-ky and savoury stir fried kang kong but the dish was very stem-my. After a while, the chewing got tiresome. 

The rice that we had to have to go with the food. 

I'd rate the experience of the food at eateries like Sari Ratu, Tambuah Mas and Rumah Makan Minang to name a few to be better ones than Yanti. So while Yanti is like not bad, it's also not exactly on the top of the list for nasi padang in my books.