Sweet glutinous rice with fried shallots from Millennium Glutinous Rice (千年糯米饭)

I seem to recall that the salty glutinous rice from Millennium Glutinous Rice came with the fried shallots while the sweet one has peanuts. Don't know if I remembered that correctly now because I've gotten portions that were mixture of sweet and salty and also have gotten servings with both fried shallots and peanuts. Are there even relations? 😅 Anyways, I got a sweet portion today with just shallots. The aromatic shallots and the tender sweet rice was... a delicious combination.

Burger King's Ultimate Angus Classic BBQ

So this was basically the child of Burger King's BBQ Turkey Bacon and a Whopper. For some reasons, I had never noticed from their menu that this has 'BBQ' in the name until today. I doubled the meat. Tasted pretty much like how it looked. Didn't over do the sauce. Burger was chunky, hefty and the patty's a bit dry-ish. With all the other stuff in there, I could barely register the cheese. Between this and the Ultimate Angus Mushroom Swiss, I prefer the latter.

A 350g Australian 'Steakhouse Char' ribeye from iSteaks

I've previously tried the New Zealand grass/pasture fed ribeye so here's the Australian 100 day grain fed meat (Bindaree). It was more expensive ($55) and I didn't think it was noticeably better tasting even though grain fed implied that they are suppose to be fattier. Quite a bit of silver skin and sinewy bits though.

Now that I've tried their "heavier cuts", I'm no longer curious and I'll just stick to the lamb.

Margaret Drive Chicken Rice, Holland Drive

I don't remember if Sin Kee ever had the name Margaret Drive featured so prominently on their signboard. I do recall that there was a time that they kinda disappeared not very long after they had relocated from Mei Ling Food Centre to Holland Drive some years back. They've obviously rebranded after and even had a branch at Havelock Road Food Centre that had inconsistent standards which eventually folded during the pandemic.

Anyways, this Margaret Drive Sin Kee is located in a different unit from their original one when they as Sin Kee Famous Cantonese Chicken Rice first moved to this coffeeshop (40 Holland Drive). That original unit is currently King of Pao Fan.

Here's the part where I exclaim, damn the chicken is still great! Slurp off the bone tender chilled bird drizzled with their concoction of chicken stock/sesame oil/light soya sauce. There's no metics to any of these quality but this stall is definitely of better standards than the defunct Margaret Drive Chicken Rice branch at Havelock Road.

I've always classed Sin Kee's chicken rice a league above many others. Or was that all others in my experience. I don't actually remember any one which I felt was better than their's which is again, sufficiently flavourful without being excessively oily.

Um Yong Baek (엄용백), Boon Tat Street

Finally got a table for lunch at Um Yong Baek (27 Boon Tat Street, tel : +65 8843 5968). They're the current Korean darling in town these days. Between procrastinations and that it wasn't so easy for find a time slot because everyone else was also trying to get a seat in the early days, it was only now that we managed to eat here.

There wasn't much of variety for their banchan. The kimchi was good enough that we had a couple of helpings, buchu kimchi was kinda fibrous and the green chilli/garlic/gochujang was good with the boiled pork that we had. The last item tasted like local pickled green chilli.

There were only a couple of daejigukbab (plus a couple boiled pork dishes and pollack roe) available during lunch. The Busan styled daejigukbab had clear broth while the Milyang style has a cloudy broth.

I couldn't decide which I liked better between the two. Both were delicious and had good quality sliced pork (belly, shoulder and tripe) in them. Both were also light on the salt. 

What works for flavouring were the myeongran-jeot/pollack roe that you could order on the side like we did, saeujeot (think chinchalok) or just salt flakes. The latter two were available on every table.

British Hainan, Purvis Street

Dinner at British Hainan (23 Purvis Street, #01-01, tel  : +65 6977 9711). What's with the name you might wonder? The food's local Hainanese, which is not the same as food from the province of Hainan in China. Dishes here stem from the era of British colonial rule where Hainanese here often work as cooks. It's Asian with a bit of English influences to varying degrees and uniquely local. 

Not so different form places like Han's, Colbar or Silom (in Bangkok).

Brother's Toffee Apple cider is available here. Didn't think this was as good as the Honeycomb flavour.

We ordered a couple of items that are signatures of local Hainanese. Like Hainanese curry. This one had potatoes, beef brisket, tendon and tripe. Nothing was particularly tender which is the way we generally prefer it these days. Tripe was chewy and the tendon was much harder than I was hoping for. Brisket was a little tough even. I don't know if that was how it was done in the past but the meat's not impressive. Curry's not bad though.

A pricey small portion of mutton soup ($32 if anyone wants to know). Good for about 4 small bowls. Other than lamb, there's wood ear fungus and tau kee in it. There's very noticeable sweetness from the herbs and also flavour from the nam yu (red fermented bean curd) in both the broth and the meat. Not bad tasting.

Menu says grilled chicken but the common local term is chicken chop. This was nicely done with a smokiness from the grill on the chicken that's slathered with a savoury sweet apricot sauce. The salad on the side was dressed with something that tasted like canned fruit syrup with dried mint leaves.