Bacon fried rice from King of Fried Rice

There's streaky bacon fried rice at King of Fried Rice. After having them for nth amount of times, I've come to the conclusion that these guys which have gotten popular from their Din Tai Fung styled fried rice, isn't as good as Din Tai Fung. Also, those bacon weren't as browned as the pictures led me to believe and were kinda limp. Pretty bland plate for something that has bacon. What's with the fear of salt with so many stalls these days?

Burning Melanzana, Moussaka and what intimate plate at Miznon

Back at Mizon.

The complimentary pita with chilli and tahini is always welcomed. Great to load up with if not for the fact that we were already ordering more pitas. 

Got a couple of eggplant pitas today.

• Burning Melanzana - eggplant with a slab of toasty fried mozzarella. I couldn't taste much of the eggplant. It was mostly the mozzarella and yeah, I liked it.
• Moussaka - beef ragout, eggplant, tahini, chilli and pickles. Also not getting the eggplant but the rest of it was delicious. Loved how the meatiness from the ragout came through. Wouldn't have known there was eggplant in it if not for the menu.

Ironic how we had gotten eggplant pitas and it was the other stuffings that shone because......eggplant. 😅

Their Intimate Plate was not memorable. I've seen it on the menu for a while now and it was basically the short rib that intrigued. In retrospect, the slightly stringy short rib was right at the bottom of the list on the plate. Not the fatty flavourful beefy short rib I imagined. Will not be getting this again.

A lunar fish salad of our times

Just some thoughts on yu sheng (鱼生). For a long time, I never connected with it. It was just an annual ritual from a tradition stemming from......childhood I suppose. Never fully understood its origins. Never liked the bits of ginger it it.

Aside from short rambunctious spurts of "huat ah!", I didn't feel much for lou hei. After all, most of us were just going through a motion because everyone else did with everyone else. But as the years went by, we took things into our own hands. Got rid of what we did not like about it and made it our own. 

There's been a few variants of it. This year, we ventured into Donki's platter. In this one, we added hamachi and tai (also courtesy of Donki), canned mandarin oranges and fresh pomelo along with an extra splash of Korean sesame oil. No ginger of course. A lunar fish salad of our times that's closer to my heart with people that are closer to my heart as well..

Back at Hillman 99

Has been a really long time since I've stepped into Hillman 99 (99 Pasir Panjang Road, tel : +65 6474 6835). The place is old school just like how their food is.

It's also one of few places where one can get chrysanthemum tea served in beer mugs. Each order of these is bottomless.

I almost, subconsciously, described this order of their paper wrapped chicken  (纸包鸡) as obligatory. But it wasn't obligatory. I ordered it because I enjoyed it from what I remembered from their restaurant at Kitchener Road.

Sweet and savoury caramelized exterior on chunks of chicken thigh meat.

Claypot pig liver was impressive. That sauce was intense with a lot going on from the gritty texture, the sweetness and garlic infusion. Not to mention those caramelized sweet cloves of tender garlic in there. I regretted not getting white rice with this but, there'll be another time. Livers were tender and not overly cooked.

Stir fried Chinese mustard (芥菜). Sauce was pretty salty. Pretty sure that there's sugar in it as well. But I enjoyed the vegetable. A little bit of crunch in them still.

Old school tasting yang zhou fried rice (扬州炒饭) - it's greasy, has real char siew and also little shrimps. This hit of nostalgic flavour was so complete an experience that I will probably never want to order it from them again because it was a little greasy for my liking. The one unique experience was that we could even get the subtle crunch of the salt granules/crystals in the dry beady rice. Some mouthfuls were pretty salty and some a little bland.

This was noodles with omelette and prawns - pretty similar to the wong po lou meen at Quan Ji because they are just different renditions of the same dish. I like Quan Ji's rendition better. This one was more saucy and that sauce was pretty salty.

Sandakan Food (山打根美食), Chinatown Food Centre

Noticed this stall (Green Zone, #02-053 Chinatown Complex Market and Food Centre, 335 Smith Street) recently and was intrigued by their fried pork hor fun. While their offerings by virtue of the stall's name indicates Sadakan food, the variety was very small, discounting stuff like chicken wings and nuggets which were generic.

Anyways I ended up with an enjoyable hor fun. It came with a sweet brown sauce and the plate reminded me of chee cheong fun. Not so much crunch on the fried pork with the dominant flavour being five spice powder - a difference from the also Sandakan Ah Yen Traditional Fried Pork which was crispier and flavoured by the fermented red bean curd marinate. That chilli on the side was salty and packed considerable heat which made everything deliciously feisty.

Mandalay Style Restaurant, Peninsular Plaza

We've never explored Burmese food much previously so this was a step out of our usual zone at Mandalay Style Restaurant (#B1-01 Peninsula Plaza, 111 North Bridge Road). Pretty much everything we ordered looked like a game of chance because of our lack of familiarity but on hindsight, we did know a tiny bit and there're some similarities we could relate to Thai food.

Like pork organ doke htoe. From what I could find out, these were supposed to be pork parts on sticks? Anyways, this rendition was in what appeared to be sweet soya sauce broth. There were parts like tripe, liver, ears, tongue, intestines and some which I couldn't identify. The braised offal were pretty tender, notably so for those pig's ears. Liver was dry and powdery but that texture/flavour had it's appeal.

This was a corn and tea leaf salad - the tea leaf being the same fermented stuff as laphet thoke. Tangy, earthy and a bit of heat that I didn't see coming.

Ordered a rice platter so that we could sample what they had. Clockwise from bottom

• laphet rice - Rice with the laphet. Flavour's kinda similar to the salad with much less intensity.
• pone yay gyi rice - I read it's made of fermented horse gram beans but it tasted like olives. Like a less salted version of a Thai olive fried rice. There's sliced chilli and onions in it.
• rice with beans and peanut oil - This in our opinion was the best tasting. It's as described, rice with beans, peanut oil and some salt. Don't know if there was anything else but the simplicity was oustanding. I could come back just for this.
• pyay rice - There's some spicy crispy stuff in it. And coriander too even though we told them not to include coriander for every item we ordered.

There's also a whole bunch of spicy anchovies + other crispies in the middle which was not bad tasting if one could deal with the heat.

The menu listed this as Mandalay styled mango salad. Imagine a pretty spicy som tam mamuang minus the sugar, lime and fish sauce. That was pretty much it. The heat from this salad took a little bit of time to build up and ended up pretty potent.