The Okamochi Box barachirashi set from Ryu's

I saved myself from damnation and came back to Ryu's. This time, we tried their barachirashi served in the Okamochi box. A wooden box with drawer compartments for food. Gimmicky? Perhaps - but it was an experience and more importantly, we enjoyed the food.

This was part of the amuse bouche. A lightly spiced carrot bisque. I couldn't tell what spices were in it but the soup was creamy and very pleasant.

The Okamochi box. The bottom drawers contained the barachirashi.

Top drawer was grilled chicken and a vegetable side which I believed was gobo.

The barachirashi came with cubed let's see - kanpachi, maguro, hotate, ikura, ika, bit of what looked like minced ebi; and there were thinly sliced & marinated shitake and renkon.

In the Okamochi box, were some seaweed sheets, a dollop of wasabi and a makisu. We tried our hand at rolling our first maki rolls ever. The virgin experience if you would.

Truthfully, I sucked at it. I had no idea what I was doing and certainly couldn't grasp how the chefs could work these things so artfully on YouTube. My clumsy hands ended up rolling the seaweed sans the mat. It looked rustic. But hey, it tasted good!

The grilled chicken look like torched chicken. The skin was charred like it had gone through aburi. But there was a familiarly sweet flavour like pandan. 

And the set ended with the same warabi mochi with kinako and drizzled brown sugar as the last time.

Home made ham and cheese sandwich with otah

I cannot imagine a sandwich like this, as simple as it might have been, to exist anywhere else but this part of the world. 

Guzman Y Gomez, Star Vista

Guzman Y Gomez (#01-32 The Star Vista, 1 Vista Exchange Green, tel : +65 6694 2044) is a chain Mexican taco/burrito shop from Australia that opened up here a few years ago. Their initial outlets were located at places I never needed to be so I never got to try them until this one at Star Vista opened recently.

You know what? I rather enjoyed what I had. And it was cool that you could choose different fillings for their set of tacos rather than having all of the same. The grilled chicken and carnitas tasted better than their flank steak which was oddly tasteless as a meat. But three tacos didn't exactly fill me up so we tried their burrito bowl with barramundi. I liked their chicken and pork options better.   

Chee cheong fun with chai por

That's steamed rice rolls (chee cheong fun) topped with preserved turnip (chai por) if anyone needed translation. Story goes when we were trying to get ourselves some chwee kueh from a particularly popular stall down at Whampoa Market Food Centre and they happened to be sold out. Which exacerbated the craving for them. There was left over chai por and the stall still had some steamed rice rolls and so the improbably inevitable happened. It's actually quite nice; nothing unexpected or surprising with the flavours since it was precisely flavours of those chai por over a starch cake.

Hambaobao, Beauty World Food Centre

I’ve been hearing/reading about this stall (144 Upper Bukit Timah Road, #04-49 Beauty World Centre) for a while and decided to check them out. I’ll describe their product (their classic hamburger) as a more Americanized Ramly burger. With better meat patties, none of those overly sweet combination of sauces and there's option for hand cut russet potato fries. Greasy buns a la plancha with cheese, pickles, butter head lettuce, an in house tomato ketchup and I added bacon. The meat was about as exciting as those at the old Botak Jones so it's not Omakase Burger for sure.

A lamb shoulder sandwich from Porsena Deli at PasarBella

That's the Pasar Bella at Suntec (#01-455 Suntec City Mall, 3 Temasek Boulevard) and not the one at The Grandstand in case you didn't realize. While I've aired my opinions in the past on what these guys were trying to sell of themselves versus the reality of who they actually are, this relatively new outfit at Suntec is nothing like that. This one is but a Pasar Bella branded food court. Nothing more.

But Porsena Deli looked interesting and we decided to try their lamb shoulder sandwich. They have a "stuff it" option for $2 which we exercised for "more ingredients". Anyway, this wasn't bad at all. 6"-ish sized freshly toasted soft white roll with a generous stuffing of that tender chopped lamb shoulder meat in that....red tikka-ish sauce, cucumbers and yoghurt. You know what? I would come back.