Recently in Food Glorious Food Category

Nope, this has nothing to do with Optimus. Check out my latest food review on Hungrygowhere.com, on the new steakhouse in Tanglin Village/Dempsey Road. More photos here.

While on Windows messenger just now, I noticed a URL beside my cousin's nickname - yum.sg. As she normally does not publicise URLs, I thought it unusual and checked it out. Turned out to be another food review site for Singaporeans, run by friends of hers.

I thought the website was more visually appealing than blurbme.com and Hungrygowhere.com. I was starting to wonder if anybody had already written a review of the review sites. Some quick Googling took me to a WhySGEntrepreneursSuck post in April.

As I expected, Hungrygowhere was rated the highest for community and content. I found specific restaurant reviews there, that weren't on blurbme. Of course, blurbme covers more than food, though I feel it's better to have one main focus. Amusingly, I know the brother of the guy behind Hungrygowhere. Singapore is a very small place. Maybe one day I'll meet the founders of Blurbme too - probably a friend's brother's ex-classmate's colleague.

The only thing is, we love food and like to share lobangs, so that's probably why so many Food 2.0 sites have sprung up and have managed to keep on going.

What's going to happen in the future? I predict things will firstly remain status quo - perhaps another new player or two may even venture into the market. However, given our small population, there will be a saturation point. The site with the strongest community and number of (good) reviews may just break away from the rest of the pack.

But what would be interesting is if these sites release their own APIs and you can embed your latest food reviews on your own websites. What if you could subscribe to an RSS feed on your favourite restaurant, or category of food? That would be so convenient.

And maybe some clever person will consolidate all these food websites into one mammoth portal and save us all the trouble of checking different URLs for the same restaurant. You know, something like the Bookjetty mashup. Ahem.

The last time I dined with friends at Al Dente Trattoria at Colours on the Bay, I recalled having a decent experience with lovely ambience. Thus, I was fine when my family decided to dine there after watching Phantom of the Opera. Or so I thought...

Met up with some old Bristol friends today and we had dinner at Shunjuu at Robertson Quay. We ordered lots of robatayaki (skewered foods) and other dishes.

My favourite was the tofu with century egg sauce topped with roe.

As a new fan of black pig meat (best experienced so far at Tom Ton restaurants in the form of katsu don), I tried the black pig robatayaki. The meat was tasty but drier and more chewy than the katsu version.

We tried the gingko nuts. They have a bitter taste when grilled.

We also had various beef and pork combinations. So the meat wouldn't feel too 'heavy' in the mouth, we also ate it along with the cabbage leaves provided.

I was pointing my camera at another plate of skewered meat, when suddenly a waitress came over and told me I was not allowed to take any more photos!

I was stunned but obediently turned off my camera, never to photograph their food again *sob* I took a few shots of my friends and that was about it.

But later on I wondered, WHY? Why can't the restaurant let its patrons take photos of its food?

It's not like it's the only robatayaki restaurant in Singapore and the recipes or presentation is so unique. I am not from a rival restaurant trying to copy their style. And seriously, it was just two pieces of skewered beef!

And in this modern age, if you see anyone sitting at their table not eating but taking photos of their food, you have a blogger in your midst! Be nice to them because they are probably planning to write a food review that very night and upload lots of pics of your food.

Now, if you know your food is good (and this restaurant does have a good reputation), you should have nothing to fear. If you see me hovering over a plate of food with a dead cockroach in it, that would be a different story.

If it's the former, you can safely assume I will write something positive, or at least neutral. And the sight of food photos along with the blog review will attract some readers who may then want to check out your restaurant!

So, restaurants with a no-photo policy, I strongly urge you to rethink your marketing strategy. You can pay lots of money advertising your restaurant, getting it listed in food directories, setting up your own website... but 'word of mouth' marketing is increasingly important as well. Don't stop your fans from writing good things about you.

The Mee Pok man passed away a week ago. Odd as it may seem, he was a special part of our school and many of us remember him fondly. Ask any SCGS girl and they will say his noodles were one of the best - if not, the best they've had.

He was, in short, an icon in an all-girls' school.

I was an SCGS girl from Primary 1 to Secondary 4. As a seven year-old kid, the first stall I patronised was the Mee Pok man's. At the time I ate the yellow Hokkien noodles with soup. My favourite line was "Thirty cent mee, mai tau geh". Which translated to "thirty cents' worth of noodles, without bean sprouts".

As I grew older I realised the Mee Pok man's prices increased as well. I can't remember exactly when I switched to the flatter 'mee pok' noodles but it probably occurred when he (or my friends in school) suggested that I try something different. Combined with a bit of lard, oil and Tianjin vinegar, the taste was heavenly.

His noodles were famous enough that the neighbours in Emerald Hill would place orders too. I remember that our principal (another SCGS icon) Miss Heng insisted that the food must go to the schoolgirls first and not to outsiders. The price for outsiders was also higher - but $1 was still a very fair price.

When you learn that someone you've just met is an SCGS girl, one common point of understanding is the Mee Pok man. On a few occasions we've even discussed what other mee pok dishes from other stalls in Singapore are comparable to his.

Uncle, we'll miss you. Thank you for being a special part of our school tuckshop, and our childhood memories.

[ This is a belated post as I got the news late, and procrastinated about writing it. Search Google / Technorati with the keywords "SCGS, Mee pok" and read other girls' blogs about him.]

I haven't written about this early enough, but fans of the fusion Japanese restaurant Bistro Cameleon should be delighted to hear that it has reopened at Robertson Walk!

The only difference, say the new, empowered waitresses and chef (employee-owners, I heard), is that they now spell it properly with a 'h'. In short, it's "Chameleon".

The guy who trained under the original owner-chef, Takashi, is now the main chef. So there's some consistency and quality control.

 
The salmon sashimi salad looks and tastes the same. Go for it!


The chicken teriyaki pizza with wasabe looks and tastes the same, except the base is a bit thicker and overall the pizza is smaller in diameter (as you can see).


The ramen noodle salad tasted mostly the same - but we couldn't place our finger on a missing ingredient. What is it?!


The new chef has his own creations - some cooked fish (forgot the name). Pleasant, but not something I will die for.


His beef salad was nice. This can be a meal on its own!

If you have more pics of Chameleon food, do post a comment here with a link to your online album. Cheerios!

Yesterday we needed some curry to be placed in a bowl, as part of a food exhibit. We managed to locate a food stall nearby which sold curry. The guy dishing out the food wasn't sure what he was allowed to do, so he checked with his lady supervisor and she billed us $1 for a few spoons of curry. We went back happy, and the stall made a bit of money in exchange for some sauce.

Today we needed to place fresh curry into the same bowl for the second day of our exhibition. We went back to the same stall. This time we were served by different people. This other man said they would never allow such a sale.

In my best Mandarin (which is not very good), I pointed out that yesterday his colleagues sold us a small amount of curry for $1. The man checked with his colleagues and insisted that his instructions were to sell a certain amount of curry sauce together with meat and potatoes, and that each portion must cost $3.

We went to other stalls and were told the same thing - "Our instructions are to sell exactly this amount of food for this amount of money." No more, no less. Finally, one of our partner stalls at the other Tower contributed the curry we needed.

This was a minor incident. But I wondered: in business, how many opportunities have been missed because staff haven't been given flexible guidelines, or weren't thinking like their bosses who owned the business?

The BBC has compiled a list of '50 things to eat before you die'. How many have you eaten? I scored 41/50.

Funny how some dishes are named specifically, but others are lumped together like Thai, Chinese, Greek and Mexican food.

What else should have been included on this list? I'm thinking escargot and buah keluak (a black nut often cooked with curry/meat). I tried the latter at Soul Kitchen where the paste was placed in a bowl. I wanted it all to myself, but had to be polite.

1. Our words. We'll say something we didn't mean, or get proven wrong. It happens when we can't bite our tongues in time.
2. Our hats. Even worse than just eating words, because we'd usually say "I'll eat my hat if you ever succeed in blah blah [add negative comment here]." It's a serious undertaking ;-)
3. Humble pie. A culmination of the above.
4. Air. You may find that strange but we call it 'jiak hong' in the Hokkien dialect, and it means taking a vacation.

As a Priority member of Acmabooks.com (at least for the next few months), I was invited yesterday to Moonfish Restaurant at Milennia Walk, to meet the Acma account managers and sample the restaurant's forthcoming, new menu. The great thing was I got to invite 3 other friends along - so I did! You can start viewing the pics from here.

Then I learnt that the restaurant and acmabooks were related companies. Quite clever, getting our feedback on both the book service as well as the new dishes. Anyway, it was really lovely catching up with the girls and sipping chilled wine with our meal. We really had a lot to eat. The Acma people were quite hospitable and friendly, despite a few of them having had to eat the same dishes twice a week!

I must say I'm pretty impressed overall. I mean, which other local book company has ever wined and dined their best customers?

Discovery Channel's Travel & Adventure channel was showing a feature on Singapore food at noon today. Anthony Bourdain did the diplomatic thing and went to the Chinese, Malay and Indian haunts respectively.

For Chinese food, he tried the Imperial Herbal restaurant, which actually was one of my favourites when I was a child (!). He was told he was too 'heaty' after a sinseh looked at his tongue, and was told he needed ginseng. I recall he tried a fish dish and deer tendons. He also drank deer penis wine - two glasses of it! And said he felt like, ahem, Superman... although he feared the food would make him flatulent.

For Malay food, he first went to the Geylang Serai market where his Malay guide let him sample otah (which he liked) before taking him to a local eatery whose name I cannot remember. It's within walking distance of the market, though, and he enjoyed the food. Any ideas which restaurant it is?

The only snag was, while in the market he kept referring to Malays as 'Malaysians', and I was a bit surprised that his scriptwriters didn't know the difference.

For Indian food, he took him to a prata stall (again, I didn't catch the name because I had left the TV room to run an errand). He had murtabak with teh tarik. The only thing is his Indian host didn't call it that, but 'stretch tea'. Obviously the script was modified for an international audience.

But his Indian host introduced him to our very own food guru, Seetoh! Complete with hat. He took Bourdain to Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant, which I've mentioned before. The dishes he tried were the scallops (yummy dark sauce), the 'kong kong' with a delicious garlic-honey chilli sauce, the frogs legs (which I've never tried before), and the ultimate crab bee hoon, which is truly very tasty as we've eaten it countless times before. Bourdain ended the show by saying that of all the dishes he tried in Singapore, THIS was the special one.

You have to love garlic, because it's in a lot of his dishes, and you can't be fussy about ambience because it's nonexistent (I've fended off stray cats and have seen cockroaches crawling about, just outside the restaurant). Danny the 'chef' has what we call a casual and practical approach to dressing, and I was glad that Discovery Travel took a no holds barred approach and actually filmed his trademark white cotton t-shirt, black shorts and boots.

ps. This other patron says it all! Read his review and see the pics.

The order for lunch today, was caprice. My ingredients:

1. 3 buffalo tomatoes
2. 2 round blobs of mozarella cheese
3. A cluster of basil leaves with stalks (already removed in the above photo)
4. Black pepper
5. Olive oil
6. Balsamic vinegar

Now I have no recipe for caprice to go by, but since I've seen and eaten lots of it at different restaurants all over the world, it was instinctive.

I washed the basil, towel-dried it so the leaves wouldn't stick to my knife and hands, and sliced off the stalks. (An annoying little fruit fly started hovering around the basil at this point, probably because of the scent given off by cut leaves. Shoo!)

Then I sliced the tomatoes laterally, removing the stalks. It was a shame to throw away the top and base of each tomato, when the parts around the core were actually edible. So I put them aside.

I arranged 4 slices of tomatoes on each plate, then put some basil leaves on top of each tomato. If the leaves were too big or curled up, I'd tear or cut them up.

Next, I sliced the cheese. This was tricky as it gets more wobbly as you cut more of it away. (Oops. Okay, that accidental sliver goes onto my plate. Oh what the heck, I'll eat it now. Mm.)

I put the cheese on top of the basil which was on top of the tomatoes. Then I chopped up most of the remaining leaves and used them as garnishing.

Suddenly, it occured to me that the 'reject' tomato slices could be diced up with basil leaves, and marinated in vinagrette. I did so, then put the diced tomatoes in the centre of each plate. Voila!

And this was how it looked like (with pepper seasoning and olive oil drizzled on it). Bon Apetit!

It was delicious too! Filled with curry potatoes in the middle. Mildly spicy sauces (negligible by my Peranakan standards, really).

Another Nokia 6600 pic for my readers. The Touche bottles were backlit, giving a lovely glowing effect.

Yesterday, we had at lunch Royal China, which opened recently at Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Fans of the original restaurant chain in London will be delighted to know that their dim sum is still scrumptious. However, the lobster noodle dish, so heavily promoted here, was nothing special. The quality of lobster was fine, but I didn't like the noodle 'smell'. Maybe some prominent food critics will have differing views on this, but I've tasted the lobster noodles at Mandarin Kitchen (Queensway, London) and nothing so far compares to it. Of course, since I'm in Singapore now, I'm perfectly happy with the Geylang crab noodles.

Remember that recent NY Times article on Singapore food? Well, one of our all-time favourite restaurants was featured in it, and we decided to rekindle our passion for crab bee hoon (vermicelli), kong kong (another kind of shellfish, like escargot except it's white and chewy), scallops and kai lan (a green leafy vegetable). All with generous doses of chopped garlic. Mmm!

Let's say the Times was right to rave about Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant. Makan Sutra, the definitive guide to Singapore food, gives it a rating of six out of six.

I used to dislike crab. And I still dislike bee hoon. But somehow, Danny the cook has a winning formula that overcomes my prejudices for a couple of hours. A few caveats: you have to accept the fact he only takes orders one table at a time. His assistants will only deliver and clear away the food. His prices are also expensive. Bring good company to pass the time. You could try ordering some wine (yes, they have a selection). And, forgive the spartan decor, circa 1970.

A frequent paradox at hawker centres and coffeeshops - the grimier the place, the tastier the food!

Wall Street Cafe at Amara Hotel now has a great S$14.95 set lunch. The salmon chowder was tasty and had fresh, generous chunks of fish. We shared a pan-fried crayfish with black pepper sauce, a seafood platter in wasabe butter, and a honey-lime baked codfish, each served on a bed of raisin rice and a side of char grilled Mediterranean vegetables. For dessert, we had a chocolate mousse with coffee or tea. The soups and desserts vary with each weekday.

Update: The main courses looked so good, we had to take photos! Thanks to Q for the pics.

So the esteemed London restaurant chain, Royal China, is coming to Raffles Hotel. The Straits Times today mentions its dim sum, which admittedly is very good - paralleled only by its excellent service*. But any Singaporean student worth his salt will tell you that the restaurant is not as famous for its lobster noodles as its neighbour across the road, Mandarin Kitchen.

And S$70 for a plate of noodles ... good golly gosh. I thought the fried rice with crab (a craze years ago, prepared by two old ladies who have since retired) was expensive enough, at about S$30 a bowl.

* update - It appears that Royal China's standards have fallen since my last visit almost exactly three years ago. Be warned!