Shinryoku restaurant

We celebrated my boss’ birthday at Shinryoku Yakitori (Purvis Street). They have a $58+++ dinner buffet menu with a pretty good selection of yakitoris. I ordered servings for 10 people from beef skewers to deep fried food to delightful morsels of fresh sashimi. The food was pretty good although they came out slowly at first. Typical of hungry people, our group of 10 were banging our tables for more despite the food trickling out of the kitchen like a dying river. However when things sped up towards the end, we were too full to finish any more.

Deep fried salmon skin salad. I asked the waiter to serve the skin sans salad.

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I love these people, even though the conversation was rude and vulgar. We went from talking about testicles to pig’s vaginas, and I got a pain in my gut from laughing. Apparently one of the girls was watching a documentary where it’s been scientifically proven that a man’s one ball hangs lower than the other ball and she had to share that tidbit with us over dinner. If that weren’t bad enough, one of my other colleagues erroneously tried to order “pig’s vagina” in a language he wasn’t fluent in.

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The restaurant’s menu was pasted on the walls, with stars tagged to it by customers with comments written on it. This was our favourite.

Happy Birthday to Me #6 Ember Restaurant

Richard brought me to Ember. it’s located at Hotel 1929 at Keong Siak Road.

Many of you would have heard of it. It’s been around for some time. It’s a little restaurant that sits about 30. so when everyone is talking, it gets really noisy.

They have a 4 course set dinner at $85+++ where you pick one from each course.

I was delighted to see they have the chicken and liver parfait with brioche. The first time I ate parfait was at Cumulus in Melbourne and i LOVED it, which was pretty amazing since I hate liver. but the parfait, coated with cream, is a mouthful of sin just melting onto your tongue. They gave a pretty generous serving too. I ran out of brioche at the halfway mark.

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Richard ordered the crab cakes.

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Then I moved onto the foie gras sandwich. When it arrived, I was plesantly surprised to see their idea of a sandwich was a sliver of baked wafer so thin you barely see it. but it adds a crunchy texture to the foie gras. WHICH WAS SO GOOD i went to liver heaven. However I’m not sure of the caramel puddle presentation at the side. To any cat owner, it looks like hairball barf.

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Richard ordered the Crispty lobster.

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I of course went for the beef tenderloin. after the yummilicious livers, I was a very teeny weensy bit disappointed with the steak. It was soft to the point where it’s a bit mushy. I like my meat with a bit of firmness. however the doneness was perfect. I really hate ordering MEDIUM and it comes out something else. The steak was served with this sauce that tasted like 5 spiced something. to the side was a slither of sweet mustard.

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Richard ordered the roasted pork belly. it was served on a bed of sinful vegetables soaked in sinful sauce (i think loads of butter), dollops of brown sauce, an circle of apple and a test tube of pork drippings. the pork takes after the chinese style roast pork with a thick serving of crackling that rests on tender pork covered with juicy pork fat. Crystal Jade, this is how roast pork should be done.

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I ended the meal with panna cotta with gula melaka while Richard ate a pear tart.

Overall the meal was really good. I want to go back again.

Happy Birthday to Me #5 Malacca Seafood

We made a weekend trip to Malacca, this time with 2 goals in mind: #1 to get my wedding shoes.

#2 TO EAT.

The last trip we made a month ago was pre-planned by family so we didn’t get to visit Portuguese Settlement, a sea-facing seafood stretch of restaurants that specialises in Portuguese style cooking. I’m not familiar with Portuguese cooking so I can’t comment how accurate the style is BUT the food is still good nevertheless.

We usually visit the 1st stall (from the car park) but this time not only were they full, they RAN OUT OF CRABS. THE HORROR. I almost left in disgust when Bryan brilliantly approached the 2nd stall and asked if they had crabs. AND THEY DID! so we went to the 2nd stall instead.

surprisingly they were rather good! I’m not sure why the 1st stall gets all the customers but I think everyone should give the other stalls a shot. This one is called Joan & El’Chico restaurant. We ordered the butter prawns. it was an EXPLOSION of butter and garlic with a tinge of prawn taste you get when you stir-fry prawns. I LOVE IT. this goes onto our list of must-eat foods in Malacca.

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Assam squid. I was expecting the spicy variety but this one came out lame. it was sour with a plum taste which was OKAY but i didn’t quite like it. I improved it by adding the belachan from the kang kong dish to this.

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THE STAR OF THE SHOW: BURN CRAB. it’s simply crabs lightly salted and peppered and put over charcoal to cook. the condiments bring out the sweet meat of the crab. This is the reason why anyone still visits Malacca.

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We went back to the cheese beehoon restaurant. Bryan saw an ad on a taxi in Singapore by a restaurant who also sells cheese beehoon. unfortunately he didn’t notice the name of the restaurant -_-

SALTED EGG CRAB. my all time favourite. I love how they pile everything into a nice pile like CRAB MOUNTAIN.

Happy Birthday to me #4: Aburiya

If you haven’t figured out by now, the best birthday celebrations in my books are those with good food.

Bryan brought me to my favourite Japanese grill restaurant, Aburiya.

As always, they never fail to amaze me with their succulent meat.

Wagyu Beef. MMM fat.

They have a “relatively” new menu of meats served with truffle salt. While I still think truffle is a little overrated, I can’t help but me amazed by the KAPOW burst of taste in my mouth as the truffle oozes from the beef to your tongue.

Happy Birthday Mong!

Mong celebrated her big 4-OH! at Cookyn Inc at Garden Hub (Margaret Drive). I didn’t realise it was where Cookyn with Mervyn has moved to until I saw his wife wandering around us keeping us fed. The theme was Back To School so we all had to scramble to get our uniforms. It would have been a miracle for me to fit into my 16 year old outfit.

Unfortunately the uniform shop we went to didn’t have my school uniform so I had to make do with a sister school. Tricia and I borrowed pink school bags from Adele and I insisted on Strawberry Shortcake school bag, carrying it with me the entire night. Other people at the party thought I was really 16. Either the bag was too successful or I really look that age, even with make-up on. Funny how I cannot fit into what I used to wear when I was 16 but I can still look 16.

I thought it was really cool that all of Mong’s friends made the effort and turned up in uniforms, some of them borrowing ties and badges from their children. We had two 24 year old DJs playing 80s music, which was a laugh when they were dumbfounded at Mong’s request for Locomotion. Wassat?

The rest of the party was aptly 80s decorated although I was half expecting the bag on the top of the cake to be Sonia Rykiel.

Happy Birthday Egoh!

This year Eugene decided to celebrate this birthday at Oversea Restaurant, a move from the usual June Eating House birthday celebration dinners. Good thing I guess, since Joe announced on NATIONAL RADIO our secret zi char place to the world.

every year we invite almost the same people, every year some of these same people didn’t get the memo about the Egoh face.

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Happy Birthday Maiya!

It’s Maiya’s first birthday. Maiya is the pride & joy of my Penguin (Tuty) and her husband Handsome. for the past month or so, Penguin has been slaving away at the preparations for the party and I didn’t realise how much effort she put it until I turned up at the party.

We were all late coz the party was at godforsaken Aloha Changi. People who call Boon Lay the Boon Docks obviously have never heard of Loyang before. it took us 45 minutes to drive from one end of the country to the other (with bad traffic), and then another 20 minutes of getting lost before we finally found it. even google maps and my GPS got lost. however thankfully a friend very kindly waited by the side of the road to point me in the right direction otherwise we’d have just turned around and driven 45 minutes home. urban planning obviously lost its way in Loyang too.

check it out, she even decorated with pineapples.

Maiya’s party theme was Spongebob Squarepants. not that a one year old would know anything about Spongebob but the mother is a HUGE fan and since the kid didn’t know better, the mother dictated the theme of the party. I was never quite familiar with Spongebob, being a Strawberry Shortcake fan myself, until Penguin sang the theme song to me.

Captain: OHHHHHHH Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
Kids: SpongeBob SquarePants!
Captain: Absorbent and yellow and pourous is he!
Kids: SpongeBob SquarePants!
Captain: If nautical nonsense be something you wish,
Kids: SpongeBob SquarePants!
Captain: Then drop on the deck and flop like a fish!
Kids: SpongeBob SquarePants!
Captain: Ready?
Captain and Kids: SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob SquarePants,
SpongeBob SquarePants!

right.

the sugar spread was amazing. there were marshmellows, M&Ms, sweets, lollies, candy of every kind laid out on the Spongebob smorgasbord. there was also a huge banner and welcome poster with Maiya’s chubby face on it. the kid doesn’t realise how loved she is in this family.

octopus balloon. pretty amazing.

so not only did we get lost, some of us also turned up at the wrong party. apparently Aloha Changi had 2 kinds of chalets, bungalows and terrace houses. however they weren’t clearly labelled so the bungalows were called Chalet A and the terrace houses just A. so some of the girls actually walked towards Chalet A, which incidentally had a lot of Malays too, and asked if it were Tuty’s party. after awhile they must have been wondering wtf is this Tuty person?

Smacked my head into this goddamn thing hanging in the middle of the door way.

Which turned out to be a Spongebob pinata. the kids went CRAZY smacking him into pieces. such violence!

Happy Birthday Tiny!

Yes I have a friend we call Tiny. it’s not her real name but it describes her and the name stuck. Yes she answers to it. Sometimes I introduce her to new people as Tiny.

Her birthday is coming so we decided to celebrate it over the weekend. It was supposed to be at Botak’s Backyard @ Dempsey but she was held up at work and we were done eating so we decided to pick her up and head towards St James Beer Garden instead.

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of a beer garden, the name in itself suggests the growing of beer but that’s not what it really is. A beer garden is usually an outdoor or open area where beer is primarily served. sometimes it comes with live entertainment, like the one at St James or the many beer gardens you find in Thailand. sometimes food is sold at these places.

Beer Garden at St James is almost like Newton Circus hawker centre, with many food stalls ranging from the usual BBQ seafood to the not so usual Malacca Lok Lok (found next to each other at one end of the row of food stalls). since we unfortunately had our dinner at Botak’s we didn’t really eat anything except perhaps an oversized serving of deep fried Ngoh Hiang (prawn fritters & crackers) and 8 pieces of kueh tutu, courtesy of Bryan (whose eyes are always bigger than his stomach and who knows I love kueh tutu). This is especially great if you’re hungry after a night of partying, where in the past, I couldn’t think of a nearby place at the southern part of Singapore that would be open past midnight for late night munchies. We used to have to make a detour to either Newton or River Valley Road.

The other great thing about beer gardens is the live entertainment they sometimes promise. When we got there, we had a duo on stage singing old mandarin hits from Theresa Teng’s era. the female singer was apparently a fan of Theresa so she has cultivated her voice to mimic the songstress voice from that era. it has a crystal clear sound to it which made it really pleasing to hear, although we all felt very FM90.5 (radio station that played oldies and evergreens only) when we recognised some of the songs.

There were 2 bands on rotation that night, the other was this old mat rock band. they looked like they were jamming more than performing. they started their set with a difficult guitar solo Eagles’ Hotel California, which the lead guitarist kinda fucked up along the way, or rather it’s the way I would play the song on Guitar hero. but because the band was made up of old men who looked like someones’ fathers, we couldn’t help but cheer and hoot anyway. we even joined in the singing when they sang Hey Jude.

Yes yes, our age was showing.

Tiny’s birthday cake was made up of Japanese cheese cake with strawberries and cream from Bakerzin. it’s not supposed to look like that but it didn’t survive Kevin’s marvelous F1 driving. all the strawberries slid off the cake and landed rather haphazardly around the box. after singing a rather long and dragged out happy birthday song while trying to beat the wind when lighting the candles, we all tucked into the cake, all armed with a pair of chopsticks each. I’ve never eaten cake with chopsticks before.

The other great thing about the Beer Garden at St James is that we could bring our bottles out of St james. so not only did we have lime juice, chin chow and beer on the table, we also had a bottle of red wine and 2 bottles of vodka. while the girls in the club were dressed like skanks and had a heavy make-up on, I was sitting like an auntie just right outside.

Happy Burbday: Oversea Restoran

I once wondered at which point do people stop celebrating birthdays in a big way and do low key celebrations. Sometimes as you get older, it doesn’t seem so important to throw big parties and invite everyone you know to celebrate your existence. But as I think of Bryan’s Aunt Patricia’s 50th birthday bash I guess there’s no such thing as too old to do anything.

But over the years, I soon tire of planning my own birthday parties while planning other people’s at the same time. petulant, I thought if nobody bothered to pick up the phone and make arrangements for me, I’m not gonna bother too. At the same time, I figured quieter affairs with smaller clusters of friends was more meaningful than having one big dinner where half the table either don’t really know the other half, or worse, don’t really like each other.

Bryan was thankful that I wasn’t looking for a big party coz planning parties is not his thing. I for one shy away from being the centre of the attention. last year my colleagues broke out in boisterous song in office and I was practically hiding under the table to get away from the attention. this year the colleague who started the singing with a loud “HHHHAAAPPPYYYY” learned his lesson so it was just a quiet lunch for the both of us at Akashi restaurant. That I felt meant much more than anything else. he himself preferred a quiet lunch than the birthday party of KFC and pizza his team threw for him where he got a box of joke lighters with titties on them.

It is through sheer chance that I parked at Shaw Beach Road one day and while waiting for the light, I looked up at the building and saw the huge signboard on it proclaiming OVERSEA RESTORAN. I shrieked and everyone at the light turned to look at me. IS IT TRUE? IS IT THE MALAYSIAN OVERSEA RESTORAN? IT’S HERE IN SINGAPORE?

every work trip I used to make to KL was never complete without at least a visit to Oversea Restoran at Jalan Imbi to eat their famous char siew and roast pork. Now that I don’t do work trips anymore, to travel all the way to KL just to eat takes a lot of effort. I missed my char siew dearly, especially since you can’t bring pork into Singapore.

So Bryan very nicely picked the restaurant and made bookings in halting Mandarin, where he gave his number while mentally translating the numbers in his head from English to Mandarin, causing much mirth in the wait staff at the other end of the light who said out loud it’s as if he’s buying lottery numbers.

For those who’ve been to Oversea in Malaysia will know that when you reserve a table, you reserve a place of char siew or it’d be sold out by the time you get there. this was something my colleagues taught me, which I passed on to Bryan. Good thing the boy had foresight to reserve a large plate.

The table number was dangerously close to my age.

Claypot Eggplant with Mince Meat in sambal sauce.
Very very tasty. slightly spicier than the Crystal Jade one where the belachan gave it a shrimpy kick to the taste buds. I like. Between Tricia and myself, after giving everyone else 1 piece of eggplant, we finished the rest on our own.

The other favourite of mine, Claypot Pork Belly with Salted Fish. the meat here was a little more lean than the KL version but still very tasty. one time I saw this listed in another zi char restaurant’s menu, I asked if it’s like the KL version and the waitress laughed and said she can’t guarantee but it’s still good.

I didn’t have the herbal duck dish I love so the restaurant manager recommended this. It’s chicken braised with onions and stuff. I have no idea what it’s called coz he said it in Mandarin and it didn’t catch. but it comes in a huge pot. Tasty but not as tasty as my herbal duck would have been.

We also ordered stir fried kai lan with ginger juice and rice wine which was interestingly tasty.

The famous plate of char siew. When we all bite into it, everyone let out a mmm. it’s not as good as the one in KL, as the outer coat wasn’t as burnt and crispy but it’s almost there. it had the same honey gooey flavour and covered with enough fat but I think the centre is a bit dry, very much like the Singaporean char siew. so it’s not the pure KL char siew but it’s still 100x better than the usual char siew we eat here. On its own, I think it’s still pretty good.

The plate of char siew was almost hidden from me so when I wanted to eat one last piece, I realised the plate was empty, coz Aaron took the last piece. I almost threw a fit there and then as that was literally the last piece of char siew left in the restaurant.

After a round of jokes about getting me a chocolate-durian cake, or a YAM cake, followed by another round of jokes about how many candles there should be on the cake.

Thoroughly amused the waiter came back with the cork on a sauce plate. The wait staff were very amused when I was hiding my face in embarrassment while the table sang my birthday song extraordinarily slowly to prolong the pain, and also when Bryan spilt an entire cup of tea and he tried to blame it on Aaron.

Making my “I’m still 21″ face.

I have to go back again, this time to order roast pork and my herbal duck.

Happy Birthday Germaine!

It was Germaine’s 27th Madhatter’s Party at Food For Thought (Queen Street) this afternoon. I must admit this place is 100 times lovelier than the cramp little corner at North Bridge Road. They really need to do something with that place. It has that awful cooked food smell that permeates even your pores (seriously open kitchen concept is so 90s).

Food For Thought (or FFT) centres around the idea of giving. I think it’s run by Christians or such as they have holy text pasted on their walls. but they also talk about giving to the needy and the less fortunate. Which went well with this party’s gift theme: all moneys will go to SPCA. all the cute little woof woofs and meow meows will get a little something thanks to Germaine and James!

The ceiling was covered with glass bottles which looked very pretty from where we sat. It’s out of reach of anyone until someone walks by with a Hello Kitty party balloon.

This shelf had strange quirky items from plastic bags with the red merlion head to beanie monkey dolls. I’m not sure what the concept was.

When we first entered, we had to register ourselves “Through the Looking Glass.” I was a champion backward writer.

We were each given food and drink coupons. so fun! it’s like a funfair!

True to the theme, Germaine appeared in the coolest looking necklace. She froze while I snapped this picture so her boobs wouldn’t accidentally rise out of her neckline.

The menu of the day.

Crazy faces at a Madhatter’s Party.

I got the Linguine. it’s okay. not fantastic.

The Earl Grey Latte is really nice.

The invisible clock on the wall, much like a Cheshire Cat’s smile.

This two look so cute.

We played a few rounds of Quiz based on the theme of black and red. When deciding on our team name, we came up with Legen-wait-for-it-Dary, suggested by Aaron who’s on a “How I Met Your Mother” binge. so all our answers had “wait for it” in it. we got bonus points for our effort, 11/10 for the Red round.

The party had lots of laughs. especially when everyone was trying to guess what “Redwood Seconds” meant. Eugene’s answer was the best: “it is the amount of time it takes for one to get an erection”.

Aaron had some beer.

What’s everyone looking at?

There was a Cosplay thing next door with a bunch of people dressed up as Sailormoons. that wasn’t surprising. what was surprising was that they started doing a dance together. We were amazed that someone actually choreographed the entire thing and they probably had to practice together. E for Effort.

myself and the pretty birthday girl! The picture is kinda blurry because Tricia decided to breathe while snapping this shot. Tsk!

flowers and cupcakes! lovely! i had the red velvet ones.

There’s something growing out of my head!

Happy Birthday Germaine! (were we really two days late?)