Wrap & Roll

After attending church service at The Star Vista on Sunday, we looked around for a spot for lunch and were attracted by the big sign that stated "The Royal Beef Noodle Soup". Yes, key words like "beef soup" do attract me....easily. Moohehe.

The Hue Beef Noodle Soup ($14.90) was interesting. The broth was light, tasty and quite refined. There seemed to be a bit of turmeric too. Instead of just beef, there was a pig's trotter in here too! I mooch enjoyed the slices of beef shank for their deep beefy flavour.


Minced Pork & Mushrooms in Steamed Rice Paper Rolls ($8.90) were delicious! Chewy sheets of steamed rice paper enveloped a tasty filling of minced pork, mushrooms and black ear fungus. The sprinkling of fried shallots and pork floss added texture and additional flavours. Dip into the tangy sauce for oomph. Vietnamese chee cheong fun anyone? :p


The Grilled Pork Chop Rice with Salted Egg Pudding ($12.90) appealed in a funny Cantonese way. The pork chop was nothing exciting but the salted egg pudding reminded me of the classic steamed minced pork and salted egg dish that is so comforting.


Wrap & Roll
#B1-11
The Star Vista
Tel: 6694 4111

Chew On This: They serve an express set lunch on weekdays at $9.90++.

Sunday Brunch at LaBrezza

Sunday brunches are a great way to unwind and pamper one's stomach(s). LaBrezza, located at The St Regis Singapore, boasts a swimming pool view and a quiet, refined, relaxed charm.


The Italian Sunday Prosecco Brunch ($98++ with free flow prosecco) comes with a buffet spread of salads and antipasti...


A small selection of good cheeses.


Cured meats! Salami, 12-year and 24-year Prosciutto di Parma anyone? :D

Very, very good cherry tomatoes. These deceptively simple fruit blew me away with their burst of juicy, ripe sweetness.

Main courses and desserts are served upon order which means say good bye to soggy, insipid hot food from the buffet table. Yay!


Pizza Vesuvio spotted a nice slightly thick crust, warm gooey mix of cheese and tomato sauce and dotted with Italian sausage.


What's brunch without eggs right? The Uovo Tartufate e Fontina (45-minute poached eggs with fontina, truffle sauce) was one of my favourite items there. Perfectly poached eggs with a salty, creamy fontina cheese sauce that went well with the rich runny yolks. And a whiff of truffle to make this lagi shiok! Moohehe.

Don't miss out on the pastas too. Handmade fresh pastas served a la minute.

The Pomodoro Fresco (tomato on vine, aged ricotta cheese, basil) was simple and delicious. I suspect they either used the excellent cherry tomatoes mentioned earlier or a very good tomato sauce.

I really like how the simplicity of the pasta dishes and the use of good ingredients allowed them to shine. The Aglio Olio (garlic and dried chilli) and Vongole (clams in marinara sauce) were also worth twirling the fork for. Flavours were clean, clear and balanced.

The menu listed a "Risotto Special". On my visit, this was a toothsome piggy risotto made with Cotechino, a cured meat product made from the foot of the pig. and Scamorza cheese. Overall very comforting with some smokiness.

From the grill, unfortunately most of the items were quite charred resulting in bitterness. :(

Scottadito (grilled Australian lamb chops, lemon-mint marinade, roasted potatoes). Baa baa black sheep. The chicken, steak and prawns seemed to also follow suit. Le sigh.

Thankfully, there was a saving grace in the Spigola con broccoli e crema di patate (seabass with broccoli, cream of potato). Moist flesh with a crisp skin.

Mooving on to desserts. Here's the Zabaglione (Marsala Sabayon with fresh fruit) at the top and the Cannoli alla Siciliana (pistachio cannoli, candied lemon) at the bottom. I like the latter for the mix of crunchy biscuit texture and creamy ricotta cheese filling. The candied lemon imparted a nice citrus flavour to balance this dessert.


The other dessert that mooved me was the Tiramisu (whipped mascarpone cheese, espresso, lady finger biscuits). It was unctuous, very light and felt like the prefect way to end brunch.

Everything was washed down with Ca'del Sette Prosecco DOC. A delicate and crisp prosecco with flavours of pear, melons and a touch of minerals.

The spread is not extensive but it is still quite a good selection of quality eats. I just hope that they fix the grill issue.

Thank you Jackson and Jasmine of The St Regis Singapore for the invitation.
  

LaBrezza
Level 2, The St Regis Singapore
29 Tanglin Road

Tel: 6506 6884

Chew On This: LaBrezza means "breeze" in Italian.

TGIFreakingF

On Fridays at the end of a work week, it is a pleasure not to plan anything. A spontaneous meet up set Joo Chiat as the location and dinner was whatever tempted our eyes. And what a Friday feast it was! 

Being a lazy Friday evening, I'm not going to document names of stalls and prices. Friday evenings are too precious to fuss about details. :p

Finding our way to Dunman Food Centre, we ordered Wanton Mee and Rojak but were nearly knocked off our seats with a waiting time of 20 minutes and 1 hour respectively.

So while waiting, we headed the gahmen's call to productivity and ordered other food. Moohaha.

Prawn Noodles Dry was decent and inhaled in a flash. The chilli paste had quite a nice kick.

This Wanton Mee was from the "less famous" stall which had a total waiting time of just 5 minutes. I like the chilli sauce which was quite aromatic. But the slices of char siew were sad.

 A black, oily plate of Char Kway Teow fried till mooist and fragrantly sweet felt sooo good.

And was balanced off by the refreshing, sweet crunch from a veg-filled roll called Popiah.

Hey then the "20-minute Wanton Mee" appeared! The noodles were springy and there's that good mix of chilli and lard but I still don't feel the wait was justified. Sad to report, the char siew was pathetic. :(

How about the "1-hour Rojak"? It was delish! The cubes of tau pok and pieces of you tiao spotted a nice crust with a smoky appeal from being freshly grilled over a charcoal fire. The peanut and heh gor (prawn paste) added fragrance and texture, binding everything together nicely. I would order this again but would order other food to comfort the wait, of course.

Before we left the hawker centre, it was one basket of BBQ Chicken Wings that would be our last item there for that evening. Well...let's just say, the basket was nice. LOL.

After killing off the Tsing Tao, we wandered along Joo Chiat and ended up checking out some awesome Beef Ball Soup!

With our tummies now busy and with the humid heat creeping up on us, we sought air con comforts and entered this wine hideout that was cool with an almoost industrial feel. Nothing fancy but with an appealing secretive yet approachable vibe. No passwords (oh please, it's a Friday!) needed too. :)

Vino for that night was this French Syrah which had a distinct aroma of cracked pepper with some fruits just in the background. Though the palette was hollow with not much after taste, I kept the faith that I was imbibing healthful benefits. Moohehe.

All Fridays should be like that yo!

Superb Gravies at Kinara!

Some times deciding on where to eat at is really spontaneous and depends on quite a bit of time and chance. For example last week when we decided to try a western seafood restaurant along East Coast Road, we faced hurdles of finding a car park, and impending rain. The last blow was being informed of a wait time of 1 hour. @#$%. Ahem. With all signs seemingly against our dinner plans there, we mooved off in search of another place before the storm.

That's when we spotted this North Indian restaurant, Kinara, near the supermarket we were aiming for post-dinner grocery shopping.


Papadums with a mint yogurt dip welcomed us. :)


Then the Kinara Fish Curry ($15.90), Saffron Rice ($5) and Plain Nann ($2.50) arrived. The Kinara Fish Curry was superb! Creamy, aromatic and with a spiciness that comes at the end, the curry was awesome with the naan and over rice. Chunks of fish (I am guessing Dory) were coated in a light batter before being fried and finished in the curry.

The Saffron Rice featured basamati rice from Dehradoon, an area in India apparently known for the rice. I found it pleasant with long, fluffy grains but otherwise nothing to shout about. And at $5 for a bowl which hardly fed me, I do feel it's a tad expensive.

The Murgh Tikka Masala ($15.90) is a must order! Like the fish curry, this gravy was awesome. Rich and heady, the gravy also contained black specks of olive vegetable. Yes, that salty stuff that comes from a jar and which many like to go with porridge. It was a very surprising ingredient (authentic or not, I am not sure) but it was 100% delicious in the masala gravy!

Not surprisingly, we ordered another portion of naan to mop up all the gravies. :D

I left feeling belly happy with the rich, punchy gravies...now if only there were better priced rice.

Kinara 

6 Changi Business Park Avenue 1

#01-28 UE Bizhub East

Tel: 6604 7016

Chew On This: They do catering, and home deliveries via Foodpanda, too.

Yummeh Beef Ball!

We were initially targeting Vietnamese beef pho but somehow got lured in by this Chinese beef ball soup which turned out to be excellent. Proof that one can plan but sometimes just follow your heart lah.

The Three In One Beef Soup ($5; additional 50cents for rice) came with beef ball, tendon ball and beef slices in a light but tasty soup with crunchy blanched beans sprouts. While the beef slices were tenderised and lack beefy flavour, the beef balls were very good- nice firm bite without being overly dense and floury and with a good beefy flavour. Dip them into the chilli sauce for a bit more (tangy, chilli and garlic) kick!

The Beef & Tendon Ball Dry Bee Hoon ($5) featured the dry version with a gooey brown sauce that packed heaps of five spice. I mooch prefer the soup version here. :)


The Beef House
151 Joo Chiat Road (shares the premise with Rong Seafood)

Chew On This: Planning a home party? Buy back frozen beef slices, beef ball, tendon ball and chilli sauce here!

Birthday Dinner with the Family at hippopotamus

Ok so watching Nat Geo will probably tell you that a cow in a hippo eating a cow does not happen. But try running around crazy in blistering heat on a scorching Saturday and it would make that moore believable. Moohehe.

After a work event that was so tiring but fun, I rushed to meet the family for my birthday dinner at Hippopotamus. It's apparently a casual French restaurant that specialises in affordable steaks.


Here's my Skirt Steak ($18.90). The muscle structure of this cut made it a tad tougher and more chewy but I  quite enjoyed its bite and flavour.

Mum and Sis (and later me. Moohaha) shared the Sirloin Steak ($49.90). A 480g thick chunk of sirloin was quite lean with a rich, irony beef flavour.

For those who can't decide on their cut, there's the Beef Skewer ($21.90)- a mix of sirloin, rump, skirt and hanger on well....a skewer.

Hippopotamus is a casual, family-friendly restaurant with decent, reasonably priced food and good service on that evening we were there. Though I am not fond of long queues, I can see why there was one.

hippopotamus
#01-204/205 
Marina Square 
Tel: 63385352 
Opens: 11am - 10.30pm daily

Chew On This: 

The Spirit of Ponderosa Lives on at Astons Steak & Salad!

I sorely miss the now defunct Ponderosa. Probably one of the first few places I cut my teeth on steaks and baked potato, Ponderosa holds many a happy memoory dining out with the family when I was a kid. So imagine my joy in discovering that the old Astons Prime has morphed into a restaurant that brings back that shiok Ponderosa feeling! :)

A Salad Bar ($19.90) offering coleslaw, mixed leaves, pasta salad, turnip, beans, olives, broccoli, walnuts etc always brings a smile.

From the the hot food salad bar counter, chew on Brussels sprouts, grilled mushrooms, pasta in tomato sauce and steamed veggies. At least 3 different hot soups from vegetables soup, onion soup and cream of mushroom should warm up empty bellies.

Also available were hot comfort food of potato wedges, onion rings, hash browns, mashed potato...some French beans and sauerkraut added a refreshing break from the yummy carbs.

And then it is back to chewing moore greens. Moohehe.

To complement the salad bar, a number of meats should please moost omnivores. The Pork Chops ($25.90; price comes with the salad bar!) were thin and super tender though I much prefer a more robust taste of the pork.

Grilled Chicken Dinner ($21.90, price comes with the salad bar!) boasted a sizable boneless chicken thigh nicely grilled with a fragrant aroma. The succulent meat had flavours of satay....without the meddling bamboo skewers. My choice of side, the baked potato, was exactly how I remembered Ponderosa's baked potato to be- creamy, buttery, salty and a bit too small! :p

End off with some fruits and the creamy soft serve ice cream. The latter again provided heaps of flashbacks to Ponderosa days.

Moocho gracias for bringing those delicious childhood memories back!

*All prices stated are already inclusive of 7% and there is no service charge (but got service hor!)

Astons Steak & Salad
#03-45/46/47
The Centrepoint
Opens: 11.30am to 10pm daily
Tel: 6235 0556

Chew On This: Aston, the guy behind the Astons chain of restaurant, used to work at Ponderosa and I think this particular restaurant is a fine tribute to the magic of Ponderosa.