I went to Oriole Cafe for Sunday brunch today.

The coffee is rather famous, so I opted for regular coffee (rather than my usual decaf). I had a vanilla latte ($6), and it came with such beautiful latte art. The latte is smooth, even with low-fat milk. It tastes way better than Starbucks. Maybe it’s because I had it warm; the cold Starbucks vanilla latte now tastes like swill in comparison.

For my brunch, I had the Ali Baba, which is Turkish-inspired. A herbed lamb patty with flat bread, halloumi cheese, a bean dip and a side salad. The lamb is flavourful and juicy, I really enjoyed it. The Halloumi cheese is a little too salty, but goes well with the bread. I will not hesitate to reorder this.

My friend KL had the classic Eggs Benedict. The poached egg is dully runny, which is good. At least for those who love runny egg yolks.

Oriole Cafe has a nice relaxing ambience, great for Sunday brunches and lazy afternoon tea.

Do check out their website at http://www.oriolecoffee.com/

Oriole Coffee & Bar
96 Somerset road
Pan Pacific services suites, #01-01
Tel No.: 6238 8348

Last week I had brunch at Antoinette at the Mandarin Gallery. This is my review.

Antoinette specializes in French desserts, so it is no wonder a whole glass case is devoted to macarons. These colourful sweet treats are pretty to look at, but I just don’t have that sort of sweet tooth to stomach them. If you like macarons, these colourful delight will sweeten your day.

The seating capacity at Mandarin Gallery is small; les chaises sont tres jolie (and my grammar is probably all over the place). The ambience is relaxing and the lights are dim, very classy, I suppose.

For brunch, I had the scrambled eggs with French ham and Gruyere cheese. It is served with thick toast and a side salad. The bread is toasted to perfection, and the scrambled eggs are fluffy and rich. The ham and cheese are a little too salty for my liking, but overall they balance out each other.

Angela had the Blinis pancakes with smoked salmon, served with sour cream. I tried some of the pancakes and I dare corroborate they are the best pancakes in Singapore. It is crisp on the outside but fluffy and soft on the inside. It’s the right taste- not too sweet and not too bland.

See how fluffy the interior is? After these pancakes, I don’t think I can stomach those from Strictly Pancakes or MacDonalds anymore.

We also had dessert to share.

I had the Religiuese of Caramel with fleur de sel. It’s basically cream filled choux pastry. For some reason it tasted rather stale to me; the choux felt more like overnight bread. I like the cream filling; it’s slightly salted caramel and I know from the interior shot below it looks too much like tau sar piah , it’s not too crumbly. In fact, this dessert reminds me a little of salted tau sar piah, just different in texture.

Angela had the Antoinette. It’s some kind of mousse in the interior that is flavoured with Earl Grey. I didn’t know it was Earl Grey at first; I just mentioned I tasted bergamot, a prime ingredient in Earl Grey tea.

Overall, the dessert and food at Antoinette is delicate, along with their cutlery and decor. It’s a nice place to chill and while away an afternoon. If you get a seat by the window, you get to people watch patrons to The Mandarin Gallery. This place is good for dessert lovers (not me). Will I return? It depends. I am not known to queue for my food, so if there is no line, I might return just for a relaxing after high tea with friends.

Read my review below.

We started off with the spicy pomelo salad with prawns, chicken, roasted coconut, ground peanuts and sweet sauce. (In their menu it was written grounded peanuts, which is quite funny.) This salad is da bomb. It is spicy, tangy, sweet, savoury all rolled in one. A true explosion of taste. The pomelo is ripe and sweet, not bitter nor sour at all. I liked how the salad is very well mixed.

Next I had the thai herbal soup with prawn, mixed vegetables and lemon basil leaves. This is a miss in my opinion. The soup tasted funky, there’s some strange unidentified gourd, and I didn’t eat any prawns. I will take Chinese herbal soup any day.

We then had a green curry with roasted duck, coconut cream, sweet basil leaves and seasonal fresh fruit. In this case, there was lychee in the curry, but I doubt it is fresh. It tasted too sweet to be fresh, frankly. The roasted duck in curry combination is not a winner. It felt too much like throwing leftovers from some banquet into the curry. The taste didn’t go together. I think it’s still a better choice to stick to chicken or beef.

The pat thai was not inspiring either. It was too sweet; they seem to have used tomato ketchup in frying it. This really tasted flat and icky. I don’t think pat thai should taste like this.

Overall, Sabai Thai does not live up to the mark for me. It feels a little like the now-defunct Lemongrass, just not as tasty. The lunch crowd that day was made of tourist and expat businesspeople on a company lunch. After eating the food I knew why only these suckers people eat there. Will I go back? Hell no. You want to know why? After eating their food both my friend and I had bad reaction to some spice or MSG they used; overnight we developed headache and felt really dehydrated and the early onset of sore throat. It’s almost like having a hangover. Their food is not worth the morning after.

Official website: http://www.sabaifinethai.com.sg/

Sabai Authentic Fine Thai Cuisine
391B Orchard Road
Takashimaya S.C.
Ngee Ann City #04-23
Tel No.:  6333 8491

I am fan of Japanese ramen, but I have unique taste. I need my broth to be complex but not too salty, rich but not too thick. Basically, I am Goldilocks without the housebreaking tendencies. Will I find my favourite Ramen from one of the stalls at Ramen Champion?

Ramen Champion at Iluma Bugis conglomerates 6 ramen chains from different parts of Japan including 3 from Tokyo and others from Sapporo, Toyama and Hakata. The concept is post-paid food court, where you are given a card which records all the purchases and you make payment at the end of the meal.

There are 6 ramen stalls to choose from – Bario (seen above with the red sign), Gantetsu, Tetsu,  Ikkousha (seen above with the black sign), Menya Iroha, and Taishoken. My friend and I decided to eat from Bario and Ikkousha.

Bario ajitama ramen

My friend had Bario’s Ajitama ramen, which comes with beansprouts. Bario is from Tokyo.

The noodles are fat and slightly flat; not as flat as meepok, but more like those noodles used in lor-mee. It soaks up the broth rather quick, so eat fast! Their egg is cooked to perfection – hard on the outside with the yolk still running. I did not manage to capture a picture of that, but I think their eggs have some kind of standard.

Ikkousha chashu ramen (with extra chashu)

Being the greedy person that I am, I got the chashu ramen from Ikkousha with extra meat. On hindsight, it was a bad choice. The meat is definitely not fall-apart tender; it was quite hard to chew at some point. The soup is a little too spicy, but I liked the crunch of black fungus inside.Ikkousha is from Hakata.

The noodles are pretty standard, not too chewy, not too soft, just nice. But I am not too picky about my noodles, really.

However, this is by no means my favourite ramen. So the search continues!

I also got gyoza from Ikkousha for sharing. Based on the picture I’m sure you can tell how crispy the charred bits are. This is meant to be eaten warm; once it starts to cool down the crispiness goes away. The filling is made with the standard ingredients, but it tastes pretty good. I will recommend ordering this dish.

Overall I liked my visit to Ramen Champion. Even though I didn’t find my favourite ramen in this visit, I will definitely revisit this place to avoid run-of-the-mill chain ramen stores.

To look at the comprehensive menu from each stall, visit their Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/theultimateramenchampion2011

Ramen Champion
201 Victoria Street
Iluma Bugis
#04-08/09
Tel No.: +65 6238 1011

]]> http://lovelyloey.me/ramen-champion/feed/ 0 http://lovelyloey.me/frostbite/ http://lovelyloey.me/frostbite/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:59:59 +0000 lovelyloey http://lovelyloey.me/?p=4897

What’s best for the sweltering heat in Singapore? Popsicles!

I was in Toa Payoh and came across this quaint little popsicle store. I was instantly attracted by the kitschy signboard and colourful popsicle display.

I love popsicles more than ice cream; ice cream always comes across as cloying and thick and fattening, while popsicles always seem so light and refreshing. The flavors at Frostbite are mostly fruity -

Fruity flavours cost $2.80 each, and the chocolatey exotic ones are $3.80. Expensive for a popsicle, but cheap for an icy dessert!

I chose the Coconut Rambutan.

The popsicle tastes of toasted coconut flakes and rambutan. Frankly I don’t think the two go well together, but I  guess that’s just me. Coconut will go well with almonds, and maybe lime (and we sing – put the lime in the coconut…)

Anyway, my colleagues had more colourful and interesting flavours.

One of them decided to colour coordinate her outfit and her popsicle – that’s the watermelon lemon flavour.

This is the mango lychee – it looks really pretty.

Will I go back to Frostbite? You bet. Each time I’m in Toa Payoh I will instantly drift over. Where is Frostbite? It’s near the Toa Payoh Hub along where Watsons and Tiong Bahru Pau is. Detailed address : 190 Lorong 6 Toa Payoh, #01-546.

The salads are customizable and comes in 3 sizes- rabbit size, zebra size and elephant size. It’s not really the size of the container or amount of base vegetables, but the number of mix-ins you have. Elephant feed, which we had, allows you to choose from a number of meat.

Every component of your salad is customizable, from the base leaves, to the mix-ins like nuts, berries, peppers, to cheeses.

My colleague has eggs, roast beef (and other stuff) with baby spinach leaves. The container is about 15cm x 15cm x 10cm deep.

I had a combination of deli leaves (with things like rocket and radicchio), cous cous, sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese, bell peppers, mushroom, pine nuts (and some others) and roast beef. The dressing is a mint yogurt, which is unfortunately not very minty nor yogurty for my liking.

See my pieces of roast beef – they were tender and flavourful.

The Salad Shop makes good customizable salads, which are light and satisfying meal. At $12 for an elephant feed it doesn’t come cheap, so I can only indulge once in a while. They only have one outlet at UOB Plaza, so it’s quite out of the way for me. Nonetheless it’s a place worth going if you like salads.

Visit their official website (http://www.thesaladshop.com.sg/) for the menu and more!

The Salad Shop
80 Raffles Place
UOB Plaza 2 #01-20
Tel No.: 6536 3686

There was a short queue when we got there at about 6.45 pm on a Friday night, partly because of the small seating capacity in the restaurant.

There are several varieties of xiaolong bao (XLB) served here, and we got the Crabmeat & Porking Filling Steamed Bun (蟹肉小笼) ($9).

I don’t know about you, but I typically pierce my XLB, squeeze out the soup into a spoon, drink the soup before I eat it. Each of these steamed buns had one tablespoon full of soup in side. I’d say that’s a golden standard. The soup in this Crabmeat steamed bun is lighter than I expected. Far lighter compared to some other establishments. My only qualm is that it doesn’t seem to be warm enough, unlike my other soupy bun (below).

I also got the King Size Nanxiang Crab Roe Steamed Soup Bun (蟹黄灌汤包)($6.8). It’s really crab soup served in a steamed bun. It reminds me of the one we had while we were in Shanghai, but this tastes better. The soup is light but flavourful, and there is copious amounts of dried scalloped fibre to be sucked out of the straw. Beware, the soup is this is really hot. Also, the skin is too thick to be consumed; it’s not meant to be, anyway.

The Shanghai Pan-fried Dumpling (上海锅贴)($5) was not crispy enough for my liking; the skin is slightly too thick, but the filling was nice. Compared to Japanese gyozas, I prefer the latter.

Also for unbeknownst reasons, restaurant vegetables are always nicer. I bet it has something to do with the copious amounts of oil and the intense heat in the wok. The Stir Fried Doumiao with Garlic (蒜茸豆苗)($9.80) is very delicious. None of the bitter grassy taste of doumiao (which I don’t like) retained, which is a plus to me.

We shared a Shanghai Fried Rice with Special Sauce Duck (上海酱鸭炒饭)($8.50). The special sauce tastes like charsiew sauce. The rice is fried with spring onion and egg, fairly standard across most Chinese restaurants. There is nothing to rave about this dish, but for those who need to fill up on carbs, the serving is pretty big.

Perhaps I had some expectations when I went to the restaurant, so nothing seem to be VERY nice; but they all meet the standard somewhat. I am not sure if I will go back again in the near future, but I know I won’t shun it if someone suggests this spot to dine.

Visit their official website here (http://www.nanxiang.com.sg/).

Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant
200 Victoria Street
#02-53 Bugis Junction
(Branches at City Square Mall and Plaza Singapura)
Tel No.: 6835 7577

I had Freshness Burger for lunch the other day. I took out from the outlet at Century Square and ordered for myself a Salsa Burger, avocado salad and an orange tea.

The avocado salad has avocado, onions, tomatoes and cucumber. The dressing is a bizarre sweet and tangy solution that really only flavoured the cucumbers. Overall the salad is fresh and mildly tasty, but the dressing is a major fail.

I am sorely disappointed at the burger. Other reviewers have warned how small the burgers are; I would say about MOS Burger size. The patty is a sad piece of reconsituted meat not unlike the patty from MacDonald’s hamburger, or the sort you get in Big Breakfast. For a salsa burger, it too me more than two bits to find. The lettuce is also a mere gesture of greens. The only redeeming factor of this burger is the soft bun; the bun is well-made and tasty. Alas, everything else about the burger is a disappointment.

Given such bad quality ingredients, there’s really not much point making burgers “fresh” because it won’t make it any better. I was the only customer in line and I waited for than 10 minutes for such a lackluster burger and salad. Ew.

So my meal from this expensive fast food failed to impress. Given a choice, I won’t return visit to this place.

Freshness Burger
#01-37 Century Square Mall
2 Tampines Central 5
Tel. No.: 67853435

Ever since its opening last year, I’ve been wanting to go to Strictly Pancakes but never really found the opportunity for it. Yesterday we finally went down to Prinsep Street for pancake dinner!

The menu has both savoury and sweet pancakes, and given the novelty of savoury pancakes, all 5 of us picked savoury dishes.

This is the Beef Me Up ($14). A beef patty with grilled mushrooms and extra thick pancakes. These pancakes are as thick as those pancakes with filling from places like Mr Bean. This pancake-burger is served with a side salad as well.

The Salmon Run ($14). Slices of smoked salmon atop a stack of three pancakes, served with a dill sour cream. Definite must-try for salmon lovers.

I had the Chicken a la King ($13). It too has a medium stack (3 pancakes), asparagus and chicken breasts cooked with cream and black pepper and onions. The onions are barely caramelised, and the chicken is tough and stringy. The cream sauce on the side is nice, but not spectacular. Of course the pancakes are fluffy and delicious; I won’t expect anything less for an establishment specializing in pancakes. This dish however, in my opinion, is feh.

With every “main course” comes with maple syrup and choice of butter among garlic herbs, rum and raisin, salted and unsalted. I picked the rum and raisin.

The butter is soft, since we were sitting outdoors. The raisins are soaked in rum, so they do taste really decadent. This butter will go well with both savoury and sweet pancakes I suppose.

I dare say the Garlic Buttered Prawns ($14) is one of the best among all that we ordered. The prawns are succulent, albeit a little too crunchy (from whatever kitchen solution they soaked the prawns in). the garlic butter is, well, garlic butter.

The last dish we ordered is the Potatoes Leeking Cheese ($12). The potatoes, leeks and cheese are blended into the pancake batter, so these pancakes are thicker than usual. It is served with a side of sauteed mushrooms and a cream sauce.

Overall, we felt that the place is overhyped going by the dishes we had. Perhaps they are better at their sweet pancakes. Pancakes for dinner are fun, but really filling! Is this place worth a return visit? Yes, provided there is no queue. We went at 630pm, and for a party of five we have to sit outdoors and by 7pm the place was filled and people have queue up. So a word of advice – go early, and keep your party small. I may return one day to try their sweet pancakes.

Visit their official website at http://www.strictlypancakes.com.sg

Strictly Pancakes
44A Prinsep Street (Opposite PoMo and SOTA)
Tel: 63334202
Refer to the website for detailed opening hours

My sister bought me a box of Lychee Pocky from NTUC. It purports to contain 7% lychee flakes in the cream coating.

The taste is very lychee-esque, and I find it hard to believe that there is not artificial flavoring. according to the ingredients list there is:

Wheat flour, sugar, hydrogenated palm fat, milk powder, lychee flake, margarine, skimmed milk powder, hydrogenated cocoa fat.

No source of artificial coloring and flavor? I don’t believe it. Perhaps ingredients listing is not so strict in Thailand (this product is under Glico Thailand license). Nonetheless it’s a tasty snack, pretty refreshing and suitably tropical. And since it’s a Thailand Glico product it’s not expensive, close to the price of regular Thailand-produced Pocky.

(This post, along with its pictures are brought to you entirely on the iPhone)