Thai Lunch & Japanese Dinner

26/7/12

One of the things Wey wanted to eat in Singapore was claypot mung bean noodles with crabs, but it wasn't the crabs that he was after. It was the strips of fatty pork in the bottom of the claypot that he had tasted in Singapore's Amara Hotel's Thanying Restaurant that he'd been dreaming of.

We were in the vicinity of Boat Quay so rather than take a long ride to Amara Hotel, we decided on an elegant Thai restaurant called Sukhokthai. My only reservations before walking into the restaurant was a fear that it was a chain restaurant because there seems to be a Sukhokthai restaurant in every part of the world. It turned out that I should've looked into the syllable "Suk".

The first red flag was the prawn cakes. Each cake was served individually on each of our plate.


It was delicious, with a  springy bite but it wasn't till later that I saw that each prawn cake was S$9/RM23/USD7...


Now I love tom yum but this was a rather bland bowl of tom yum. It just tasted very sour. It was also about S$8 or 9 per bowl. I'm not sure how they are doing now but Thanying makes the BEST tom yum although you need an iron-clad throat to drink a bowl of their version of Thailand's most famous soup.


Papaya salad. Good and refreshing. Can't remember the price.


The water spinach was very tender and fried just nice, not too overdone, but there was just a bit too much sugar in the dish for me.


Green curry. Again, rather bland and ordinary.


I specifically asked the waiter if they make claypot mung bean noodles with strips of fatty bacon and he said yes. Wey dug all over and found two small (spoon size) pieces of lean pork and he was so disappointed. The dish was also very soupy underneath all those noodles and again, bland and devoid of the exotic mixture of pepper, coriander roots and other spices. The waiter had asked if we wanted the noodles with prawns or crabs but since Wey doesn't eat prawns, I opted for crabs. And that's when I made one of the classic mistakes in ordering in a restaurant: I didn't ask the price. I just thought, how much can crabs cost? Since Hub paid, I had no idea of the cost until much later. If I had known, I would've let the waiter know that he's a bad waiter for not warning me because S$110 is outrageous by any standard. A good waiter should ask the customer if she wants to pay for Sri Lankan crab or some cheaper crabs. What a fleecer, SuCkhokthai!


Cassava with coconut milk. The cassava was done well, chewy and delicious but the coconut milk was too thin.


Sticky rice with mangoes.

The meal for 4 at Suckhokthai was S$270/RM690/USD230, the most expensive Thai meal I've ever had. Hang on, make that the most expensive meal I've ever had given the ordinary dishes. It isn't the outrageous prices that guided my rating but really the food was just average to slightly above average, made better because it was 'fine dining' Thai style.

Wey felt so bad after that that he suggested that we skip dinner, to average the cost of our meals I suppose. I have such sweet kids. But we went to Orchard Road and I've always wanted to try the ramen in Ippudo, the restaurant which some people swear makes the best ramen in Singapore. There was a long queue when I passed by the restaurant last year but it has since abated slightly. We got a table easily because we went at 6 pm.




This was oh-so-good, much better than those in New York's famed Momofuku. I think it was S$3, which is cheap compared to Momofuku's USD9 bun.


Potatoes with cod roe. I couldn't taste the roe but this was tasty to although not worth the S$18 (if I don't remember wrong).

As with all ramen, you get a choice of soup base: miso (fermented bean paste) or shio (salt) or shoyu (soy sauce) or tonkotsu (pork bones). We went straight for the richest, heaviest and most delicious stock, the tonkotsu.


Akamaru chashu S$20/RM50/USD16, ramen with simmered belly pork. At first glance, the house-made white straight ramen was a surprise, maybe a slight disappointment, because ramen to us is always yellow and crinkly but it tasted great, so it went down okay. The soup though was thoroughly satisfying--very rich and tasty--and the pork belly was awesome, meltingly tender and full of flavor. Look at the bits of fat floating in the soup.


Ramen with flavored egg, tender pork cubes and bamboo shoots, S$24/RM60/USD19. This is the ramen we ate most in Tokyo and it's still our favorite.


The flavored egg is just boiled egg with soy sauce and other seasoning but I was told each egg is S$3/RM7.50/USD2.50.

I found Ippudo's ramen very good (but not cheap! Meal was about S$70/RM180/USD60 and the 3 of us shared two bowls of ramen) but I don't think that given the high quality of Japanese food in Singapore that Ippudo has the best ramen. My son Wey would disagree though because Ippudo is his favorite restaurant now.

Marina Bay Sands

25/7/12

A reader of this blog in Singapore had kindly sent me a guide book on the hawker stalls in Singapore a few years ago, probably to change my opinion that the best food in Singapore is found in restaurants, the more expensive the better, and that the hawker food there can't hold a candle to the hawker food in Kuala Lumpur.

I brought the book with me this trip and my son Wey who reads the book often, marking the things he wants to eat, suggested Chai Chee Pork Porridge (name of the stall) since my stomach was still unwell. Wey had also marked Western Food 85, famed for its crispy pork knuckle, which was right next to Chai Chee PP, at 85 Bedok North St 4. When we got to the stalls (which are in a newly renovated hawker market, and near a stinky birds shop), we found that Western Food 85 had moved away. Dang moment for Wey.




The pork &century egg congee and the chicken congee were thicker than Hong Kong congee, very smooth and not saturated with msg (as congee in KK are), and we loved it. S$4/RM10/USD3.30 for regular bowl.


Hub loves wonton noodles and orders them whenever he's not in KK because the wonton noodles in KK are hopelessly soft and bland. We found Singapore wonton noodles pretty good, with a springy el dente bite like wonton noodles should, but the wonton dumplings had soft pork mince (a no no for us; we prefer crunchy prawns filling) and the soup lacked shrimp roe flavor.


Singaporean fried lobak (turnip cake) is very different from Malaysian's version and I am partial to Malaysian lobak. This plate of lobak was too sweet, didn't have bean sprouts and lacked turnip flavor.


The Marina Bay Sands casino and hotel complex looks ridiculous from far, like a ship had somehow run aground on the top of three buildings--but when you get up close, it is stunning. I've had the pleasure of listening to Moshe Safdie, the architect for the building, talk about the Marina Bay Sands project during the e.g. Conference in Monterey in April this year.


Singapore has an Eye too.


The lotus-shaped Singapore Museum. Must visit it next trip.




This is the pool end of the 'ship'.


In the Marina Bay Sands Hotel.


The sky bridge connects the hotel and casino to the 2-weeks old Gardens By The Bay. I love plants and had looked forward to walking in the Gardens but it was too hot and I thought I'd go back some night (when there'll be a lights display) but never did. It's okay because the garden will just get better with time. Trust it to the Singaporeans to come up with this fantastic tropical garden, the only kind in the world.

The hotel has many restaurants but the biggest one (I think) is Rise, which has a daily buffet so beautiful that it's hard to resist. I could though, because I was still sick and nothing appealed to me. Hub and Wey decided to eat the buffet (S$57/RM145/USD47, tax included) so I went window shopping. When I came back, they both looked unhappy, too full and regretful and as always with buffets, they both swore they'd never eat another buffet again. Wey said he didn't even try more than 20% of the spread because he felt so full. Here are just some of the buffet:
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The carrot cake was very delicious (yes, I ate some), with a very light texture. The filling was cream cheese but the top and sides were covered with fresh cream.

To get to view the famous infinity pool on the 57th floor, you have to either be a hotel guest or pay an entrance fee of S$20. A friendly waiter told us that a better deal would be to go to the rooftop bar for a drink, so we did that. And that's when we found an even better deal: Go to the lift at Tower 3 and ask to go up to the bar for a drink. The lady'll give you a card and you can then go up. Once up, you can sit down for a drink or a meal or just walk around. We saved S$60 and felt so clever. Of course, that means you don't get to enter the pool area but the view from the bar is pretty awesome anyway.


A view of the Gardens By The Bay. The  bridge on the lower right of the photo connects to the hotel (I'd be crazy to walk there under the 3 pm sun). Those circular towers are 'super trees' and reminds me of Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia.


Exciting things are happening to Singapore's skyline and architecture.


One end of the 'ship' is a roof top bar called Ku De Ta which I thought was rather disappointing compared to the world's top roof top bars, especially Moon Bar at Banyan Tree in Bangkok and Aer at Four Seasons, Mumbai. 


The other end is an awesome infinity pool.








I had the casanova (I think it was called), a choc upcake, and the raspberry cupcake, both good but not awesome, S$6/RM15.30/USD4.90 EACH.



After a long walk around the complex (we skipped the casino because minimum age for entrance was 21), I was hungry and Mozza Pizza it was. You'd be a fool to miss Mozza Pizza's pizzas if you are in Marina Bay Sands.








The waitress suggested that I try their most exciting and unusual pizza, the one with nettles, salami, caciocavallo and egg, S$30/RM76.50/USD25. It was very good (Wey was blown away by it) but I prefer pizzas with a tomato base. Mozza's pizzas are expensive but totally worth it! This time, the pizza was larger than those we ate last year.

After all that food, Hub and Wey said they'd skip dinner but when dinner time came, we found ourselves back at the hawkers' stalls in Koven where Wey had the mee bok and Hub ordered a claypot chicken.






I didn't think that I'd like this but after one bite, I couldn't stop eating. The chicken was tender and tasty, the gravy had hints of Sichuan peppercorns and other Sichuanese spices. I enquired and was told by the waitress that the cooking was Chongqing-style. Chongqing in Sichuan was the capital of China in 1066 BC, in 1063 and from 1939 to 1946.


We had to have dessert on a hot muggy night, and queues are good signs.


Super smooth soy bean jelly (taufu fa) and grass jelly (leong fun). Both are jellies, but different in flavors and texture. The grass jelly (black color) was soft yet springy while the soy bean jelly was slippery-smooth and soft. About S$1.90/RM4.80/USD1.55 per bowl.

It was a good food day. And night.