I first met Kenjiro "Hatch" Hashida back in 2013 when he had just opened Hashida Sushi at level two of the Mandarin Gallery. I was at once smitten by his vintage anago tsume (sauce) which has an unbroken lineage of over 135 years!
The Coconut Club: Nasi Lemak, Cendol, Otah and other Coconut dishes!
You would be forgiven if you thought that The Coconut Club was some sort of beach bar serving piña coladas, but nooooo..., the reason it's called "The Coconut Club" is far more prosaic. They called it "The Coconut Club" simply because the owners were nuts over coconuts!
Joo Heng has been famous for the longest time and it was one of the first zi chars which blogged about in 2006 when I first started to prowl the streets of Singapore in search of its best food.
Legendary Bak Kut Teh: The future is bright for BKT!
In recent years there has been a spate of new Bak Kut Teh restaurants opening up. We can probably attribute this trend to the success of Song Fa Bak Kut Teh which managed to strike upon the right formula in translating the traditional dish for a new generation of Singaporeans.
It’s been a few years since I last wrote about Ah Liang and his then newly opened Chao Shan cuisine restaurant. Since then he has relocated to a bigger and brighter restaurant at Philip St, so we felt it was time to visit our Teochew Ah Hia again.
Joël Robuchon: Three Michelin Star Dining Experience
How does one write about a Three Michelin Star restaurant whose Chef has been given the title “Chef of the Century” and who currently has a total of twenty eight Michelin Stars? If I criticised it, I would surely sound patronising. If I said the experience is “phenomenal”, I might be misconstrued as being shallow.
Ye Shang Hai Teochew Porridge: Taxi Driver’s Haunt
This Teochew Ah Hia is your typical “hao lian bah“. The saying goes that Teochews are “hao lian” (like to brag), Hokkiens are “dua bian” (big cons). If you don’t believe it, just pop by Ye Shang Hai and talk to the boss! But the good thing about being “hao lian” is that they make extra effort to make the food good so that they have something to be “hao lian” about.
After the meepok is tossed in the sauce, it is topped with a generous amount of sliced pork, pork balls and minced pork. Then tender sliced Japanese style charshu which has been slow cooked for 5 hours is draped over the noodles and finally, in case you still haven't satisfied your need for pig, a generous amount of crispy pork lard is laid on top of the mountain of pork.
It is good to see our two young hawkerpreneurs, Kai and Randall doing so well at Roast Paradise one year on. When I initially posted their story on Facebook in Oct last year, they had just opened their stall and though the char siew was promising, I felt that it needed more fine tuning before I would recommend it on the blog.
This is one of the few stalls I know who still insists on using pork lard to fry the oyster omelette. Their typical plate of oyster omelette is 70% crispy and 30% gooey which is a very nice combination of textures. For those who have dentures, you can also request for them not to fry it too crispy, so that you can still gum the the gooey bits.
There are some things in life that are so simple and yet so good. Things like ban jian kueh (慢煎粿 – lit slow fried cake) for example. Mix flour, eggs and milk into a batter, slowly pan fry it till it turns golden brown and serve it with crushed peanuts and sugar. Crispy on the outside, chewy in the middle, the combination of the warm chewy carbs with the savoury sweet ground peanuts is a good as it gets!
Dashi Master Marusaya is one of my favourite Japanese restaurants in Singapore. It’s one of the few places I know which uses only natural ingredients to cook their food. So their dashi doesn’t just come out of a pack. It is made the traditional way using Rishiri kombu (regarded as the best in Japan) and aged katsuobushi (of which they are the distributor) which they shave at their premises. That is why they dare to call themselves “Dashi Master”!
