Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Xin Hainan @Serangoon Garden



This is a 'new' restaurant that just opened for 10 months.  The deco is very Chinese.  There are many photographs on the walls, obviously this restaurant was previously known as Xin Haifu (新海府), but changed the name recently.


As we were there for lunch, and still needed to go back to office to work, I ordered fried beef with egg, served with plain rice.   The taste was quite decent.  The egg was smooth, and tasty, but the beef was a bit uneven.  Some slices were really tender, but some were really chewy.  Overall, it was still quite reasonable.

They have a lunch set menu, for my plate of fried beef with egg, the cost was S$6.80++.  I think it is pretty reasonable, considering we are eating in a restaurant.

Their signature dish is said to be the crab porridge, but we didn't have the time to give it a try, maybe next time.

Their service is again, an area for improvement.  I paid my bill with cash, they came back to say that they didn't have change for me.  Well, the change was only 25 cents, not a big deal, but it really doesn't reflect well on them.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Melben Seafood @ Ang Mo Kio Ave 3

It has been more than a year since I last visited this seafood joint.  Some new colleagues from Europe would like to try it so we went there again.


The sequence they brought out the food is healthy.  Wondering why?  The first dish that came was a vegetable dish.  It is said that vegetables are easy to digest, but the meats are not.  If you eat meat first, vegetables later, the vegetable will just get stuck in your stomach and produce gas.  If you vegetables first, as they are easy to digest by the stomach,  they will not get stuck.  And your stomach can get plenty of time to digest the meat later.


The second dish was salt and pepper prawn.  We ordered the medium size, which means you will have 7 pieces of prawn, for $30.  The prawns are good.  Deep fried till crispy outside, even the shell became crispy and you could eat it too.  The meat inside was still tender.  This is the kind of prawn I like very much.


Coming to Melben, crab bee hoon is a must-eat item.  The soup was real soup cooked with the crap.  I think they didn't put milk in the soup to make it look more milky, as I didn't sense the taste of cow milk.  The soup is thick, and a strong fragrance of crab meat.  The crab meat itself was very fresh, firm but tender.  Good quality stuff!  Thumb's up!


Another must-eat dish here is the butter crab.  It is still very good, but the butter taste is less strong now.  The crab meat, as usual, is firm and tender.  Not just the clamp is good, the body, which is quite coarse usually, is also tender and firm too!

We ordered the chili crab too, but before I could snap a picture, it was already gone.

They have three 'types' of crab, in terms of weight.  The SMALL is ~1kg/each, for $68/kg.  The MEDIUM is 2 crabs for 1.5kg.  I think this should be SMALL.  Then the BIG ones are ~2kg/each.  For 6 people, we ordered 3 1kg crabs, plus a medium-sized prawn dish, and medium-sized vegetable dish, plus drinks (both beer and soft drinks), the bill came up to a total of $346.  That's a pretty decent dinner with very good quality crabs.

Would go there more often, if there is no concerns for cholesterol.  :-)

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Kay Lee @ Suntec City Mall


When the original Kay Lee Roast Meat was sold to Aztech in 2014 for 4 million dollars, it was big news in Singapore.  It was said that the recipe itself was worth more than 1 million dollars.  I was just curious what kind of recipe that would cost this much.


I ordered the 3 combinations with rice.  The 3 combinations include their signature black char siew, roast duck and roast pork.  I have never heard of BLACK char siew before, a black char siew, to me, means the cook was not good enough and the outside is burnt, which is equivalent to say your skills are no good, the food is no good!

When I took my first bite of the black char siew, wow... I was pleasantly surprised.  Never before in my life do I like char siew.  Usually it has a strange taste and I don't like it at all.  The black char siew here is different.  I suspect they use honey during the roasting process, so the char siew still has a tint of honey's sweetness, but not too sweet.  The 'black' part is not burnt, just darken, and it is not carbonized, just darker in color, probably due to the honey.  Inside, the meat is still tender and juicy.  When you bite it, it feel like a naughty boy jumping up and down on a bumping pad.  I told myself, this is the best char siew that I have ever had so far.  The 1 million dollars for its recipe obviously is worth every single cent of it.

The roast duck and the roast pork are decent, but I would say just average,  nothing to wow about.  As a matter of fact, I think both are on the salty side.


I also ordered the salty vegetable and duck soup.  Too much salty vegetable, the only taste of the soup is being salty.  There is room for improvement here.

I will give a 5-star for the black char siew, but at most 3-star for the rest.

Monday, November 9, 2015

Burger Up


Didn't notice this burger join until recently.  It is located on the ground floor of Yishun Ten, quite convenient to grap a bite before going for the movies.



What is special about this place is the way the customers order their burgers.  There is a vending machine like machine for you to interactively choose the fillings of your burger, from the type of patty, to vegetable, etc.  And you can also choose whether you would like to have side dishes and soft drinks.  Everything is fully customized.  Once you are done with your choices, a receipt is printed out which you take to the cashier to pay for it.  Then you can sit down and wait for your burger to come.

The wait time is around 10-15 minutes, not really fast, probably due to their small kitchen, and the burgers are all fully customized.


The burger came out to be decent, enough to fill your empty tummy, and satisfy your burger craving :)

It is quite novel to me, worth a try.


Saturday, November 7, 2015

Spectre


Spectre is the latest James Bond movie (the 24th, as I was told), released just this week, starring Daniel Craig as the famous British spy 007.

I have never been a fan of Daniel Craig, the most un-handsome James Bond actor, but somehow in this episode, I think he did a pretty good job.  His coolness, his calmness bring out the charm of the James Bond naturally and perfectly.

The contribution from Q, in Spectre, is more impressive than the last Bond movie.  Q has evolved from an old techie playing with mechanical parts to a computer nerd, reflection of our time.

The movie is action-packed, other than pockets of love scenes, boring conversation has been less often.  Daniel Craig was jumping on top of building, fighting inside a helicopter, in a train, and involved in a high-speed car chase.  I don't know how much he was paid, but definitely he did make an effort to make every dollar he is paid worthwhile.

However, there are some laughable details.  For example, the bad guy built a secret facility in the middle of the desert, a secret facility that doesn't appear on the map, but you can find it from satellite images (probably from Google Earth?).  As it is a secret facility, the security is tight, there are security cameras everywhere, and guards watching Bond's every step.  Guess what, the facility was destroyed by Mr Bond with a SINGLE bullet to a critical pipe!  Alas, 'secret' facility.

Overall, I think the movie is not bad, good entertainment and you will never get bored.  Some initial reviews gave the movie a 1 out of 5 stars rating, I think those people more probably are some arty-farty nerds that have no idea what entertainment means.