Dropped by Epicurious, one of the lesser known outfits dotting Roberton Quay, for a late dinner. Interestingly, the word epicurious stems from the words epicure, which is used to describe someone with refined taste, especially in food and wine and curious.
Occupying just a small unit along the bustling Roberston Walk, Epicurious does mostly al fresco seating with the exception of 3 small tables in its tiny interior which seem to suffer from cooling problems (read. Where's the airconditioning?) The al fresco area has big blower fans to cool the area though, which is probably why people usually choose to sit outside instead of inside (from my observations).
Epicurious Burger - Read many good things about the burger so thought I would give it a shot with the works ($4 for an addition of egg, cheese and bacon) First looks, it didn't come across as impressive as the one from Wild Rocket, especially in the size department. Taste wise was pretty decent though. The beef patty could have been a little less cooked but still managed to retain its juiciness and taste. Add the egg, cheese and bacon in and you get one hearty burger. I didn't like the bread though, which was a little too toasted, rendering it hard. The accompanying fries were just overfried and too salty.
Herb Roasted Half Chicken - The chicken was nice without being too strong on the herbs, a bane that most such dishes suffer from. However, the portions could have been bigger and I personally would have liked it to be a little more sour so as to bring out the contrast.
Hazelnut Cheesecake - Interestingly, the hazelnut cheesecake came topped with strawberries. That aside, it was actually quite good, with the cheese relatively light and airy without being too overwhelming. The base was a concoction of dark chocolate and orange peel, which was certainly something different.
$55 for 2 mains and 1 dessert might seem to be pushing the boundaries for reasonable pricing. But food is pretty decent and the place is rather cosy with good service. Worth a visit if you are in the vicinity and dont want to bust your budget dining at the fancier outfits.
I have this sudden craving for tapioca, a very strong craving thats it. So, when i saw this Bali Thai with a takeaway counter, i jumped up with joy literally. For i know, they will definitly carry their popular dessert -- steamed tapioca.
True enough, beside boxes of steamed tapioca, they also carry varieties of kuehs (mostly with coconut as part of the ingredients) as well as their another popular item -- mango sticky rice.
Priced at 2 dollars for a box of tapioca, you can get rather decent pieces of steamed tapioca. I liked the texture of their tapioca, its neither too hard nor too soft. It also has a chewy texture that will allows me to do some mouth exercise. :P
However, i find that the coconut dressing seems abit too diluted. You will not find those creamy coconut dressing there, instead its those watery coconut 'water' which hardly has coconut taste in it. Well, perhaps im so used to coconut cream in thai dessert so when i saw this coconut 'water', i find that it just could not tasted as good.
Overall, i find that their tapioca tasted rather average. If they can improve their coconut 'water', this dessert would definitely tasted much more better. Ohh, another improvement that they can make, may be the temperature of the tapioca.
By combining hot steaming pieces of tapioca with the cold coconut dressing, this steamed tapioca dessert will be the most wonderful thai dessert. Super Yummy!
Using yellow and black as the primary colours for this cafe proves to leave a strong impression on me. When i am at IMM this time round, i decided that i just have to try them out.
Waiting at the entrance of the cafe was a breeze, i did not wait for long before i was being introduce to a table. Due to the design of the cafe, some of the seats were placed just beside the walkway. This design, i feel that it seems a little dangerous for ladies to have their bags placed on the seats.
A word of caution to ladies is to have your bags placed on your laps instead.
Out of curiousity (wonder how hongkong curry will taste like?), i ordered their chicken curry with bread (you get the choice of either rice of bread). To my dismay, the curry does not taste good. First, the curry sauce is a bit too watery and definitely not spicy enough. Next, the potatoes are basically tasteless and rather hard to bite. A pretty decent amount of chicken can be found, but i find that the meat tastes abit of raw to me.
The bread were sliced quite evenly, but i feel that it will fare better if they have toast the bread in the first place.
Feeling rather disappointed with their curry, i ordered another main dish - black pepper chicken chop. This dish was orignially paired up with a salad but in the end it was replaced by an egg (a cold one somemore!) without the customer knowledge. Well, somehow i feel that it will be good to inform the customer earlier if they have run out of salad instead of just changing it without saying a word.
I pretty like the taste of the black pepper sauce (smell nice too) and it seems like a great combination when combined with the chicken meat.
Overall, i find that their food tasted rather disappointing. Perhaps, it will be good if i have sticked to their speciality dishes instead. :P
Just for the mango pudding, my friend wanted to have our dinner here. Haha...funny, right? I'll kept the review of the mango pudding to the last part.
I shall start off with the steamboat. Just the 2 of us & so we picked the sichuan spicy soup and the herbal chicken soup. Interesting, the steamboat was served in individual small pots instead of the big steamboat pot one usually sees. The have both cooked and raw food. The cooked food includes local delights such as popiah and rojak as well as others like teppanyaki, roasted chicken, pork rib, sausages. As for the raw food, the spread was surprisingly little. Not alot of variety, it's mainly meat like fish (dory & seabass), pork slice, chicken & beef slice. Seafood wise there's only prawns & crabs. Vegetables not alot too. Others are the typical meatballs you'll find at other steamboat places.
Although the food variety was disappointing, I have to say that the soups were good, especially the herbal chicken soup. Very often, I could smell the soup as I walk pass Suntec Convention Centre. Haha...
The mango pudding was highly recommended by my friend and it turned out to be really good. Its texture, sweetness. Just perfect! They have small fruit tarts, fruits & even DIY ice kacang in the dessert section. I think I'm more into their dessert huh? Haha...
For the price of $25.80/pax, I think it would be more reasonable for them to serve better drinks than just ice water. But i suppose their location & good service (they were really quite at clearing our used plates!) are the reason why they are charging so much.
We were looking for a chinese restaurant in Plaza Singapura. Without many choices, we landed in this restaurant to settle our dinner.
After sitting down, we were served some flower tea and pickles. Later did we realised that the compulsory tea costed $3 while the small dish of pickles costed $2!
For their menu, they have set menus as well as ala carte menu. They even serve hi-tea buffet on weekends & PHs.
Anyway, we ordered 5 dishes which include 'Braised Ox Tendon with Bamboo Shoot and Chilli in Small Wok', 'quick-fried seasonal greens', 'Braised Seasonal Greens
with Fresh Mushrooms', 'drunken chicken' and 'Braised Chicken Balls with Chilli and Parsley'. Most of the dishes tasted pretty normal, not much of a 'wow'. The meal was not satisfying for most of us.
However, their service was good. Their waiters would constantly refill your tea for you & clear off the used plates & replace with new ones.
The bill came up to around $100 for 5 persons, where only 4 dishes were calculated into the bill. All thanks to the credit card promotion. Although the service is good, I think I'll go to other places for better chinese food.
Ah, what do I say. With the interior and name and uber-many-branches-around-in-such-a-short-period-of-time, it just made me feel like I just had to try this place. (Despite my friend warning me against going to the one at Siglap because of the quality of food.) With eating out being general more expensive now, I'd go to this place because I was expecting it to be slightly cheaper. Hey, it is a cafe after all right.
So I got myself a plate of noodles. I can't quite remember what it was called, but I guess they're all so similar, differentiating it is not that necessary. The noodles are like instant noodles! Along with two stalks of vegetables, a sunny side up egg and (seemingly canned) diced pork. Looks really ordinary, like you can do it yourself at home too. That was about $6 I think.
My friend ordered porridge. Again, I can't remember what it was called. I tried one mouth and I told myself if and when I were to come back again, I will never order this. It was just rice and water and it tasted like Fish Slice soup with rice in it. Yes, the kind you can get from hawker centres. It was $9.90 if I'm not wrong.
The food wasn't horrible nor inedible, but it was so ordinary that you'd feel the pinch just having to pay for the stuff there.
What was more appalling was that when the waitress served us our drink, she seemed so uncertain that she had to ask us if that was tea. I can't believe she did that. You can be new there, you can be unsure of what you're doing, but you really should not bring a cup of drink to your customer and hesitate to give it to them right before them.
On the whole, I really think it’s not that worth eating here. No doubt it’s like “fast-food” and it’s a relatively cheaper place to eat at, it still isn’t worth paying this kind of money for such service and food quality.
I was brought to Halia for a celebration. First to start with, it was a long walk from the entrance of botanical garden to the restaurant. But it's always gd to do some exercise before filling up your stomach withy food. Haha...
The restaurant is hidden in the Ginger Garden of Botanical Garden. There's both outdoor and indoor tables available. For a cool & rainy evening, it is ideal to take the outdoor seats (no worries! It's sheltered!) where you can enjoy the cool breeze and the greeneries.
Next come the food. We ordered the recommended crisp black pepper soft shell crab. It came with wasabi aioli but the wasabi taste was not too strong & went well with the crispy oft shell crab. Nice! We also ordered the soup of the day which was cream of aparagus & prawn. The cream was not too thick, just nice to warm up your stomach for the main course. For the main course, I ordered the Hokkaido scallop & prawn linguini (which turned out to be sphagetti) while my partner ordered roasted soy-glazed french duck breast & duck confit. The sphagetti came with a generous serving of fresh, huge scallops & prawns. But the sauce was a little too salty for me. The duck was ok (probably because I'm not a big fan of duck meat), quite tender though. You can even decide how well you want it to be cooked.
Next comes the dessert! We picked a truly sinful but nice one called 'warm bittersweet chocolate torte' which comes with melted hot chocolate in the middle, a scoop of vanilla ice cream & strawberries. It was heavenly! The combination of the bittersweet taste of the chocolate, milky vanilla ice cream & a little sour taste from the strawberries. Oh my god!
It's definitely a nice place to dine in, away from all the high-rise buildings in Singapore.
My friend had a sudden crave for the food here, so we decided to settle our dinner here.
She ordered the eel porridge while I just ordered a plate of xiao bai cai in oyster sauce since I wasn't feeling too hungry then. I had a mouthful of the eel porridge & it tasted quite nice. Sweet porridge. But my plate of vegetables wasn't nice. the xiao bai cai was not xiao (small) at all. Big stalks of the vegetables which were not cut. It made eating quite difficult and the oyster sauce was quite diluted too.
To compensate for the disappointment, we ordered the mango ice to share. It was good! Generous servings of mango on the top. It's definitely worth a try.
It is in fact my first time to do online shopping. Initially, I wasn't too keen in online shopping,especially for clothes as I prefer to try on the clothes to make sure that I can fit into them nicely. But lately, I was introduced to this blog store by my friend & realised that it is quite interesting.
The website provides pictures of models wearing the clothes on sale. Furthermore, they also provide useful information such as the length of clothes, bust diameter, sleeve length, arm hole, stretchability, etc. Very customer-friendly!
From the series, I've picked 2 pieces of clothes. However, only 1 of them was available and it took them quite a while (about 2 weeks) before I was informed. The delivery also took quite some time t arrive (near to 2 months).
On the overall, I like the clothes catalogue, which covers a wide range of clothes from casual wear to office wear. However, their customer service should be improved.
Decided to watch Golden Compass on a weekday in Gold Class to pamper ourselves for once. Haa....
Surprised to see that it is almost fully booked on a weekday afternoon. Hmm... Seem like a lot of ppl really dun mind spending money for comfort. Haa...
Once in, we are greeted by very polite servers. There is a lounge for us to relax while waiting for our movie to start. The menu is very impressive as well where we can order set meals to snacks to even beer or while while watching the movies. Haa...
Once we are urshered to our seats, we are greeted by big plush red sofa chairs, with a blanket on the sides. The seats are very comfortable and with a push on the side button, the seat will slowly move into a flat bed position. So you can adjust to whatever position that you are comfortable with.
There is a small table in between the seats where you can place your snacks or food. There is a button on the table where you can press for service.
As there is only like 24 seats in the cinema, the space is really big and no way the person in front can block you. The screen is a wide large screen that fills the length of the room.
Paying $25 per ticket ($30 for weekends), is consider a luxruy to me. However if the movie is 2.5 hrs or even longer, I think the money is worth spending. At times, they will have special promotion for with food tied in with the movie and I think that is much more worth it.
What a way to pamper a movie lover like myself. Hee.....
1=SGD 0.0587
Dropped by Epicurious, one of the lesser known outfits dotting Roberton Quay, for a late dinner. Interestingly, the word epicurious stems from the words epicure, which is used to describe someone with refined taste, especially in food and wine and curious.
Occupying just a small unit along the bustling Roberston Walk, Epicurious does mostly al fresco seating with the exception of 3 small tables in its tiny interior which seem to suffer from cooling problems (read. Where's the airconditioning?) The al fresco area has big blower fans to cool the area though, which is probably why people usually choose to sit outside instead of inside (from my observations).
Epicurious Burger - Read many good things about the burger so thought I would give it a shot with the works ($4 for an addition of egg, cheese and bacon) First looks, it didn't come across as impressive as the one from Wild Rocket, especially in the size department. Taste wise was pretty decent though. The beef patty could have been a little less cooked but still managed to retain its juiciness and taste. Add the egg, cheese and bacon in and you get one hearty burger. I didn't like the bread though, which was a little too toasted, rendering it hard. The accompanying fries were just overfried and too salty.
Herb Roasted Half Chicken - The chicken was nice without being too strong on the herbs, a bane that most such dishes suffer from. However, the portions could have been bigger and I personally would have liked it to be a little more sour so as to bring out the contrast.
Hazelnut Cheesecake - Interestingly, the hazelnut cheesecake came topped with strawberries. That aside, it was actually quite good, with the cheese relatively light and airy without being too overwhelming. The base was a concoction of dark chocolate and orange peel, which was certainly something different.
$55 for 2 mains and 1 dessert might seem to be pushing the boundaries for reasonable pricing. But food is pretty decent and the place is rather cosy with good service. Worth a visit if you are in the vicinity and dont want to bust your budget dining at the fancier outfits.
See all my pictures here
Rating given:
I have this sudden craving for tapioca, a very strong craving thats it. So, when i saw this Bali Thai with a takeaway counter, i jumped up with joy literally. For i know, they will definitly carry their popular dessert -- steamed tapioca.
True enough, beside boxes of steamed tapioca, they also carry varieties of kuehs (mostly with coconut as part of the ingredients) as well as their another popular item -- mango sticky rice.
Priced at 2 dollars for a box of tapioca, you can get rather decent pieces of steamed tapioca. I liked the texture of their tapioca, its neither too hard nor too soft. It also has a chewy texture that will allows me to do some mouth exercise. :P
However, i find that the coconut dressing seems abit too diluted. You will not find those creamy coconut dressing there, instead its those watery coconut 'water' which hardly has coconut taste in it. Well, perhaps im so used to coconut cream in thai dessert so when i saw this coconut 'water', i find that it just could not tasted as good.
Overall, i find that their tapioca tasted rather average. If they can improve their coconut 'water', this dessert would definitely tasted much more better. Ohh, another improvement that they can make, may be the temperature of the tapioca.
By combining hot steaming pieces of tapioca with the cold coconut dressing, this steamed tapioca dessert will be the most wonderful thai dessert. Super Yummy!
Rating given:
Using yellow and black as the primary colours for this cafe proves to leave a strong impression on me. When i am at IMM this time round, i decided that i just have to try them out.
Waiting at the entrance of the cafe was a breeze, i did not wait for long before i was being introduce to a table. Due to the design of the cafe, some of the seats were placed just beside the walkway. This design, i feel that it seems a little dangerous for ladies to have their bags placed on the seats.
A word of caution to ladies is to have your bags placed on your laps instead.
Out of curiousity (wonder how hongkong curry will taste like?), i ordered their chicken curry with bread (you get the choice of either rice of bread). To my dismay, the curry does not taste good. First, the curry sauce is a bit too watery and definitely not spicy enough. Next, the potatoes are basically tasteless and rather hard to bite. A pretty decent amount of chicken can be found, but i find that the meat tastes abit of raw to me.
The bread were sliced quite evenly, but i feel that it will fare better if they have toast the bread in the first place.
Feeling rather disappointed with their curry, i ordered another main dish - black pepper chicken chop. This dish was orignially paired up with a salad but in the end it was replaced by an egg (a cold one somemore!) without the customer knowledge. Well, somehow i feel that it will be good to inform the customer earlier if they have run out of salad instead of just changing it without saying a word.
I pretty like the taste of the black pepper sauce (smell nice too) and it seems like a great combination when combined with the chicken meat.
Overall, i find that their food tasted rather disappointing. Perhaps, it will be good if i have sticked to their speciality dishes instead. :P
Rating given:
Just for the mango pudding, my friend wanted to have our dinner here. Haha...funny, right? I'll kept the review of the mango pudding to the last part.
I shall start off with the steamboat. Just the 2 of us & so we picked the sichuan spicy soup and the herbal chicken soup. Interesting, the steamboat was served in individual small pots instead of the big steamboat pot one usually sees. The have both cooked and raw food. The cooked food includes local delights such as popiah and rojak as well as others like teppanyaki, roasted chicken, pork rib, sausages. As for the raw food, the spread was surprisingly little. Not alot of variety, it's mainly meat like fish (dory & seabass), pork slice, chicken & beef slice. Seafood wise there's only prawns & crabs. Vegetables not alot too. Others are the typical meatballs you'll find at other steamboat places.
Although the food variety was disappointing, I have to say that the soups were good, especially the herbal chicken soup. Very often, I could smell the soup as I walk pass Suntec Convention Centre. Haha...
The mango pudding was highly recommended by my friend and it turned out to be really good. Its texture, sweetness. Just perfect! They have small fruit tarts, fruits & even DIY ice kacang in the dessert section. I think I'm more into their dessert huh? Haha...
For the price of $25.80/pax, I think it would be more reasonable for them to serve better drinks than just ice water. But i suppose their location & good service (they were really quite at clearing our used plates!) are the reason why they are charging so much.
Rating given:
We were looking for a chinese restaurant in Plaza Singapura. Without many choices, we landed in this restaurant to settle our dinner.
After sitting down, we were served some flower tea and pickles. Later did we realised that the compulsory tea costed $3 while the small dish of pickles costed $2!
For their menu, they have set menus as well as ala carte menu. They even serve hi-tea buffet on weekends & PHs.
Anyway, we ordered 5 dishes which include 'Braised Ox Tendon with Bamboo Shoot and Chilli in Small Wok', 'quick-fried seasonal greens', 'Braised Seasonal Greens
with Fresh Mushrooms', 'drunken chicken' and 'Braised Chicken Balls with Chilli and Parsley'. Most of the dishes tasted pretty normal, not much of a 'wow'. The meal was not satisfying for most of us.
However, their service was good. Their waiters would constantly refill your tea for you & clear off the used plates & replace with new ones.
The bill came up to around $100 for 5 persons, where only 4 dishes were calculated into the bill. All thanks to the credit card promotion. Although the service is good, I think I'll go to other places for better chinese food.
So 2.5 stars for the place.
Rating given:
Ah, what do I say. With the interior and name and uber-many-branches-around-in-such-a-short-period-of-time, it just made me feel like I just had to try this place. (Despite my friend warning me against going to the one at Siglap because of the quality of food.) With eating out being general more expensive now, I'd go to this place because I was expecting it to be slightly cheaper. Hey, it is a cafe after all right.
So I got myself a plate of noodles. I can't quite remember what it was called, but I guess they're all so similar, differentiating it is not that necessary. The noodles are like instant noodles! Along with two stalks of vegetables, a sunny side up egg and (seemingly canned) diced pork. Looks really ordinary, like you can do it yourself at home too. That was about $6 I think.
My friend ordered porridge. Again, I can't remember what it was called. I tried one mouth and I told myself if and when I were to come back again, I will never order this. It was just rice and water and it tasted like Fish Slice soup with rice in it. Yes, the kind you can get from hawker centres. It was $9.90 if I'm not wrong.
The food wasn't horrible nor inedible, but it was so ordinary that you'd feel the pinch just having to pay for the stuff there.
What was more appalling was that when the waitress served us our drink, she seemed so uncertain that she had to ask us if that was tea. I can't believe she did that. You can be new there, you can be unsure of what you're doing, but you really should not bring a cup of drink to your customer and hesitate to give it to them right before them.
On the whole, I really think it’s not that worth eating here. No doubt it’s like “fast-food” and it’s a relatively cheaper place to eat at, it still isn’t worth paying this kind of money for such service and food quality.
Rating given:
I was brought to Halia for a celebration. First to start with, it was a long walk from the entrance of botanical garden to the restaurant. But it's always gd to do some exercise before filling up your stomach withy food. Haha...
The restaurant is hidden in the Ginger Garden of Botanical Garden. There's both outdoor and indoor tables available. For a cool & rainy evening, it is ideal to take the outdoor seats (no worries! It's sheltered!) where you can enjoy the cool breeze and the greeneries.
Next come the food. We ordered the recommended crisp black pepper soft shell crab. It came with wasabi aioli but the wasabi taste was not too strong & went well with the crispy oft shell crab. Nice! We also ordered the soup of the day which was cream of aparagus & prawn. The cream was not too thick, just nice to warm up your stomach for the main course. For the main course, I ordered the Hokkaido scallop & prawn linguini (which turned out to be sphagetti) while my partner ordered roasted soy-glazed french duck breast & duck confit. The sphagetti came with a generous serving of fresh, huge scallops & prawns. But the sauce was a little too salty for me. The duck was ok (probably because I'm not a big fan of duck meat), quite tender though. You can even decide how well you want it to be cooked.
Next comes the dessert! We picked a truly sinful but nice one called 'warm bittersweet chocolate torte' which comes with melted hot chocolate in the middle, a scoop of vanilla ice cream & strawberries. It was heavenly! The combination of the bittersweet taste of the chocolate, milky vanilla ice cream & a little sour taste from the strawberries. Oh my god!
It's definitely a nice place to dine in, away from all the high-rise buildings in Singapore.
Rating given:
My friend had a sudden crave for the food here, so we decided to settle our dinner here.
She ordered the eel porridge while I just ordered a plate of xiao bai cai in oyster sauce since I wasn't feeling too hungry then. I had a mouthful of the eel porridge & it tasted quite nice. Sweet porridge. But my plate of vegetables wasn't nice. the xiao bai cai was not xiao (small) at all. Big stalks of the vegetables which were not cut. It made eating quite difficult and the oyster sauce was quite diluted too.
To compensate for the disappointment, we ordered the mango ice to share. It was good! Generous servings of mango on the top. It's definitely worth a try.
Rating given:
It is in fact my first time to do online shopping. Initially, I wasn't too keen in online shopping,especially for clothes as I prefer to try on the clothes to make sure that I can fit into them nicely. But lately, I was introduced to this blog store by my friend & realised that it is quite interesting.
The website provides pictures of models wearing the clothes on sale. Furthermore, they also provide useful information such as the length of clothes, bust diameter, sleeve length, arm hole, stretchability, etc. Very customer-friendly!
From the series, I've picked 2 pieces of clothes. However, only 1 of them was available and it took them quite a while (about 2 weeks) before I was informed. The delivery also took quite some time t arrive (near to 2 months).
On the overall, I like the clothes catalogue, which covers a wide range of clothes from casual wear to office wear. However, their customer service should be improved.
Rating given:
Decided to watch Golden Compass on a weekday in Gold Class to pamper ourselves for once. Haa....
Surprised to see that it is almost fully booked on a weekday afternoon. Hmm... Seem like a lot of ppl really dun mind spending money for comfort. Haa...
Once in, we are greeted by very polite servers. There is a lounge for us to relax while waiting for our movie to start. The menu is very impressive as well where we can order set meals to snacks to even beer or while while watching the movies. Haa...
Once we are urshered to our seats, we are greeted by big plush red sofa chairs, with a blanket on the sides. The seats are very comfortable and with a push on the side button, the seat will slowly move into a flat bed position. So you can adjust to whatever position that you are comfortable with.
There is a small table in between the seats where you can place your snacks or food. There is a button on the table where you can press for service.
As there is only like 24 seats in the cinema, the space is really big and no way the person in front can block you. The screen is a wide large screen that fills the length of the room.
Paying $25 per ticket ($30 for weekends), is consider a luxruy to me. However if the movie is 2.5 hrs or even longer, I think the money is worth spending. At times, they will have special promotion for with food tied in with the movie and I think that is much more worth it.
What a way to pamper a movie lover like myself. Hee.....
Rating given: