Category: Food

Entries about food, because who doesn’t love to share pictures and stories about the food they’re eating?

Chili Sauce or Ketchup?

Bradley Farless4 Comments

One of the things that I had to get used to when moving to Singapore was the abundance of chili sauce and peppers, and the tendency people have to eating it.  It’s included with most dishes from hawkers, or in a bottle on the table.

There are a few varieties of it.  Sometimes there’s a thick, dark brown chili paste that’s added to the dish itself.  There are also green, slightly sweet peppers that are served alongside the dish in a small cup.  Or, there are red peppers mixed with soy sauce that are served the same way.  Those are just the most common.  There are quite a few more.

Typically I’m not a big fan of chili sauce or peppers.  I think this is mostly because in the US when you get something with peppers in it or have chili sauce, it’s really really hot.  The chilis and peppers in Singapore don’t hold a candle to their heat.  This is especially true of jalapeno peppers.

However, after living here for so long, I’ve come to appreciate these peppers and the different chili sauces.  Most of them add a lot of flavor to otherwise bland dishes that you purchase at hawkers.  In fact, I think some hawker dishes wouldn’t be palatable without them.  Don’t take that to mean hawker food is bad though.  Some of my favorite dishes are from hawker stalls!

Where it gets weird for me is when I see little packets of chili sauce in fast food chains.  Or when I see a chili sauce dispenser right next to the ketchup dispenser, like at the McDonald’s restaurants here in Singapore.  People in Singapore seem to enjoy dipping their french fries in chili sauce instead of ketchup.  I can’t get used to that taste, especially since it’s a weird sort of sweet chili sauce.

The thing about McDonald’s though, and perhaps all fast food chains, is that they tailor their menus to the country they’re in.  It’s only smart.  If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to gain any market share.  For example, in the Philippines you can get a longganisa meal.  Longganisa is a local type of sausage that’s quite good!  (Click here for a recipe.)  The chili sauce is the only difference I’ve noticed with the McDonald’s in Singapore though.

I’m just glad that ketchup is still available for my french fries!

BBQ Chicken Revisited

Bradley Farless2 Comments

Over the weekend my wife and I spent quite a bit of time out and about and we happened to find ourselves at Tampines 1 as evening approached.  We started thinking about where we wanted to have dinner when we saw the Tampines 1 branch of BBQ Chicken.  I believe it’s a local chain restaurant.  We’d eaten there before and the food was pretty decent, so we decided to give it another shot.

This time, we both chose meals from the main course selection.  I got the “Jerk BBQ” and my wife got the “Korean Charbroiled”.  We had a good laugh about that because when I ordered it she said, “Figures”.  Ha ha ha!  We also had another order of an appetizer called Koshi.  There’s a picture of that in the previous post that’s linked to above.

One of the problems I noticed with this restaurant is that they don’t seem to understand the concept of “appetizer”.  It’s supposed to come before the food so you have something to snack on while you wait for your main course.  In both of our visits to BBQ Chicken, at both locations, the appetizer was served along with the main meal, as if it were a side dish.

That aside, the food was pretty good.  It’s still nothing to get excited about, but it makes for a decent dinner.

Here are some pictures:

The top image is the Jerk BBQ and the bottom image is the Korean Charbroiled.  Ya, there’s quite a bit of bad grammar in the menu and in the slogans along the walls.  I should get some photos of that and post it sometime.

What we always want to try, but wind up not having room in our bellies for, is a dessert called Pat Bing Soo.  It sounds delicious!  One of these days we’ll have to go there just to have that dessert.  Here’s a shot of the Pat Bing Soo entry in the menu that shows the ingredients:

OrganiCafeXperience & Teadot

Bradley Farless4 Comments

Yesterday was my wife and I’s 1st anniversary.  It was sort of a shame that she had to work, but we still tried to make the most of the evening by having a nice dinner.  We went to the bottom floor of Century Square Mall to OrganiCafeXperience.  She didn’t really know where we were going.  She loves the place, but it’s a bit pricey so we don’t go often and haven’t been there in about 7 months or so.  I think she assumed I wanted to get something from the pet store down there, but then I just stopped and shuffled her into the waiting area to be seated.  She had a great smile on her face!

I’m sure you can tell from the name of the place, but OrganiCafeXperience is an organic foods restaurant.  Like I said before, it’s a bit pricey but the food is very much worth it.  After eating at this place, I wonder if all food would taste as good if it were grown naturally, without chemicals.  Most organic foods I’ve eaten do have a cleaner, richer taste to them, but anything organic comes with a premium cost, so it’s more of a treat than a norm for us, and for our families.

We sat down and took some time to browse through the menu. We decided to start with an appetizer, the Wild Mushroom Soup, along with garlic bread, which you can see I couldn’t wait to take a bite out of. The soup is very creamy and has small and large pieces of button and shitake mushrooms in it. The taste is really rich and I could see myself making a lunch out of just one big bowl of it. The garlic bread was icing on the cake. It was crispy and moist at the same time and was made with real butter and chopped garlic. I don’t know how they do it. I always had to cheat and use some garlic powder to get my garlic bread to taste anywhere near as good as this was. Our bowls of soup didn’t last long! We devoured them!

After that, it was time to move on to the main courses.  I chose a beef tenderloin dish and my wife chose a dish with lamb.  The beef tenderloin dish was delicious.  The two pieces of meat came on a bed of noodles with a brown sauce and was topped by two grilled tomatoes and a fluff of alfalfa.  One thing I love about the food here, and that’s maybe common with organic food, is that I could taste all of the different ingredients.  The alfalfa was crisp and vibrant.  The beef tasted great.  The broccoli was crunchy and fresh.  Even the noodles had their own distinct, enjoyable taste.  Plus, there were bits of ham mixed in with the pasta that added to the flavor.  I cleaned my plate.  Best of all, the portion was just the right size.  Even after clearing my plate entirely, I felt full but not stuffed.  I tried some of my wife’s lamb, but she was enjoying it so much that I didn’t take much.  In exchange I offered her some of the beef from my plate.  She said it was delicious.

The downsides to this restaurant is that the location isn’t that great.  The restaurant is separated into two areas.  There’s the preparation area and the storefront which is situated in a storefront along the wall.  Then there’s the seating area which is a separate, sectioned off area along the escalator that leads down into the lower level.  It’s not great ambiance, but the food makes up for it.  Also, the drinks are nothing to get excited about.  We actually didn’t order any drinks this time, because the first time we ate there they weren’t only unimpressive, but rather bad.

So, after dinner, we moved on to Teadot in Tampines 1 mall to enjoy the relaxing atmosphere of a cafe and sip on… ya, some tea!  I had a Royal Earl Grey Tea Latte, and my wife had a drink called Iced Dragon’s Brew.  It was made with oolong tea and some citrus I think.  I’ll have to go over the menu again.  I fully intend to go back.  It’s one of my favorite hang-outs for beating the heat.

We sat at Teadot for about 40 minutes, sipping our tea and using the free wi-fi.  Then we wandered around and did a little window shopping.  It wasn’t long before 10 PM came around and the mall was closing up, so we headed home.

Our 1st anniversary evening was nothing extravagant, but it was tasty, and we had fun!  We’ll be following up on our celebrations this weekend at Sentosa Island, where we plan on riding the luge and checking out Underwater World.  Expect photos!

McCafe: I’m Not Lovin’ It

Bradley Farless2 Comments

A few weeks ago, a guy I communicate with regularly on Twitter asked me if I’d been to McCafe and tried the coffee there.  He’s not much of a coffee drinker but I think I was complaining about Starbucks prices and he mentioned it as an option.  I’d never really considered going to McDonald’s or their McCafe for ‘premium’ coffee before.  I mean, how great could a latte or cappuccino from McDonald’s be?

He was telling me that a lot of his friends go there instead of Starbucks because the prices are cheaper.  I happened to be in the mall at the time (using Twitter on my phone) so I stopped by the McCafe there to have a look for myself.  I wasn’t impressed.

I’m not sure if this is another case of Singapore overpricing anything that even hints at being a luxury item, or if it’s simply a matter of currency conversion and the fact that this is an imported item.  Either way, the prices didn’t seem too much different from what I could find at a Starbucks here, so I kept going.

Yesterday I decided I might as well give it a shot.  I wanted something cold and coffee-like, and I happened to be by this same McCafe in White Sands Shopping Mall in Pasir Ris, so I walked up to the counter and ordered their “double chocolate frappe”.  Ok, so that’s not exactly a coffee drink, but it should still have some coffee in it.

The presentation was nice.  It certainly looked good:

So, it was time for the real test.  The taste test.  I took a sip through the straw and… fail.  It was watery tasting.  Even if it had a low coffee content it should have still tasted … thick… since it’s a frappe, but what I tasted most was crushed ice.  There were a few pieces of chocolate shavings in the bottom of the cup that were nice, but overall the drink was unsatisfying.  I couldn’t even taste coffee in it.  Is there any coffee in it?  I’m pretty sure that chocolate frappes from Starbucks have espresso in them.  Maybe I set my standards too high.  I was hoping for something like this McCafe in Italy.  Nonetheless, that’s the last time I’ll be going to McCafe for fancy coffee drinks.  I’ll stick with Coffee Bean or Starbucks when I get that urge.  Still, though, the best coffee I’ve had so far from a restaurant is the plain old Kopi O from the hawkers.

I’ll have to try to get out more and find some real premium coffee shops.

Muslim Food

Bradley Farless11 Comments

A few weeks ago I posted an article about some Muslim food we’d tried. It was called Chicken Murtabak and it was pretty good. It took me almost a year to get up the courage to try out Muslim food. I think it was mostly because of paranoid fear over being poisoned or having my food spit on by Muslims because of where I’m from.  Not to mention I spent some time in Iraq.  Ya, sounds kinda silly and stupid right?  But, for years the US media has been pushing it down our throats that all Arabs/Muslims could potentially be dangerous, and I spent a long time in Iraq and Kuwait, worrying about whether a guy was going to say hello or blow himself (and me) up at any moment.  So, maybe the fear wasn’t so unfounded after all, but then again most people here ask me where I’m from.  They don’t seem to recognize the accent.

Anyhow, we enjoyed the murtabak and had decided we would go back for more, but we put it off because it messed up our stomachs a bit. Tonight we finally decided to eat there again. The stuff tasted so good we were willing to risk stomach problems! Plus, we think it was the curry that’s served with the dish that caused the problem, so we were careful about how much of it we ate this time around.

As we walked up to the “Indian Muslim” stall, the guy behind the counter had an amused look on his face. Maybe there aren’t too many white guys that order Muslim food in this area? Well, that probably goes without saying. Anyhow, we got another order of murtabak, mutton this time, and a cheese roti prata. I also went to the next stall called “Muslim Food” and got an order of chicken rice. It had another name in front of that, but I can’t remember what it was. So, we had a pretty good spread of food between the two of us.

The mutton murtabak was good, but my wife says she likes the chicken version better. The cheese roti prata was fantastic. I’m going to get more of those tomorrow at lunch time. They remind me of cheese sticks from the US, or like a slice of New York cheese pizza without tomato sauce. It’s not that big, but they’re only 1.50 apiece so it’s not too bad a deal. Plus, I think I can get them cheaper around the corner from there. As for the muslim version of chicken rice, it was surprisingly good. It tasted as if it had been grilled over a real fire, which is a plus for me. I love grilled food! It also had a nice sauce poured over it. The rice was seasoned with garlic, which I enjoyed. Plain rice usually doesn’t do it for me. There was also a cup of a clear broth. That’s typical with meals purchased from hawkers here in Singapore. I wasn’t expecting much from it. Usually it’s just a chicken broth. Again, I was surprised. It had been seasoned with onion and garlic and tasted great!

It’s hard to get over cultural stereotypes, but in this case it was a good thing I did because I’d have missed out on a lot of good food.

BBQ Chicken

Bradley Farless4 Comments

The first time my wife and I took a walk through the E-Hub mall at Downtown East in Pasir Ris, we saw a very nice looking restaurant on the entry level floor.  The name of the place is simply “BBQ Chicken”. I’ve been thinking about it ever since and we finally had the opportunity to go back.

The place is very clean and very comfortable.  We were seated in a nice booth in the corner.  We took a look through the menu.  It’s packed with a lot of great choices.  You can get everything from salads to sandwiches to stuff off the grill.  Looking at the posters on the wall, I think their “main attraction” dishes are made with chicken quarters that are cooked over charcoal, possibly using some sort of light olive oil.  They did look tasty, but we were in the mood for something a bit lighter than that, so my wife got a chicken salad and I got the chicken tortilla meal.  We also ordered an appetizer called koshi.

My chicken tortilla sandwich was pretty good.  It was nothing spectacular, but it was very satisfying.  The fries were a big greasy, but that’s ok.  The coleslaw was surprisingly good.  My wife’s salad was fantastic.  The vegetables were fresh and the chicken in it was surprisingly tasty.  I think it must be prepared the same way as the grilled chicken.  The koshi dish can be seen in the picture above.  It is 3 shish kebabs of chicken mixed with onion and red bell pepper.  They were very good.  My wife liked them a lot and said she could make a whole meal of them.

I can’t say much about the place.  The food wasn’t extraordinary or unique.  It was just good.  We’ll be going back though, and next I plan on trying one of the grilled chicken meals.

3 Days in Kuala Lumpur: Part 9: Street Food

Bradley Farless4 Comments

It goes without saying that when you visit a place you have to try the local food, and you’re not going to find authentic local food in chain stores or fancy restaurants. Not typically anyways. We spent most of our 3 day trip looking around the Chinatown area and it has a fairly decent mix of tourist style restaurants, franchises (3 McDonald’s encircled the area… not surprised at all), and a nice assortment of “street food”. That’s what my wife says it’s called. She’s referring to the stand alone carts that sell food. She was insistent that we try eating at one of them before leaving and I love to eat, so I didn’t put up any argument.

So, the second night of our trip we found ourselves wandering down the road that runs along eastern edge of Chinatown and we saw a stall that was selling satay. I think satay is just a local word for shish kebabs, except they’re plain grilled meat on a stick, with a sauce applied to them during the grilling process. The stuff smelled fantastic and we couldn’t resist. We snagged their last beef satay, 3 chicken satay, 2 chicken liver & gizzard satay, and an order of rice cubes. It was served up fairly quickly and came with a dish of a spicy and sweet peanut sauce. We cleared the plate in about 3 minutes. The stuff was delicious and left us wanting more. I’m not a big fan of gizzard and liver, but even that tasted great coming off the grill there.

Here are some photos!

The other thing I can recommend is a stand called Air Mata Kucing. I have no clue what that means, but it’s located at one of the intersections along Jalang Petaling, near the center of the Chinatown area. They serve a drink that tastes like tea made with sugar cane. There were also bits of some fruit in it. My wife says she thinks it’s longan fruit. It’s very good, very sweet, and can be served with or without ice. We wound up going back for more of this stuff on our 3rd and last day there.

I would have liked to have had the opportunity to try out more of the local dishes, but our trip was a short one. There’s always next time!

Just Acia

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Just Acia is a restaurant located in the Downtown East Mall in Pasir Ris, Singapore. My wife and I went to the mall to meet up with friends we hadn’t seen in months. Singapore is such a small island, but life gets so hectic that we still seem to only find rare opportunities to hang out with our friends.

When we arrived, the first thing on everyone’s minds was dinner, so off we went. One of our friends already had a place in mind that she said was fantastic, and had a great deal. We’re always keen to find places that are both “fantastic” and have a “great deal”. She didn’t disappoint!

Just Acia is on the ground level, back past a huge children’s play area. We’d probably never have even found it without her taking us to it. I didn’t even realize that the mall had a back area before tonight.

As we walked up to the restaurant I saw a sign that said all “set meals” come with freeflow (as in free refills) ice cream and drinks. That got my interest up, because free refills on anything isn’t common in Singapore. I was extra excited about the ice cream, because ice cream in Singapore is sold for a fairly high price. Most dairy products here are quite a bit more expensive than what I was used to in the US, because it all has to be imported. For those of you who don’t know and don’t care to Google it, Singapore is an island nation and a city-state.

When we got to the table and flipped through the menu, I was surprised again. The set meals were reasonably priced and the food looked really good. My wife placed an order for beef bulgoggi and I got the deep fried chicken, as well as a side dish of steamed dumplings. Right after ordering we were given cups and small metal dishes so we could start getting our drinks and ice cream from a buffet style bar near the front of the restaurant. The drink choices included Pepsi, Mountain Dew, some teas, cappuccino, lattes, and mocha. Again, impressive for the price.

By the time we sat back down our orders were hitting the table. The meal came with a bowl of rice (no surprise, this is Asia), a small bowl of broth soup (standard fare in Singapore), and a small dish of what I think was kimchi, though I could be wrong.

The food was fantastic! The first thing I tried was the dumplings. They were so much better than I had hoped. I’ve had a lot of dumplings in Singapore and these were the best so far. The deep fried chicken was crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. It wasn’t over cooked, and it tasted like the oil they used was fresh. My wife and I swapped a portion of our meals and her beef bulgoggi was great as well.

The cappuccino I had after my meal was fairly strong. It was nothing special, but I have no complaints about it either. The ice cream also wasn’t anything premium, but it did have a good taste to it, and I wound up getting three servings.

The last thing I’d like to mention is that the staff is very friendly and very helpful. They were always smiling and always quick to ask if you needed any help. The only drawback I found was that the hostess seemed a bit hard of hearing. She spoke English, but she either didn’t listen to or didn’t understand what I said back to her. When we first approached the restaurant, two of our group had gone on ahead, with the rest of us lagging behind. I tried to explain that we were with the other two people, but she kept saying, “Group of four? Please come this way!” Finally, we just ignored her and walked past her into the restaurant to where our friends were waiting. Later, I stepped out for moment and when I came back, she asked me if I wanted to be seated, as if she hadn’t just seen me 4 minutes previous. Still, this is Asia, so you can’t expect everyone to be as proficient in English as a native speaker, so I can’t even call this a bad mark against the restaurant. It was just a minor annoyance that most foreigners have probably come to occasionally expect while traveling abroad.

All in all, this place serves some great food for a great price, and we’ll definitely be visiting them again.

Amigos; Western Food

Bradley Farless9 Comments

When I moved to Asia I knew I was going to be giving up a few things. One of those things was easy access to cow meat. Singapore doesn’t have much in the way of cheap beef, or reasonably priced steaks. Or, so I thought.

During my first visit to Singapore in March of 2008 I saw that a typical diet here consists of mostly chicken, pork, or fish and rice or noodles with a small portion of some green leafy vegetable. Soups containing those ingredients are also popular. That’s pretty much all I’ve eaten for the last year as well. Not that I’m complaining! A lot of those dishes are delicious! But, I had a craving for something a bit more solid than that, and the last time I had a good amount of beef was on my birthday in the Philippines in March of this year. Even then it wasn’t a steak dinner as most Americans would envision it.

I had resigned myself to the belief that I would only have a good steak dinner when I was back in the US, so I wasn’t actively looking around for good deals. I didn’t want to break my budget to get something I can easily do without.

When my wife and I first agreed to rent our current place in Pasir Ris, the agent that located the property for us gave us a short tour of the area. Well, actually we went on an hour long walk around a good portion of the neighborhood but it was so exciting that we hardly noticed the distance we covered until we looked at it on a map later.

During this walk, we passed a small shop that was part of a hawker area. It’s called ‘Amigos; Western Food’ and doesn’t have a very impressive exterior, but the agent went into detail about how good the food they serve is. I smiled and nodded, but I wasn’t really convinced, and wasn’t in any hurry to try it. A few days ago I had an interesting conversation with a guy from Egypt, who also had nothing but good things to say about the place.

Last night, my wife and I finally got around to checking it out. Good thing the place is open late, because we didn’t make it over there until about 1am! I think we were the only customers there. We took a look at the menu, and I was surprised to see that there was a steak available for only 13.90, so I ordered it. My wife got a plate of lamb chops, which was also reasonably priced at about 9 dollars or so. Still, it was cheap, so I wasn’t expecting much. I certainly wasn’t expecting something that looked better than the picture on the menu. That’s sort of a joke, where what you order rarely looks as tasty as the picture. This time, the opposite was true, and we were more than pleasantly surprised to find such great looking dishes at a hawker stall.

The lamb chops.

The steak.

So, I suppose the real question is, how did it taste? That was the second surprise. The stuff was better than great! It was fantastic! In anticipation of a potential fail whale, we asked for Tabasco sauce, but we wound up not needing it. As you can see from the pictures above, both dishes came with a sauce. Each had a distinct taste that seemed appropriate to the meat. The potato wedges were also fantastic and the veggies used for the small salad were crisp and fresh. As for the meat, it was tender and had just the right amount of fat on it. My steak was a little undercooked, but it had been so long since I’d had a good steak dinner, and it tasted so good, that I didn’t care. I gobbled the whole thing down, then cleared the rest of the plate, and was very satisfied. My wife and I traded bites of lamb for steak, and her lamb was just as good.

If anyone’s looking for a reasonably priced place to get a great steak or set of lamb chops, this is definitely the place to go!

Cults in Singapore

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Cults can be dangerous, socially disruptive elements in society.  As such they should be treated with extreme care, to ensure that they’re not planning anything crazy, like blowing something up or destroying the local playground.

When in Singapore, be aware that the following cults have been spotted hanging around a bakery in Pasir Ris:

The Yam Bis Cult

The Suji Bis Cult