Covelli Italian Bistro and Wine Bar @ Orchard Central

Located at B2 of Orchard Central, near the lifts. Visited on a Saturday evening, and before that, had made prior reservation via Reserveit. Really an easy, hassle free reservation system and it gives instantaneous confirmation. They'll even send a reminder sms. Cool!

The restaurant looks rather small and cosy. At about 630pm, there was no crowd. Liked that the tables are not too near each other.

seats for 2 pax

menu

Do note that the menu in the restaurant was a little bit different than its online menu found in Reserveit website. For example, there was a starter called "Foie Gras d'Anantra" that was not found in its restaurant menu. Also note that there's a bit of difference in pricing as well.

wine menu

We ordered a Pasta al Fruitti Di Mare (seafood pasta) and a Quarantaotto (24 hours braised beef short-ribs with mashed potato) for our mains and two glasses of pink moscato.

Diners have the flexibility to choose the pasta and the sauce.  We chose spaghetti and squid ink.

complimentary bread

One thing that I found peculiar with Covelli, was its complimentary bread. One piece per customer. Seriously, no joke.

They do serve iced-water, just that you'll need to request for it. One of the service staff was quite attentive and she came by periodically to top up the iced-water.

pink moscato

Our pasta arrived 10 minutes after the drinks were served. First reaction was that the pasta sauce was thinner than expected.

Pasta al Fruitti di Mare (spaghetti with squid ink sauce)

The seafood pasta has half slipper lobster, prawns (2 pieces), mussels (2 pieces) and baby squids. Its online menu actually listed more items such as fish, clams and scallops but we failed to find it in our dish.

yummy prawn

As the sauce was rather thin and watery, the umami usually associated with seafood wasn't found here. For some odd reasons, the cheese flavour was rather strong as compared to the flavours of the sea. But to be fair, the slipper lobster was nice and not too dry nor too hard, while the prawns were the best. Succulent and firm to the bite, albeit rather limited edition at just 2 pieces.

Next, was the 24 hours braised beef short-ribs.

Quarantaotto (24 hours slow braised beef short-ribs with mash potato)

with such handsome looking beef, can't wait to sink my teeth into this!

The Quarantaotto's beef looked good enough to make you want to eat it! But upon first bite, a question popped out automatically, "Did someone forget to add salt?" I'm all for natural flavours but still felt that something was missing from this dish. Even the mashed potatoes were a tad tastier than the beef! The mash had a bare hint of truffle.

The slow braised beef was tender but not till the extent of easily breakable by a fork.

tender beef on a bed of creamy truffle mash

This meal would've costs us about $48 per pax, but with Groupon vouchers, we paid about $28 per pax.

Chiso Zanmai @ The Central, Clarke Quay

Located at Level 2, go round TCC and walk across the bridge. It's only opened after 12pm and need to queue to pay first. Lunch is about $14.90++ per pax and top up $1.99++ for unlimited drinks. The drinks include
cold drinks (green tea, iced lemon tea, root beer etc) and hot drinks (coffee, cappucino, latte) all from drinks dispensers. Self-service please.

still empty

reserved seats

this thing cannot be moved, and it's smack right in the middle of the table *LOL*

view from our table

The restaurant was really crowded around lunch time. But do note that there is no salmon (nor any other sashimi) during lunch time on the day of our visit. This was really sad because salmon should be a staple feature in Japanese buffets, no?

cold items section

hot food section

sushi (see, no salmon... sads)

dessert section

First round, here's what I came back with:

boiled octopus with broccoli, ebi and sweet potato tempura, tuna cubes with yam, takopochi, mackerel and okonomiyaki

The food selection wasn't very tempting for me. Really tried hard to want to try the food offered in this buffet. The ebi tempura wasn't replaced as fast as we would like to and it remained unreplenished even after 15 minutes. So, only had two pieces in total. Sads.

looks nice, but the taste was so-so only

beef okonomiyaki (with burnt outer layer??)

The cabbage okomiyaki, can skip because the egg was quite hard and not alot of cabbage in it. Probably can try the boiled octopus (where it retained its bite but it was a nice chew), ebi tempura (if you're lucky), tori karaage (not bad only), tuna cubes (closest thing to raw fish......), matcha tofu (sweeet~), braised pork belly (no salmon belly, will have to make do with pork belly!) and desserts.

matcha tofu (must try)

tuna cubes

braised pork belly

Should eat the matcha tofu before having the sweet corn tofu because the corn tofu has a stronger taste. Both are nice. I ate 3 servings in total. The pork belly was soft enough and not too salty.

soy pudding with ginger syrup

cappucino

Was quite worried when I saw the cappucino. It looked like it had too much milk! But the taste was quite nice. Bitter and foamy enough. Best compliment to the sweet desserts.

from left: profiterole (puff), cheesecake, eclair, matcha jelly, sponge cakes, passion fruit cake

All of the desserts that's in the picture above was nice except for the passion fruit cake as it has a too tangy taste. For some odd reason, also found that the milk filling in the profiterole and eclair were too watery. Nice and sweet but watery. Odd.

yums

Thanks Cathy for the birthday treat!

Tianfu Steamboat (Paradise On Earth) @ Tanjong Katong Road

Located after Caltex gas station (opposite side) and there's a durian stall nearby. We were there to have steamboat buffet @$20.80+ per pax.

steamboat set menu

steamboat buffet items (can only choose items from B and C)

table setup for steamboat

For drinks, we ordered a jug of lime juice (@$8+ per jug).

lime juice (good for about 5 glasses)

The soup base (for buffet, can only choose mala/tom yum/chicken/fish head), we chose mala and chicken soup (yuan yang pot).

cooking and we waited patiently

Hmm, forgotten to take pictures of the raw ingredients but one plate portion was rather small. So in a group of 6 pax, you might want to order triple plates of the same thing. Things that I quite liked were the carp fish slice, chicken meat, pork belly and the various vegetables. But the pork belly was two thirds of fats and one third of meat! The fried yam and clams gave the soup a good flavour. But the mala flavour wasn't fiery nor spicy nor numbing. It was just a little pepperish. Oh, and some of our orders were not delivered at each round. We ordered three rounds and each time, they'd forget to bring a certain item. But it's ok, you can try again at the next order.

We also got ourselves a plate of har jeong gai (prawn paste chicken) @ $8+ per 8 pieces (one wing yields 2 pieces).

watch out, served piping hot!

The prawn paste chicken wings were crispy, tasty and juicy although the marinade wasn't even for most pieces.

aftermath...

We paid $27.20 per pax for the meal.

주막 Joomak Restaurant @ Upper Bukit Timah Road

This place is located at Level 4 of Beauty World Centre. Took bus #67 from CCK interchange and dropped right in front of the overhead bridge to Beauty World, and the bridge connects directly to level 4. How convenient is that? We passed by Dulukala Peranakan Restaurant, and this place is right after Pink Candy, another Korean snack shop.

restaurant facade

We went in and seated ourselves. Seemed like the restaurant owners were busy so we had to wait quite a bit for the menu.

menu

FT Island on the wall

hangul characters

I really wanted to try the jajangmyeon (짜장면 / 炸酱面) and fried chicken but jajangmyeon wasn't available that day and my dining companion is absolutely against fried chicken.  Sigh. So we decided to order one ginseng chicken soup (samgyetang 삼계탕) and a seafood pancake (haemul pajeon 해물파전). The price in the menu are all nett prices. Drinks 'menu' is written on the wall. Typically, the diners there are mostly Korean families or couples. There were only one or two tables that were non-natives on our day of visit.

The favourite drink on the table seemed to be makgeolli (막걸리). The content is actually poured into a small kettle and the 'cups' are small roundish shallow bowls of the same material of the kettle. Here's a picture from someone else's site for illustration purposes. My dining companion wasn't keen to drink, so we didn't order any. The Korean family next to our table added Sprite to the concoction. Ooh, probably will try it at home next time!

cold drinking water (free)

Our order of samgyetang arrived first, but the side dishes (banchan 반찬) did not come till much much later.

ginseng chicken soup (삼계탕)

one whole small chicken

flavored salt

Spoons and chopsticks are in a container on the table, so please self-service.

getting ready to eat

The ginseng chicken soup was healthy tasting. In fact, it was rather mild, so the salt came in handy. The chicken stuffing consist of one good sized ginseng, red dates, garlic and glutinous rice. Lots of green onions in the soup as well. Liked the soft glutinous rice that had absorbed all the essence of the chicken and ginseng.

glutinous rice

There were 8 types of side dishes served that day.

banchans (반찬)

The Korean family next to my table was quite amused by me taking pictures of banchans. Probably a little difficulty to understand why someone would want to photograph ordinary side dishes that they've been eating on a daily basis.

Spicy side dishes

I don't know what's this, but it tasted like spicy 金针菇

kimchi

Non-spicy side dishes

steamed egg

beansprouts

anchovies

shitake mushrooms

fishcake strips

Enjoyed all the side dishes but my favourite ones were the fishcake, the unknown spicy one, kimchi and beansprouts.

Mr Kim sajangnim was busy cooking that night. He only came out once in a while to serve the customers.

The haemul pajeon took the longest time to cook. But it was such a pretty plate when it came.

seafood pancake (해물파전)

Aren't these pretty? Reminds me of spring!

Although its name was seafood pancake, the only prevalent ingredients were spring onions and squid. The pancake was also kind of undercooked on its inside. Not sure if that's how it was meant to be?

not sure what's inside this mixture, but recommended to dip the pajeon in this

squid peeking out

We paid $35 for 2 pax and we ate well that night. 잘먹었습니다~

Here's the link to second visit.