Bar Bar Black Sheep @ Bukit Timah

Located at Cherry Avenue, this place always seemed to have a crowd on both occassion of visit. The concept is pretty simple; it has three stalls offering Indian, Thai and Western fare. Food and beer/wine. Good combi, yes?

the Thai and western food stalls

It was post dinner when we visit, so we got some light bites to go with beer. The food was from Smok'Inn Frogz Kitchen. Had onion rings and fish fingers. Can't remember the exact prices but each were below $10. Yep, they were deep fried and very oily.

onion rings, served with ketchup

onion rings close up view

fish fingers, served with fries and tartar sauce

fish fingers and fries

The onion rings got soggy pretty fast. Had better ones elsewhere. The fish fingers were a little burnt, the batter was thicker than expected and the fish meat was soft. The fries were alright though.

Had a funny incident with the beer. Ordered a jug of Kronenbourg Blanc and the guy delivered to us, and we paid. He came back with the change. And after a few minutes, we realized we didn't have any glasses to pour out the beer. Hahaa! The guy forgot to bring us some.

finally, glasses for beer

a jug of Blanc @$25

Payments are in cash terms. This place opens till late.

Zhou's Kitchen 周庄 @ Novena Square 2

Located at Level 1 of Square 2, this place looked pretty small. On the weekend day of our visit, the restaurant doesn't seemed to be ready for its 6pm start of evening service as some staff were seen to have just started to clean up the front section of the restaurant. Probably the tea-time crowd was hectic? Not sure.

booth seats

view for 2 pax seats

For 2 pax dining option, they have two set menus (Chef's Recommended Set and Tasty Set) available and both priced at about $28++. For set menu meals, one can get appetiser, soup, fish, vegetable and dessert. Quite a good variety, if you ask me. However, my dining companion was more keen on ala-carte dishes so we didn't get any set menus.

ala-carte menu

As the usual practice in most Chinese restaurants, a small plate of peanuts or such would be placed on the table. Here, we get pickles. The vinegared fruits and vegetables slices/juliennes/shreds tasted quite nice.

pickles 酸菜

We also ordered pu-er chinese tea for drinks and it came served in a metal pot.

tea pot

pu-er

For food, we ordered steamed sea bass, crispy roasted chicken (half) and stir fried kai lan with sambal. The service was pretty fast, as the food started to arrive in approximately 10 minutes after our orders were taken. Also liked that the service staff will verify the orders once more with you, after it was keyed into the system.

The crispy roasted chicken came first.

crispy roasted chicken (half) @$16++

flavored salt

closer view of yummy chicken

The chicken was quite yummy with its thin crispy skin and tender moist meat, especially the thigh and ribs part. Yums!

stir fried kai lan with sambal

closer view of vegetables

white rice

The vegetable wasn't spicy actually. Just fragrant with the sambal and goes quite well with rice. The surprise dish was the fish, as I wasn't really expecting a milky broth from that dish.

steamed seabass

closer view of steamed fish

Liked how the fish meat was already deboned and placed back on the serving dish to resemble the fish body. There were tofu cubes below the fish meat. The fish was alright although there was a slight fishy taste to it. However the preserved vegetables were kind of too salty to be eaten so we skipped those.

Service was generally alright, although one dish from someone else's table got sent over to ours after we had finished our meal.

We paid $26+ per pax (after 20% off for Tunglok card holder members birthday month discount).

Yakitori Enmaru 焼鳥 炎丸 @ ION Orchard (Part II)

Second time visit with a first-timer. Wendy, my friend, made reservations for us, but on a weekday evening, it was rather unnecessary. The place was quite quiet.

handwritten welcome note

I was happy to note that the $5 shochu promotion (on selected shochu) is still available, so got myself a Tomino again.

We ordered yakitori of course, and this time round, we had tsukune oroshi (chicken meatballs with grated radish), garlic shitake mushrooms, ringo buta bara (pork with apple slices) and tebasaki (chicken wings). For appetiser, we had the tako with wasabi. Also ordered the ibushi yaki and onigiri. I had the salmon onigiri while my friend had the same but grilled version.

As usual, the raw cabbage with miso was served as otoshi. I think they forgot to drain off the water from the cabbage as there was quite a pool of liquid at the bottom of the bowl.

a feast for two

Everything was served to us, almost all at the same time. So that was how we ended up with a table full of food! On hindsight, it would be better if we'd order bit by bit and have those first, before re-ordering. The grilled items probably tasted better while it was still hot off the grill.

mushrooms!

The grilled mushrooms had a nice strong scent. Heady woody flavour. Yums. Next, we had the deep fried chicken skin in ponzu sauce (kawa ponzu).

kawa ponzu

yummy sinful deep fried skin

The deep fried chicken skin was kind of addictive, like crunchy keropok, albeit probably a more sinful version.

Onigiri, I kind of liked. Sure, the rice didn't hold and half of the onigiri crumbled after a few bites and there were scarcely any salmon in it, but somehow, this mound of rice ball wrapped in seaweed was like comfort food. Simple and filling.

salmon onigiri

Ok, I cheated. At times, the plain tasting onigiri was jazzed up using the tako wasabi. Haha! New flavour to consider.

small mound of slimy tako with spicy wasabi in a large bowl

tsukune, tebasaki and buta ringo

The tsukune was a little disappointing. The meat didn't hold together (not as compact as previously tasted) and it was a little dry on its inside. Perhaps we had left it out for too long before consuming it. Tebasaki was pretty juicy, while the apple pork was a little hard. It was a good chew though and the apple slices were sweet.

ibushi yaki, close up

The ibushi yaki and the tako wasabi were quite salty, so it made us thirsty for a long time.

Overall, the service was friendly and polite. The place was fairly relaxed.

Thank you Wendy, for the birthday treat!

Here's the link to first visit.

주막 Joomak Restaurant @ Upper Bukit Timah Road Beauty World Centre (Part II)

My brother wanted to try, so brought him here. It was a Saturday evening, right after the rain. So the place was pretty quiet when we reached at about 630pm. Probably just two other tables occupied. My bro has no preference so I ordered for us. 짜장면 Jajangmyeon and fried chicken (half portion).

side dishes 반찬

The shop has a new helper to serve the tables, so we got our side dishes pretty quickly this time round. Glad to see that there're variations in the banchan.

omelette

potato strips

cucumber kimchi (this was good!)

fish cake strips (my fav!)

beancurd (taukwa) kimchi

beansprouts

spinach

kimchi

Bro likes the young kimchi, and we both agreed that the cucumber ones were done up pretty good.

Jajangmyeun was served up pretty fast. Looked quite easy to cook too. Ingredients seemed to be lots of onions, black bean paste sauce, minced meat and cucumber strips.

jajangmyeun (짜장면 / 炸酱面)

yummy~

slurpilicious noodles

The sauce wasn't as thick as I thought it would be (after effect of learning about jajangmyeun from Korean shows), and it was actually nice and sweet plus not too salty. The noodles were yummy! Absolutely slurp worthy. The texture of the noodles is like a cross between pasta and laksa noodles. Chewy yet soft. Nice. Good for sharing between two people.


Allow at least 15 to 20 minutes for the fried chicken. The shop proprietress said that they only have original flavour for that evening. Half portion yields 4 pieces of chicken, so it might be more worthwhile to get the whole chicken portion for just a few more dollars extra.

chicken in a basket

eat me!

Serving fried chicken in a basket is always a charming sight for me. Don't ask me why. It just is. The fried chicken was served piping hot, so do wait before sinking your teeth into one. There was one drumstick and three other fairly large pieces of fried chicken in there.


The skin was crispy, and though original flavour, it was still marinated with a little of the hot chili powder. Yums! Beneath those sinfully delicious skin, was tender and juicy meat. 

juicy~

The chicken was flavourful on its own, but do dip them into the chili sauce that came together with the chicken basket. That was nice too with citrussy hint in the sauce.


We paid $32 for the meal and it was good for two pax.

the bill

Here's the link to first visit.

Streets of London @ Bukit Merah Central

Located at Block 161 Bukit Merah Central, this place is just one bus stop away from my office. So decided to pop-in for lunch with a colleague.

eye catching signboard

The place is still quite new, and was curious about its food since it was featured twice in 8-days (last week and this week), plus because of its proximity to my workplace...why not try it?

It's a casual joint, so we sauntered in and settled ourselves onto any available table. In fact, we were the only customer there at that time.

choose your table

we sat here, with nice table lamp and a nice framed picture

Menus were quickly presented and the young chap left us alone for us to decide. There's no GST nor service charge here, so the prices are in nett. Set lunches for $10 is available and it comes with a soup of the day and a small glass of soft drink. Options included fish and chips, chicken chop and spaghetti bolognaise. The rest I can't really remember but there wasn't any steak options.

My colleague chose the fish and chips set lunch, and I ordered the sirloin steak ala-carte (@$15) to be done medium rare. For drinks, they're having a whole day Happy Hour promo till end of May, so a bottle of Hoegaarden goes for $6. And we also had a basket of onion rings to share.

First to arrive, the french onion soup that's part of the set lunch.

pepper shaker et french onion soup

Liked the temperature of the soup, and it was quite alright with visible strands of onions cooked till soft. My colleague likes all things onions, so she seemed to enjoy this.

Hoegaarden in a Stella glass

 
Next up, was the basket of onion rings which I think is quite a steal at only $5. Served right off the frying pan, it was very crunchy and very hot!

onion rings @$5

closer view of the onion rings

One bad thing about the onion rings? It was actually dripping with oil, especially the bottom ones. It would be much much better if the oil was drained from the onion rings prior to serving. It was quite alarming to see oil seeping out of the basket and onto the plastic tablecloth!

oil alert!

Now, on towards the main courses. The fish and chips, was shall I say, quite impressive.

fish and chips

The fish portion was of a sizeable chunk. The batter was as thin as it can be, so we're eating fish and not flour.

thinly coated batter

fleshy fish

The fish flesh was firm and soft at the same time, and tasted pretty smooth. Gently salted, so it has some taste on its own. Liked the small mound of fruits and vegetables but the fries was pretty ordinary and doesn't seemed to be double fried.

The steak took some 15 minutes to cook since the soup first arrived.

sirloin steak

served with onion mushroom sauce

looks too rare for a medium rare, yes?

First impression of the steak, was that it was quite thick for a sirloin. But signs of trouble appeared after cutting the meat. It looked pretty rare, so that made it jaw achingly chewy and hard to swallow. It was worse when the knife came to the center of the meat.

Asked the young chap who was running the service, if he too feels that the meat was too rare to be medium rare. He thought so too, and brought the meat back to the kitchen.

Ten minutes later, my same steak re-appeared with some parts still red while the top parts of the meat was cooked to medium.

second time cooked steak

The steak was disappointing, so didn't finish it.

We paid $36 for the meal.