Big Mama at Kim Tian Road

Big Mama is a fabulous place for dinner on Saturday nights - we were there in a group of 7, and having booked the first seating at 6pm, we were told we had to leave before 8pm. No problems there, since the food arrived very quickly. It's a homely, unpretentious place and excellent for large rowdy groups, since you can get to try a bit of everything - the servings are huge.

They're very generous with the appetisers, and when the plates were emptied, offered refills cheerfully. Top marks for service.

Close-up of the various appetisers -my favourite was the jelly-like spicy blocks, which were a bit like cubed 凉粉.

I absolutely loved their seafood and chives pancake. Soft on the inside and crispy on the outside.

Great with the chilli dipping sauce

We ordered suyuk, which is...siu yuk. The platter arrived looking like this:

Ooh the pork was delicious - very soft and tender, and not too fatty so it didn't feel too sinful popping everything into our mouths

Two ways of eating it: either with sauce and cucumber, or with a slice of radish and bean sprouts.

Bulgogi beef - this turned out soupier than expected, but still tasty nonetheless.
 
We ordered a spicy grilled chicken, which came with raw veggies and had to be stir-fried at the table.

The final product with rice cakes - excellent.


The seafood hotpot was really good as well - this was not too salty, just the right amount of spice and really good with white steamed rice.

It had noodles at the bottom, which were nice and chewy.

A fantastic place to go with greedy friends.

Website: http://bigmama.sg/menu 

Kko Kko Nara

There's a Korean fried chicken restaurant near the office that serves really yummy hot spicy chicken wings, as well as an amazing ddeokbokkie (spelling?) steamboat. One lunchtime a couple of friends and I headed down because one was craving the steamboat - chock full of rice cake and veggies in a spicy and slightly sweet sauce.

Their bi mim bap is pretty good too

Hot spicy and yummy steamboat - the perfect pick me up in the middle of a long workday.

It get seriously crowded at night, so reservations are essential.

57 Tras Street
Tel: 62248186
Open daily from 11am to 4am (yes, this isn't a typo)

Hyang-to-gol Korean Restaurant

Warning: Lots of pictures of meat. Not for herbivores.

Hyang-to-gol is located on the 2nd floor of Amara Hotel, tucked away in a small corner in between Silk Road and Than Ying. I had never known that Amara had a Korean restaurant, having been to Silk Road, Than Ying and Santaro several times. It was about half-full on a Saturday night, although there was a steady stream of customers.

They serve many varieties of meat, mostly fatty cuts. The meat is not cheap though - the beef plates cost $35 t0 $40 per plate, while the pork plates cost over $20. We ordered 2 serves of the beef rib, one serve of squid, one soup and one raw beef (yukke).

The standard appetisers

Ikan bilis - quite nice and crunchy

Kimchi

They give you 2 dipping sauces to dip the meat into, one which tasted vaguely of miso, and the other being a salt-sesame oil mix. I preferred the latter.

Raw meat being grilled.

The smell was divine!

We didn't expect help for the grilling.

Freshly grilled fatty beef...absolutely divine.

Raw beef with raw egg yolk and korean pear. Absolutely yummy!

Second round of beef being grilled

Squid

Soup

Hyang-to-gol Korean Restaurant

165 Tanjong Pagar Road, Level 2 Amara

Tel: 6220 7160

Open daily from 11.30am-3.00pm & 6.00pm-2.00am.

Various bits and pieces over the weekend

The weekend was filled with stops at various eating places - some good, others better, and one not good at all.

After a run last week, I went to Central mall craving Marutama Ramen's chicken broth, which I consider absolute comfort food. It was 9.05pm and I was told they were not serving any more customers for the day. I had tried Ramen Santouka once before, when the queue for Marutama was too long for any sensible person to wait out, and had found Santouka to be pretty decent. It wasn't easy to find, since it was tucked away in a corner of the building. But seats were available without having to wait too long, which was important.

The prices on the menu range from about $13 to $17. I had wanted the chicken ramen, but it was sold out. So I went for the shio ramen ($13.50).

This is the first time I have seen preserved plums (ume) added to the soup to enhance its flavour.

Ramen Santouka's name card has the following description: "To make our mild, pearl-coloured Tonkotsu soup, we take the time to simmer the pork bones before adding our vegetables, dried fish, kelp and other special ingredients. We cherish the exceptional taste and flavour of our special soup and ensure that it is never boiled".

The noodles were springy and the soup was warm and flavourful. The ramen came with bamboo shoot strips, 2 slices of pork and some sliced black fungus. My only grouse was that there wasn't any egg in it - the type cooked in a soy base with a soft yolk - also known as ni-tamago.

Friday night supper after watching a concert at the Expo was at the East Coast Lagoon. There is no better place for Satay Bee Hoon than Ming Kee. They open from 5pm to 11.30pm everyday except Tuesdays, and I always stop there after landing at Changi Airport after starving myself on the flight to make space for the yummy yummy bee hoon. We also love the rojak (from the stall to the left of Ming Kee) and the oyster omelette (from the stall to the right of Ming Kee). The chicken wings (from the stall to the right of the oyster omelette stall) are also pretty good.

On Saturday morning, we were at Raffles City to do our part for the Singapore economy. As the shops were only open at 11am, we decided to stop at Out of the Pan for crepes. The service was extremely disappointing - orders were bungled, non-0rdered items charged to my bill and vanishing waiters - and the food only average at best. I won't go into greater detail, but paying customers deserve much better.

This was a set menu - for $22, you get a salad, a main crepe and a standard drink. We added $2 to swop the drink for a cafe lattte instead (which was $0.50 cents more than the price of a standard drink in the a la carte menu).
The mushroom crepe, which I had ordered before and enjoyed. But there used to be more mushrooms before.

After such a disappointing experience, we needed something else to eat. Since we had gone to Vivocity, we decided to try Kim Gary. We had seen massive queues outside previously, and had also tried the Kim Gary in City Square JB. They also have branches across Hong Kong and Malaysia. But who is Kim Gary anyway? Apparently it's not the bloke featured on the place mats.

We managed to get a window seat with a great waterfront view.

Ordering from the different menus can be a confusing thing.

The place was packed at lunchtime on Saturday.

Honey lemon with aloe vera ($4.20), a Mango Lure (fresh mango with sago) ($4.20)and almond milk, which came as part of a set meal.

The husband's steak set ($17) came with soup, garlic bread and a drink. Unfortunately he forgot the golden rule - the Hong Kongers will cook steak the way they like to eat it. It was rather salty, but that's not to say that it wasn't good.

I had the shanghainese noodles with pork chop and preserved vegetable ($6.50). It wasn't very tasty, and the noodles were very soft.

The greedy husband also ordered fries ($3 something) with mayonnaise and pickles. They were yummy - crispy and hot, and quite tasty.

Just a bit of an identity crisis - are their fries French or Irish?

We had Korean food for lunch the next day at a restaurant called A-ri-Rang in Harris Resort in Batam during church camp with friends at a Korean-Japanese restaurant. They gave us the usual appetizers.

The husband's chicken don.

Two of us had the kimchi soup which was pretty good.

One greedy fellow ordered both a sashimi/tempura set and fried chicken.

To round the weekend off, the best food at the best place in Singapore: the Mother In Law cooked roast chicken pasta (using capellini, or angel hair pasta) with lemon, parsely and pine nuts. Healthy, tasty and best of all - cooked with love : )