Sunday, April 06, 2008

Some nice places to eat - and some not so nice

Three months of eating compressed into a single post!


This is Reif + James at Clarke Quay. Really small, exclusive restaurant, with an expansive selection of wines. Quite pricey, but I must admit the food was quite nice - look at that beef! The restaurant is not well lit and sits maybe 20 to 30 people at most, so if you like a feeling of exclusivity and intimate service, this is quite a good place.






This next one the Huang Jia restaurant at Kallang Leisure Park , which was rather more pricey. The dishes were very flavourful - very enticing for the first eat, but I'm not sure whether it would become boring after a second visit. All the dishes were quite good - but after a while I forgot to take photos... I was particularly impressed with the crispy chicken. Normally, the skin and the drum stick of the chicken is really good but parts of the chicken become too tough. But in this case, every part of the chicken meat remained moist and tender as well!

The out-of-focus piece at the back here - foei gras with a slab of suckling pig and the crispy pork skin - was fantastic - the flavours combined really well!

















I also liked this dish a lot - it's just a piece of scallop and a snowfish, but it tasted great... heh.

The restaurant is quite large, I'm guessing about 80-100 persons seating, max. What I really like about the decor is the seats, which are really comfortable and large chairs which you can recline in and really enjoy your food in. The restaurant has made sure that there's ample space for these large seats, reducing their capacity but helping to create a spacious, imperial, feeling.








On to a not-so-good place.

Finest Cuts at the basement of Central is somewhere between a butcher and a coffeeshop. There are all these appetising cuts of beef, lamb, and pork waiting to be purchased, and they have a small serving area - maybe 10 persons - where they can serve you your steak at about $20. For that price, you get what's pictured left - looks like NUS canteen western food right? The crime is not the dish decoration, though. It's that the beef is truly ordinary - for $30 I can get much much much better beef at Hogsbreath or Prime Society, so I'm never coming back here again...



Next up - Magma German Wine Bistro. As you'll see below, German food - ie sausages and beer. And in the name, German wine. Honestly - not very impressed, either with their pork trotters or with their sausages. The beer (see how happy we are?) was pretty darn good though, with a nice variety of beers to choose from. I'm curious about some of the non-standard alcohols they have, and next time I'm going to try the honey wine. Is that like mead, do you think?


























Rounding up.... Back to the ole trusty Dessert Hut, in this case at People's Park Center. Yummy ah Boling and other desserts at about $2.50 per bowl. Good stuff. Don't mind the queue, you'll get a seat soon enough...

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