Pinotxo - An Epicurean Pilgrimage

I spent five days in Barcelona. I visited some of Gaudi’s works, headed down to the port and spent hours wandered around the city under the warm sunshine because KD and I decided that we were ‘walkers’ that we weren’t going to hop on the tourist bus but walk everywhere. We walked everywhere. We might even developed stronger legs. The truth about our walking route is that although it was spontaneous, it was guided by mainly by the lust of shopping and the desire to eat, that being said, we did literally walk into a few sights and monuments.

Fresh seafood, cutting edge molecular cuisine along side fervent advocates of traditions the Catalans know how to seduce you into their glorious world of food. We had a lot of eating on the agenda. Different city same story, too much to eat too little time.

The food here in the city is incredibly delicious. Of all my meals I had, the one table that I would board a plane just to eat at again is the crowded L-shaped counter of Pinotxo in arguably one best markets in the world, La Boqueria. Here, there is no menu. Needless to say, what is fresh is the menu.

We lucked in grabbing two seats at the corner after a short wait of five minutes where our espresso were served and we contemplated what we should eat.

“What would you like?”

“What is good?” asked the naïve me.

“Everything is good!”

“Ok, I want some fresh seafood, so…between the bamboo clams, the clams and the gambas..”

“For me, the gambas are the best, but that’s for me...”

“I’ll have the gambas,” the deciding factor being when in Barcelona, eat like the Catalans.

The gambas were possibly one of the best things I have eaten all year. Pristinely fresh, succulent and sweet all they needed was a little coaxing on the hot plate, a splash of olive oil and a dash of sea salt. After you gently nudge its head off allow its natural prawn essence to spill onto the plate to marry with the olive oil for a sauce that should be soaked up by a baguette slices. The food was so pure and it spoke so sincerely, I feel in love with Pinotxo instantly.

“How were the gambas?”

“The best I’ve ever had…” and that’s the only way I currently feel inspired to cook prawns at the moment.

They also encouraged us to try their chickpeas, another of our charming cook’s favourite, and that like the gambas was deceptively delicious - the best I've ever had. We also ordered their baby squid cooked with white beans, garlic and balsamic that we witnessed them cooking from start to finish and continued to stare jealously at the gorgeous plates that others ordered. The wonderful people at Pinotxo took a liking to us. Maybe it was our appetite and sense of adventure that endeared us to them as they generously fed us odd bits to sample. When we called for the bill, we assured them that we would be back tomorrow but tomorrow was a Sunday and the market it closed on Sunday, so Monday it had to be but there is no seafood on Monday.

We still returned on Monday and we had a repeat of their chickpeas, and ate from what I would term their ‘land menu’ – tripe, veal cheek, salted cod and such. It was still all magically good although I am biased towards the ‘sea menu’.

“Come back tomorrow?” they asked with a smile.

“I would love to but I have to fly off in the morning. Too bad, I’ll come back when I’m back in Barcelona.” If I could, I would board a plane today to eat there again.

Morton’s where size matters

Morton’s The Steakhouse
Mandarin Oriental
5 Raffles Avenue, Marina Square
Tel: 6338-0066

The steak lineup

For that one night in Morton’s I decided that I was going to pretend to be a man because that seemed to be the only appropriate response.

Morton’s stays true to the idea of American style over the top indulgence. It is a very masculine restaurant. I was in super-size me land with steak fillets as big as my face and lobster claws as large as my hand. In Morton’s land, size matters. Correction, size is everything. Even the tomato was the size of my fist!

The service is winning. It is the integral part of the whole experience from the start to the finish. Part of the whole experience of being pampered is having the waiter literally bring the menu. They recite it off the top of their heads and as show off their platter of meat cuts available and dangle the 1.5 kg lobster in front of you. It is a fun spectacle.

The steaks. They are good, they aren’t awe-inspiring but they are good meats. It starts with a good ingredient – a gingerly aged piece of beef – and that’s what you are presented with. What I love about it is that, there really is no margin for error here because the steak is presented to you in its naked glory, cooked to your choice of bloodiness.

jumbo lump crab cake

But before we get to the steaks, there are the appetizers to get through. Maybe the colossal shrimp cocktail or a main lobster cocktail? I had neither but I was allocated a colossal shrimp Alexander with beurre blanc sauce which strangely but very amusingly tasted like popcorn. Along with that, the jumbo lump crab cake is outstanding, so if you can’t decide between the starters, this is my choice pick.

As for desserts, as far as I can remember this might have been one of the first places to have the ubiquitous molten lava chocolate cake in Singapore (correct me if I’m wrong) and a Godiva hot centre chocolate cake but the Godiva has now been dropped but it is still a fail safe good ending for dinners.

Will I come back? Maybe but one condition must be fulfilled - someone else has to picking up the check because I don’t feel that the prices are justified. The whole theatric experience was to a certain extent bordering on ludicrous but very entertaining. I can’t fault the food it was good but maybe I’m not man enough to stand up to the size of it. A good steak, yes and too much of a good thing, I packed half of mine home and prolonged the pleasure of my NY strip. So maybe this place isn’t for me and definitely not for the faint hearted.

Salad Days

My vegetable man in the nearby market has been good to me. He has over the years been a good supplier of fresh crisp greens and other colourful roots but in the recent years he has been sourcing for a wider variety of vegetables and has cultivated a substantial and growing choice of organic products.

After a monster meal yesterday, I decided a salad was the only way to go today. I walked to the market today in search of fabulous things for my chopped salad and digestion. I find the idea of a chopped salad very appealing. One of the reasons is strange and self serving. One of my favourite things to do in life is to mise en place. It is weird I know. And I love working with the knife, slicing, dicing and chopping. So for me, the chopped salad is perfect, I get to savour the whole process of preparing it and then I get double the pleasure from forking through it. The salad combinations are unlimited and just think of it of a mix of something light, something fresh and a clever mix of things in my fridge or the guiding principal can be – select the things you love to eat.

This was my chopped salad of the day.



Romaine lettuce
Sautéed shiitake mushooms
Tomatoes
Manchego cheese
Leftover roast beef
Quail’s eggs
Vinaigrette made from the best olive oil you can get, vinegar and your favourite mustard

Hamburgers at Relish

Relish
#02-01 Cluny Court (next to Serene Centre)
501 Bukit Timah Road
Tel: 6763-1547

Here’s more about eating hamburgers. I recently headed down to the chic casual burger bar Relish to see if I’ve found the place for burger craving emergencies.

It didn’t quite do it for me. I had the signature wild rocket burger with sun-dried tomato relish and arugula. Hamburger versus hamburger, sure the patty was generously thick, the cooking was spot on with the medium-rare and it had great texture and mouth feel when chewed on but I didn’t get an ounce of the transcendent char-grilled beefy taste that I was looking for! Not to discount the sun-dried tomato relish or the Sarawak pepper sauce which was delicious but I still have beef about the patty and my semi-hot fries that seemed to have spent too long on the pass.

Maybe I don’t belong in a gourmet burger bar or maybe when it comes to hamburgers or maybe I am a hamburger purist or simpleton (I’m not sure which), but it is really simple, all I really really really want is a really tasty no fuss hamburger where I can taste that it is good beef (no Kobe or Wagyu required), it was cooked deliciously pink to order and served with fresh lettuce, tomatoes and squirts of ketchup and mustard. Fries optional but preferred.

Burgers and how I like them

I have a strange relationship with hamburgers. I never crave them as a comfort food but when I do spot one on a menu, I occasionally have a compulsion to order it even though it might not be what I really really want.

Whilst I never crave them, I still find the need to find a good burger joint for emergencies. The good news is that I’ve found one the horrible part of that news is that it isn’t on the same continent as my regular home address.

Just a short walk away from the Albert Cuyp market is where I think is the best place to roll up your sleeves and to bite into in Amsterdam: Burgermeester.

This smallish, narrow and unassuming shop makes fine burgers. The good people that operate this place are really friendly so that makes the burger eating a happy experience. And in case you were wondering, they serve side salads and milkshakes as well, but the focus is really on the burgers.

Once you’ve sized up the burger menu, narrow your choice down to your favourite three and then I recommend ordering the mini trio plate that way you get to eat all three of your choice burgers. And don’t forget to ask for the burger of the month. Every burger is made to order, so if you go during the busy hours a wait is expected.

I tried the plainest of them all, the beef burger. It was good. They use mainly organic ingredients, implication: good, fresh and happy ingredients = tasty burger. For their beef, they make their patties with Blonde d’Aquitaine beef. After the process of being chopped, shaped and grilled, what emerges is beef patty that is juicy and flavourful, fantastic for burgers. My first bite and to my delight had me reaching across the table for the napkins to save the beefy dribble from hitting my clean shirt. It was nothing grand in this crazy gourmet burger era where Kobe, Wagyu, foie gras and truffles are now its frequent bedfellows, but it was a thing of basic beauty.

Burgermeester
Albert Cuypstraat 48
Tel: +31-206-6709339

The Singel 404

I’ve been away. After about two weeks of sleeping in foreign beds and waking up to a hammered jet lagged feeling; I’ve just made it home.

The feeling of being home is a strange feeling. You can be perfectly alienated at home and at home in a completely foreign environment. This trip I went back to a place that I called home for a while, parts of it still looked foreign and other parts looked and smelled familiar. The supermarket that was a seven minute walk away from my then home, my supermarket, had the same smell that it had five years ago. Thankfully not one of those bad smells, but just a distinct smell that was strangely reassuring.

After walking down the aisles of the Albert Heijn and reacquainting myself with the delights of pindakaas (the Dutch version of peanut butter that taste nothing like the smooth Skippy’s/peter pan types that I grew up eating), stroopwafels those waffles that justify are thin enough to hold the maximum amount of caramel, speculaas a Dutch spiced biscuit that I was seriously addicted to and the cheese, I started feeling more at home.


Old cheese with egg, sun dried tomatoes, honey mustard, sprouts, avocado, garden cress and walnuts

Once I pulled myself out of the supermarket, I did the next thing that was top on my priority, to eat at my favourite sandwich shop in Amsterdam. Anyway, the Singel 404 is small, so you need take any choice table that you get and if the sun decides to come out, sitting along the Singel to watch the boats, bikes and people pass it a great way to spend lunch. The menu here is huge – with nearly fifty different bread + ingredients options ranging from the failsafe toastie, club sandwiches, and my personal favourite section: specials where they have great combinations – it is hard not to at least one option that you would like. Or the last option is for you can be an impossible person like me on my first visit where I insisted on creating own sandwich despite the dizzy array of choices, but I am not too sure if this option is still available.

This trip I made it to the Singel 404 twice – for lunch and brunch. In the peak lunch hour, it is annoying having to stand around and to watch people eat whilst you are starving but in a seriously twisted manner, there is perhaps a magnified sense of gratification when you grab a choice table and savour lunch with conversation. For brunch, I made it there really early and so I enjoyed a full twenty minutes of quietness from me being the solo diner in the lunchroom. Everything I’ve ever had in this place is good. Everything. That and I’ve had fabulous memories at this place. Needless to say, I love it.

Singel 404
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tel: +31-204-280154

And this little piggy went to Mimigar

Mimigar
1 Nanson Road
#01-08 Gallery Hotel
Tel: 6235-1511

Here at Mimigar, the open kitchen is dedicated to Okinawan style food and the cooks wear funky hats. I think Okinawan cuisine is good fusion food. It is a fun mix of Chinese and American influences that have been adopted into the local style of cooking.

The Chinese influence – stir-fried bitter gourd with pork. Unlike the Chinese version which is commonly generously flavoured with black beans, the okinawan version has a very clean taste and stir-fried over a furious flame with eggs and tofu.

The American influence – taco rice that is essentially a taco sans taco shell but plus rice. They also have a Japanese version that is taco curry rice, a house specialty – I’ll try this the time.

One of the stranger things that I ate here were sea grapes – a type of edible seaweed. I thought they looked really cute. The way they serve it here is pretty straight forward, a plate of sea grapes and a shoyu based dipping sauce, dip and chomp. And of course you have to have a serving of mimigar when you are at mimigar. With a whole menu page dedicated to this delicacy, you can choose how you would like to enjoy it. We chose to cover it with peanut sauce, something that I thought was a little too overwhelming, since I tasted peanut sauce and a hint of crunchy porky.

Mimigar has a quirky vibe but I can’t put my finger down as to where it origins, is it the fact that the cooks have funny hats or that the restaurant is named pig’s ears but whatever it is, I like its quirk.

Singapura oh Singapura

Singapura Seafood Restaurant
Blk 9 Selegie Road
#01-31 Selegie House
Tel: 6336 3255

Cold crabs rock. It is crab au naturel and because of that it is essential that the crab is of the freshest quality. At Singapura restaurant, the flesh is firm and compact, the roe is creamy and the garlicky vinegar chilli sauce is a great complement.

This restaurant has been around for while. Its operations are now run by the second generation but the food still holds on to good traditions. Other than the solid chunks of cold crab, there was more good food that came from.

Unlike the usual prawns rolls that are made from a combination of minced pork and prawns and rolled in bean curd skin, their special prawn rolls were made form whole prawns and deep fried to a crisp. And their pork ribs, tender and sticky sweet are finger licking good should not be missed.

Our attempt at ordering a vegetable dish was derailed when the staff suggested that we tried their baby kalian with pork liver, another deliciously sauced dish that disproportionately had more liver than leaves – so much for trying to order something healthier!

Last up before our noodles was the fish head. The fresh dish head was steamed with a generous handful of garlic and then sauced with tau cheo, very simply put together but very good. To finish it all off, we split a plate of Foochow noodles, after all we are in a Foochow restaurant, and that rounded up dinner.

Ten-Jyaku - to inspire tranquility

Ten-Jyaku Japanese Sushi
Millenia Walk
9 Raffles Boulevard
# 01-11
Tel: 6837-3960

H's Maki

A few weeks ago a friend brought me Ten-Jyaku - a two year old Japanese establishment that has a small sushi bar, serves up specialty hot pots and has these intimating bamboo cage-like sitting areas.

From the outside looking in, I was apprehensive but when I entered I was met by a familiar face that stood behind the sushi bar, this chef that I met a year ago and I felt a little more at ease.

The good people at Ten-Jyaku serve up fabulous aburi sushi. The courses leading up to that also deserve a mention – a refreshing momotaro tomato consommé jelly, oden, pork ‘sushi’ and homemade salmon tofu topped with oyster and miso. The highlight for me, however, was still the sushi or more accurately aburi sushi. The sushi chef pulled out all the stops and served us what he a sushi roll that he named after himself, let’s just call it Chef H’s sushi. It was a tempura prawn and spicy mayo roll that was stopped with tai and more spicy mayo and gently applied the glowing flames to the sushi’s surface. The whole roll was a great pop of flavours and textures. Following which he served us more sushi of salmon belly, yellow tail, snapper and scallop all baptized by the blow torch flame and topped with a combination of their different flavour enhancing garnishes. And to finish it off, we pieces of rice that was topped with an obscene amount of creamy Russian uni that was free from any fishy scent.

Admittedly I would have liked to have a wider range of fish to choose from, but what they might lack in quantity and choice, they make up in quality and fun through their swift reach to their blow torches and their garnish kits.

WFSKFHSH - Fish Steamboat!

Whampoa Food Street Keng Fish Head Steamboat House

556 Balestier Rd
Tel: 9769-4451

116/118 Rangoon Road
Tel: 9023-2854



I was first introduced to this steamboat last year through one of the Makankaki’s session and I instantly fell in love with it.

The past few days of rain have got me craving for some soothing hot soup. My favourite place at the moment to slurp and to warm up is Whampoa Food Street Keng Fish Head Steamboat House aka WFSKFHSH. There they prepare a rustic charcoal heated steamboat filled with fresh fish slices, yam, vegetables and a stock that is unbelievable well flavoured and delicate – we suspect it is a good mix of fish bones and a load of ti po (dried sole fish).