So long, for now

Pavilion Restaurant
20 Craig Road
#01-02, Craig Place
Tel: +65 6557 2820

There are very few things I am willing to wake up early on Sunday mornings for. One of them is the practice of yum cha – going to restaurants and eating dim sum. I absolutely love doing this. Sometimes it seems that weekends wind up being busier than weekdays are – with one commitment after the other. Going for a nice leisurely dim sum brunch relaxes the mind and body like nothing else, and it is one of my favourite activities.

I got back from Sri Lanka Sunday morning at 8am after a red-eye, and any other reasonable person would have headed straight home for a deserved forty (or eighty) winks. But Victor had organised a brunch – to be his farewell before he leaves for Taiwan for a year – and it was one I could not miss. I headed home to shower and managed to close my eyes for an hour or so before it was time to head out again.

(Besides, he was buying, and I am cheap like that.)

Victor is one of my trusted foodie friends and eating kakis, and can always be counted on for good judgment when it comes to all things gastronomic. Our tastes are also quite similar in that we have an unabashed love of hawker food, and when it comes to restaurant dining we tend to prefer classical Chinese cuisine, with its soups and roasted meats. His departure may have meant just one less person in my network of scouts, but one who was a significant contributor. His presence will be missed.

He deferred to me for a choice of restaurant, and I suggested Pavilion. I had heard about it a little while ago from an acquaintance – and had wanted to wait till it had been open more than four or five months before trying it. Victor’s farewell came at just about the right time, and he was gracious enough to acquiesce to the suggestion – so off we were!

Pavilion is situated in an area with quite a bit of character, the Duxton/Keong Saik area, just a few doors down from Pasta Brava. It is pretty interesting coming here for dim sum on a Sunday because nothing else in the area – littered with bars and shady KTV pubs – is open at the time. Add that to the fact that it is smack on the fringes of the Central Business District – desolated on Sundays – and you have a restaurant that is bathed in an eerie calm as we approach it.


The inside was just as empty as the streets outside were, and for a minute we did a double-take, wondering if we were at the right place. But the restaurant soon filled up, and through our meal we saw a procession of families, groups of foodie friends – young and old alike – come and go. The clientele was decidedly eclectic, and it had the feel of a restaurant that had not come into its own yet, still finding its own gaggle of regulars.

The food surprised and spluttered in equal measure, alternating between the sublime and the shoddy. We started out really strong, with a cold dish of homemade beancurd with red cherry shrimp and century egg completely knocking me off my feet. I didn’t bother taking a photo of this since it was not much to look at, but one taste and I was reminded not to judge a book by its cover. The beancurd was soft and silky, and topped with a sauce made from century egg – so imagine white slabs covered in a gooey greenish-brown sauce. It didn’t look very appetising, but it was quite stellar.


Compared to the version at Victoria Peak, the siu yoke was at least cubed in sizeable portions, and paired with a decent Dijon. We also had a soup of crab meat and fish maw, which was very well executed. I don’t know why, and it may be just me, but restaurants never put enough pepper and vinegar in their soups. You may think it’s a personal taste thing, but I have never seen anyone drink soup from a Chinese restaurant without adding to taste. We all do it. It’s never seasoned enough when it comes out of the kitchen. Why wouldn’t chefs just adjust, and season the soups a little more? Perhaps it has now become a psychological mind-game, and chefs deliberately under-season the soups because they know diners will adjust it themselves anyway.



The dim sum dishes that we ordered were very impressive. I have to say Pavilion goes all out for some of these. Their siew mai was larger than any other version I’ve seen, and had large pieces of scallop in them – an appreciated twist. In contrast, the liu sha bao was tiny – the size of a golf ball – and despite the custard not being runny enough for my liking, was a very creditable effort. The deep fried spring rolls tasted rather ordinary, but at least didn’t taste oily or greasy.



It is right about here that the meal went downhill. We had ordered a set menu – at $78++ a very reasonably priced dim sum set menu for 4 – and rounding out the dim sum was a trio of “normal” dishes. The steamed kailan with beancurd and mei cai (preserved vegetables) was just passable, saved by the burst of umami that the mei cai gave the dish. The belly-rib “Zheng Jiang” style was battered and deep fried well, but somehow the taste just didn’t agree with me. This could be just a personal thing, for Daselin had many good things to say about the dish.



But what was severely disappointing was the wok-fried hor fun with pork and chye poh. Dry, dreary in colour, and lacking in wok hei, it really almost felt like an amateur had cooked it. There was nothing bringing together the dish, no harmony of flavours, no cohesion. By themselves, these are very cheap ingredients – rice flour noodles, strips of pork, and chye poh – and it really felt like it. I could only take two spoonfuls before I had to push the bowl away. Victor polished his bowl and joked that he didn’t like to waste food, but shook his head in disgust when I offered him the rest of my bowl to finish off.

The hor fun reinforced my innate distrust of set menus. Very often, restaurants will offer their star dishes as part of a set menu, but the line-up will invariably be rounded out with other disappointing dishes, or dishes on which they make the highest margins. At Chinese restaurants, you are almost always better off ordering a la carte.

Dessert was similarly uninspiring – two servings of tofu ice cream topped with a sesame and a lychee syrup. This place seems to really like the soybean, by the way.

Despite all that, I actually rather liked Pavilion. It is nice and cosy, and that first beancurd dish won them enough brownie points to forgive one or two misses. (Not the hor fun though, nothing can excuse that.) The service staff was efficient and attentive, and kind enough to let us stay long after the lunch hours – filling our teacups without asking.

So it is goodbye for now for Victor, and as we eventually trudged off from the restaurant there was a little sadness lingering. But we took comfort in two things: knowing that he would be back, and the fact that he could unearth more good eats in Taiwan. Consider this his overseas scouting mission, then!

Floored by fruit

One of the biggest drags for serious foodies in Singapore is the lack of fresh produce. Singapore grows less than 5% of the food it consumes, and land is so scarce that it is typically allocated to other uses than food production. Even though the agricultural parts of Malaysia may only be a few hours' drive away, something like a Blue Hill would still be next to impossible here.

I was reminded of this during a recent trip to Sri Lanka, where I was served a piece of papaya as part of breakfast. The papaya did not look all that appetising: veiny and overripe in parts while underripe in others, and I almost pushed the plate aside before something in me clicked. It may be the guilt from having too little fibre in my diet, but something made me pick up that spoon and carve myself a bite of that papaya.


Boy am I glad I did, because it was juicy, succulent and sweet beyond belief. I realised just how much eating fruit in Singapore had dulled me to the heights that fresh fruit can scale. The fruit we get in Singapore is almost always grown elsewhere, picked before it is ripe and sprayed with chemicals to retard ripening and kill pests, before it is transported here. I had forgotten just how sweet and wonderful a piece of fruit, picked when ripe and eaten within a day or two – or even hours – could be. This piece of papaya was a timely reminder.

The wisdom of crowds

Two Chefs
Blk 116 Commonwealth Crescent #01-129
Tel: +65 6472 5361

These days, the ease of expressing one’s opinion via a variety of media online has made the views of crowds instantly accessible. There is just one thing wrong with this: the crowds may not always be right. There is a site called hungrygowhere.com which serves as an aggregator of reviews on eating places in Singapore. Now, there are many good things about this site which I like. It is very comprehensive, and can normally be counted on to provide good, up-to-date information on all manner of establishments – from the one-man-operated kiosks to the hundred-seater banquet halls. I have to say that I post my reviews there sometimes (I want to be heard too you know, I believe I am entitled to that conceit). Yet I have found myself disagreeing many times with the collective opinions of certain places, and so when push comes to shove I am inclined not to trust this site.

I still believe in the masses’ general tendency towards accuracy – as in, the collective opinion more often than not points in the right direction, good or bad. But it is a blunt instrument, and cannot provide the level of precision serious foodies need. There is a world of difference between great and good, between divine and satisfactory, and that precision is lost when truly discerning opinions get mixed in with a whole bunch of others that are not so.

One of the dangers of this “crowdsourcing” is the tendency for aggregation to amplify certain attributes. It is human nature to want to know the opinion of others, and human nature for those opinions to subtly influence our own. If we read other reviews that echo our own opinions, we subliminally reinforce, and in some cases intensify, our own impressions of the place. In that way, what was maybe a decent-to-good, two-star restaurant at best, suddenly gets elevated to a three-star.

But as the saying goes, two heads are better than one, and that may be the rationale behind this stalwart of the tze char scene in Singapore. Two Chefs is actually opened by a pair of brothers, who have come together to bring you this no-frills, salt-of-the-earth eating place in the Commonwealth area. So far, and to my knowledge at least, they have not gone the way of countless other family businesses or hawker dynasties, and the two brothers look to be doing quite well together. I’ve heard that lines start forming by 6pm for dinner, and the wait for a place can hit the 45-minute or 1-hour mark. For good, simple, tze char comfort food – that is a long wait.

Two Chefs is an undisputed media and blogosphere darling. Almost every online review of it is generous to a fault, and the place was lauded by the Sunday Times as one of the best tze char places in Singapore. I rarely venture out of the East for food, so until recently had not had the good fortune to try it. But it was recently suggested as a venue for a midweek get-together, and despite there being other, more familiar names tossed in the hat – I plumped for this one just to check it out.

I was quite disappointed, for the food was very average. The one dish that everyone goes there for is the butter pork ribs, which are cutlets of pork breaded and deep-fried, and then coated with a powdery mixture that looks like grated parmesan cheese but is actually a secret formulation made from butter and sugar. This was not bad, I have to say, for the meat was tender and moist, and the buttery powder neither overly sweet nor cloying. But while it won high marks from me for innovation, it didn’t quite deserve the unadulterated adulation of the blogging community.

Other dishes were downright disappointing. The kailan hadn’t been blanched before wok-frying, and so retained a bitter pang. The tofu with golden mushroom wasn’t top-grade tofu, and the sauce tasted a little off. The drunken “dang gui” prawns were large and succulent, granted, but the Shaoxing broth it was in lacked oomph, and could perhaps have been rounded out with a fuller ingredient base.

We were so unimpressed by the quality (and quantity) of the food that we had to order a couple more dishes. To satisfy someone’s craving we got another treatment of pork ribs – this time a coffee pork ribs which was surprisingly good. But the three-egg vegetables that we got on the waitress’ recommendation only served to confirm that either this place was terrible, or the kitchen was having an off day. There is an art to cooking vegetables, for most leafy greens have little, or in some cases even unpleasant, flavour. Many cooks – in addition to their other seasonings – typically add a little sugar to the wok as the vegetables are cooking, which helps them to caramelize and adds both flavour and texture. This did not seem to have been done for the three-egg vegetables.

I do have to mention that the food came unbelievably fast. It felt as though we had only just finished ordering when the first dish came out the pass and was placed on our table. My hypothesis is that the kitchen – used to dealing with a full house on weekends – is such a well-oiled machine that cooking for a crowd of 60-or-70-percent capacity is a piece of cake for them. If that is true, then it is cause for admiration.

I really wanted to like this place. The heartland location, the utilitarian setup. The lack of pretensions, the honest fare. These are all good things, and true things. I tried to disassociate my appreciation of the place from what I had heard about it, to ensure objectivity and while true objectivity is perhaps impossible, I honestly did not think this place was all that great. It is not that it is bad, and I would be happy to go back there again since it is relatively affordable. But it is just not praise-worthy. I am sorry to say, the wisdom of the masses got it wrong on this one.

Easy peasy Japanesy

If there is one thing the Japanese are impossibly good at, it is exporting their food. Japanese, I believe, is as ubiquitous around the world as Italian or French cuisine – and the words “sushi” or “ramen” have become as well-known as “pasta”, or “confit”. The assault takes place on many fronts – first it comes in the form of products: Japanese crackers, or instant ramen, etc. Then the food service wave starts – first the “locally-adapted” restaurants start popping up. At the onset these are typically modified to suit the local palate, and will make concessions in taste or any other component to secure a local following. At the same time, if there are any Japanese expatriates at all in the area, you’ll also see the smaller, sole-proprietor shops popping up – with food that is typically more authentic – to cater to the Japanese diaspora. But once Japanese cuisine has entered the consciousness of the locals, the mainstream quest for authenticity starts. At this point the Japanese chains come in, and since they already have the brand equity they can afford to insist on product quality and consistency of the experience they sell. So you’ll see ramen chains abroad insisting on bringing the noodles, or even other ingredients, in from Japan; and refusing to use local substitutes. More Japanese food products get imported, people get more and more exposed to Japanese food, they get more and more curious about it, and it becomes a virtuous cycle.

It is interesting to appreciate this phenomenon in Singapore – from the point of view of someone who was away for a long time. To me, it seems that there are thousands more Japanese restaurants in Singapore these days as compared to before I left for the States. And the palate of Singaporeans is changing. There has always been a local fascination with Japanese food – and indeed, all things Japanese – aided no doubt by that bastion of television programming, Japan Hour. But while before, that fascination stemmed from a curiosity for the foreign and exotic, these days there is a subtle shift beginning. Locals no longer view Japanese as an exotic “other” but increasingly accept it as part and parcel of the local dining scene. How you can tell this is very simple. When you are planning a dinner out for a sizeable group, it is invariably difficult to pick a cuisine, much less a restaurant, that satisfies everyone. Someone might not like the spice of Indian food, for example. Or another might shun the carbo-rich Italian diet. Others view even more exotic cuisines like Mediterranean or Greek with a healthy dollop of mistrust. Yet almost nobody will complain when you suggest Japanese – and while that may be a result of this wonderfully diverse and amazingly agreeable cuisine, it is also testament to how assimilated it has become.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with all of this, of course, and I will be the first to raise my hand and say that I am quite the fool for Japanese myself. This past week I went on a bender of sorts – four days of Japanese food in a row – and lived to tell the tale.

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Tuesday – Aoba Hokkaido Ramen
2 Orchard Turn
#B3-25 ION Orchard
Te: +65 6509 9394

Nowhere is this proliferation of Japanese cuisine more evident than in the spread of ramen. If you mentioned ramen to anyone ten years ago, they’d probably be able to tell you what they knew – that it was noodles in broth, typically served with a slice of belly pork and an egg, and sometimes topped with seaweed or other garnishing. Some might even be able to describe that famous scene in the movie ‘Tampopo’. But these days, mention ramen to the man on the street and more likely than not he or she will be able to expound on the various types of broth – shio, shoyu, miso or tonkotsu – and the various regional noodle variants. He or she will be able to tell you that tonkotsu broth is made at a rolling boil for up to 10 hours or more, because the vigorous boil helps to emulsify the fat and water, creating an ultra-tasty, milky-looking broth. Knowledge of ramen has increased exponentially, as has the availability of different styles in Singapore.

Aoba is a franchise from the northern island of Hokkaido, supposedly where ramen is most revered. I believe this is due to the suitability of a hot bowl of noodles and broth to the harsh winters there. They have opened a couple of franchises here in Singapore – one of them at Ion Orchard – and after seeing the queue at Watami we decided to come here instead.

There are people who may not understand what all the fuss about ramen is. After all – it is just noodles in broth. These are the people that do not truly understand the Japanese approach to food and life. To the Japanese, simplicity is sacred, and perfection is a goal to be accomplished at all costs. When the Japanese put out a product, every single component of that product must be perfect. The Japanese do not subscribe to the 80/20 rule. They do not cut corners. To them, everything is a craft, and mastery of that craft is the highest ideal. Each product that they put out should be a work of art – so even if they are doing something simple, they do it well and they do it with pride. That is why ramen holds so much allure to the Japanese. It is simple, sure, but to take something simple and make it into a life-changing experience is anything but. And to be able to replicate that process over and over again is also far from simple. That is what the Japanese live for, and that is why they are obsessed with ramen.

By those lofty standards, Aoba falls a little short. I had the Shoyu ramen and while the broth had good flavour – the chashu was limp and uninspiring. The noodles were good taste-wise but lacked a little springiness. I did like the egg though – it had that mushy quality of the not-quite-hard-boiled eggs you typically get in ramen. As an overall product the ramen was above average, but a long way short of life-changing.

Wednesday – Itacho Sushi
2 Orchard Turn
#B2-18 ION Orchard
Tel: +65 6509 8911

By some quirk of fate, I found myself back at Ion Orchard the next day, and we decided on sushi this time. What’s odd about Itacho is that it is not a Japanese franchise, but instead originated in Hong Kong. The chain has since expanded to China, Taiwan and Singapore (they probably know better than to enter the Japanese market). Itacho @ Ion exhibits many of what is bad about chain restaurants – cookie-cutter décor being one of them – and some other faults not specific to chain restaurants. In an effort to maximize revenue, tables are jam-packed into the restaurant space – at times I almost felt as though the table next to us was participating in our conversation. Service is rushed and impersonal – understandably given the crowds and the turnover during the dinner rush – and when I cracked a joke to our waitress she seemed a little taken aback and did not know how to respond.

But it also exhibits what is so good about chain restaurants. They clearly have their processes in place – and have a very interesting cha chaan teng style of noting the table’s orders on a mini clipboard, which is kept on the back of one of the chairs at the table. More importantly, they must have great purchasing power, for their product is pitched at a very affordable price given its quality. The sushi is fresh enough, the quality surprisingly good, and each piece goes for around $2 or $3. It is not cheap, seeing as how I need about 20 of the little buggers to feel full, and some of the more expensive pieces can go up to $7 or more; but it is not ridiculous either. I’m not sure how they pull this off – especially since they only have the one Singapore outlet (for now), so there are less economies of scale compared to their network in Hong Kong.

Itacho smartly stays away from sashimi because the truly transcendent sashimi demands absolute freshness, which is often difficult and expensive. The focus here is on sushi, and the results of that focus are clear to see. The sushi with cooked seafood at Itacho is actually very good – what they do is they roast the piece of seafood gently so that only one side is cooked through, and when you do eat the piece of sushi you get the contrasting textures of cooked and raw at the same time. Overall the restaurant’s offering is far from exquisite stuff, and it is clearly a product for the masses. But the people at Itacho do not see the need to dumb down that product. A restaurant with lesser ambition would limit the menu to the cheaper products, or those easy to source, and wind up with the same six types of sushi you could get anywhere else. But Itacho understands that the average consumer demands much more than that. That’s why the wagyu beef is on the menu. That’s why you can get three grades of fatty salmon – with more or less tendon. Itacho cuts the right corners in order to strike a good balance between quality and cost, and the result is an impressive selection of decent sushi at affordable prices.

Thursday – Saboten
9 Raffles Boulevard
#P3-01 Parco Marina Bay, Millenia Walk
Tel: +65 6333 3432

Laura had told me earlier about this hidden enclave of Japanese restaurants at Parco Millenia Walk, and I had been meaning to try it out. So when the crowd consensus – not for the first time – fell to Japanese, I suggested going to this place to check it out. It is really hidden away, on the third floor of the department store, and since the shopping crowd had thinned by the time we got there, it was eerily quiet. But it gave us a chance to view the several Japanese restaurants – and one lone Italian place. Each of them had a different focus – there was a sushi place, two ramen places and of course, Saboten, which specializes in tonkatsu.

On hindsight I felt this was the standout meal of the week. Saboten does one thing and does it very well. The panko was crispy and flavourful, and the pork cutlet inside tender and juicy. The other breaded meats were uniformly excellent. You could gripe about the miso soup (standard-issue) or the rice (plain, when I expected vinegared) but both of those items are free flow, so it is hard to gripe about them.

But the most enjoyable thing about Saboten is the hand-chopped cabbage that they serve before the meal. They provide two dressings to eat the cabbage with – one a yuzu-flavoured soy sauce, and the other a sesame oil vinaigrette – the latter of which was quite amazing. ZJ commented that she had never been so eager to eat cabbage, and it was a sentiment echoed by everyone at the table.

What I also liked about Saboten was its attention to the little things. The salad bowls that they gave us came chilled. The tonkatsu came on a mini-grill, which meant that any residual oil would drip onto the plate below rather than cling to the pieces of meat. (For the record the tonkatsu at Saboten wasn’t very oily in the first place.) It’s the little things that separate the great from the good, and it was pleasing to see a restaurant take the time to give all things their due.

Friday – Waraku
6 Eu Tong Sen Street
#03-89/97/98 The Central @ Clarke Quay
Tel: +65 6327 8860

There are three so-called enclaves of Japanese food in Singapore that I can think of. First and foremost is the Cuppage Plaza area – the original Japanese expatriate hangout and the most authentic. Then you have the Parco Millenia Walk space where Saboten is. Finally you have the Central, right next to Clarke Quay. Here you have the generalist chain restaurants Ma Maison, Sun With Moon, Waraku and the ramen-yas Marutama and Santouka.

The Japanese chain restaurants all have the same formula: a little bit of everything food-wise, oversized bowls, glitzy menus with many photos and generally a greater emphasis on presentation. You’re not really going to these places for the quality, so it’s really a crapshoot picking between them. Waraku has booths with a nice quayside view, so that was where we headed. (Unfortunately the group wound up too big to sit at the booths, so we wound up without a view after all.)

It was a good thing I had already eaten ramen, sushi and tonkatsu earlier in the week because these aren’t very good at Waraku. I had a curry chicken udon which, I have to say, made me very happy. Unfortunately nothing else I tasted that night was impressive, or even any good. Michelle’s tuna tartare came smothered in an overly salty soy sauce, which destroyed the dish. The smoked salmon, avocado and asparagus roll had too little avocado, and the salmon wasn’t smoked, but raw. The soft-shell crab roll came in a tamago wrap which was rubbery to the bite. The agedashi tofu was bland and uninspiring. After a while I gave up trying to sample other people’s food. What was the point? It was all bad. I must have lucked out with the only decent dish on the menu.

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If there was one thing consistent about the Japanese places that I went to this week, it was that they were all doing brisk business. Singaporeans, it seems, just cannot get enough of Japanese food. It is all very well and good, but the day after my Japanese bender I ate some good old mee pok tar, and realized that when the rubber meets the road I would really rather eat Singaporean hawker food. Call me crazy, but it looks like I won't be moving to Japan anytime soon.