What’s really great about Ember is the large variety of choices in the set lunch menu. Each category easily has more than 5 different items to pick from so you can mix and match to try out before settling on your preferred 3-course combination¹.

The food was undoubtedly good and when I finished the meal, I was already thinking of what to order the next time I was back. However I never did return, being distracted by another place nearby – which I’ll blog about eventually!

And what I had:

Tomato foccacia

Roasted and poached foie gras with mirin and shoyu, shiitake

Crispy duck leg confit with new potatoes, caramelised onions, thyme jus

Chocolate fondant with vanilla ice-cream

And some mint tea to round off a good lunch!

Restaurant Ember
Hotel 1929
50 Keong Siak Road
Singapore 089154
Tel: +65 6347 1928

1. See this post at CrunchyBottoms for more items. ↩

Yu Shang Inspired Salmon Ceviche

Sashimi grade salmon served with a dipping sauce of plum sauce, Chinese peanut brittle candy, lime juice, coriander & sesame seeds.

Spaghetti Carbonara

Sous vide egg, kurobuta bacon and truffle cheese.

Wagyu Tomahawk

Wagyu beef cooked on the bone, approximately 1.5 kg of luxurious wagyu beef seared and slow roasted at 50 °C for 30 hours & served with french fries.

Kuih Balu Trifle

Singapore’s favourite little sponge nuggets soaked in local black coffee & gula melaka syrup. Layered with whipped coconut cream and grated coconut.

Wine Tasting Course

Amadio Grande Reserve Pinot Chardonnay Brut
2006 Riesling Grand Cru, Paul Ginglinger
2006 Syrius “The Successor” Shiraz
Lustau East India Solera Sherry
Señor Lustau Solera Reserva

This small and cosy 18-seater Japanese eatery has been steadily gaining a reputation for having one of the longest reservation lists for a place of its size.

I didn’t think much of it until I actually tried to make a reservation for dinner on the Christmas week in 2012…only to end up getting a slot for yesterday, 4 months later, which of course I took!

The other thing that draws people to Teppei is the fact that their omakase sets, which go for $40, $50, & $60, are extremely value-for-money, going by the variety and number of courses.

Chef Yamashita Teppei is quite the jovial person, and judging by all the blog posts on Teppei out there, I’d say that he probably changes at least 50% of dishes each time you go, with seasonal variations too.

On my visit, I went straight for the $60 omakase and got 19 courses, if you count every single different item as 1 course each.

Some of the interesting dishes I had was the toro hand roll with tempura crisps inside, Japanese goose barnacles, Japanese ice plant, and the stir-fried wagyu slices. But there were also others that I didn’t particularly fancy.

Overall I’d say that Teppei is indeed value-for money, with a nice enough variation in dishes so you probably won’t get bored trying this place a few times.

Definitely give Teppei a try if you want something different, and if you like the experience, be sure to make your reservation for the next visit at the end of the meal because you’ll probably have to wait another 3-4 months to return.

Main seasoning: butter. Rub it all over the chicken, under the skin, and inside the body cavity.

Additional seasoning: Some crushed cloves of garlic and a lemon.

Leave garlic on the roasting tray, shove one half of the lemon inside the chocken’s body and squeeze the juice of the other half all over the chicken. Sprinkle salt, parsley, and thyme.

Roast in oven.

I turned it over to get even roasting all over the chicken. And pretty much that’s all you need to do for a simple but delicious roast chicken!

And of course roast chicken is best paired with some roast potatoes as well!

While many have said that the Wok & Barrel is an expensive place, I do feel that the food is worth the money but it is indeed expensive so I didn’t really visit them as much as I would have liked to.

The chef of the Wok & Barrel – Shen Tan – however did cook up delicious dishes worthy of the new ‘Mod Sin‘¹ term that’s been going around, like their ba chor mee pasta or beef rendang pizza.

And even though they’re no longer in operation, she’s still keeping those creative juices flowing and cooking up dishes like “slow cooked tongue with an Indomie inspired sauce of kicap manis, chilli, onion and garlic powder, lard tossed through prawn flavoured egg noodles“.

In any case, I’m not going to bother writing a review but just going to put up a pictorial of all the food that I’ll be missing!

1. This term is short for ‘Modern Singaporean‘, referring to dishes that use more premium ingredients or cooking methods from other countries to substitute those in our local recipes. ↩

Of course now that I’m older and having sampled a lot more different prawn noodles out there, there’s definitely many variations in the way it’s cooked.

Having accumulated so many prawn heads and shells in the freezer compartment that the plastic bag could no longer fit inside, I decided to try cooking my own prawn noodles using the shells for the stock.

There are a plethora of recipes out there on cooking prawn noodles but I picked this one because it seemed closest to how I imagined the recipe should be, mostly from hearsay. Along with some on-the-fly modifications, of course.

First, gotta brown those pork ribs nicely.

Then the real star of the show, frying all those prawn shells!

I was frying batch by batch…

…but at one point, my wok was nearly full of prawn shells.

After frying all those batches, throw in all the shells and the pork ribs into a stock pot.

Add 5 cups of water (or more if needed), and all the seasonings (ikan bilis, peppercorns, salt, etc)

Simmer for a few hours, until it tastes to desired.

Serve!

So I wasn’t really interested in comparing Shinji to the other establishments such as Aoki, Tatsuya, etc. I had something else in mind – comparing Shinji to Sushi Saito. If you haven’t heard of Saito before, it’s a 3-star Michelin sushi restaurant in Tokyo which I reviewed here.

It might be a bit unfair to compare them like that, but then again Shinji was set up by Kanesaka-san, who runs the 2-star Sushi Kanesaka in Ginza. Surely the idea was to bring some of that quality over here as well, since Shinji is Kanesaka-san’s first venture outside of Japan.

And from what I’ve read¹, it seems like Saito-san was mentored by Kanesaka-san, which owns a stake in Sushi Saito, and they both share the same suppliers. If you read my Sushi Saito review and compare to this one, you’ll also see the strong similarities.

Stepping inside, the ambience really reminded me of the higher-end sushi restaurants in Tokyo; the quiet zen feel of muted soft wooden tones and matte cotton white formed the elegant aesthetic of Shinji.

The service was also excellent; probably the best service I’ve enjoyed locally since eating at Waku Ghin. They gave me a small box to put my bag on so that it wouldn’t touch the floor and even made a mini “cushion” out of napkins for me to put my camera!

The lunch menu of Shinji is very simple as well, they only offer the Setsugetsuka Sushi Course Sets and an Omakase Special. As this was my first time at Shinji, I decided to go with the Hana set, a 9 piece nigiri sushi set.

Appetizer – shredded ginger flowers, seaweed and tuna

Kanpachi (Amberjack)

Chutoro (Fatty tuna belly)

Otoro (Very fatty tuna belly)

Ika (Squid)

Aji (Horse mackerel)

Maguro zuke (Marinated tuna)

Katsuo (Bonito)

Kuruma ebi (Tiger prawn)

Anago (Conger eel)

Tekka maki (Tuna rolls)

Tamago (Egg)

Dessert – pumpkin puree with some red beans at the bottom

The verdict? Well Shinji is probably the best sushi I’ve had in Singapore. The neta was incredibly fresh and the shari was well-made, with a good flavour to it.

However, Shinji’s sushi was nowhere near close to that of Saito’s sushi. There was a distinct difference in the quality and flavours in both the neta and shari, and considering the shari is 80% of the sushi, the difference was made to be even more obvious.

But for all that difference, I’m definitely returning to Shinji again for my sushi fix, because there’s no way I’m paying for a ticket to Tokyo every time I want to eat good sushi. Still, it really did feel for a moment that I was back in Japan…

Shinji by Kanesaka
Raffles Hotel
1 Beach Road, #02-20
Singapore 189673
Tel: +65 6338 6131

1. See sfreelife’s review. ↩

Their brunch menu is quite different from their dinner menu, being small and mostly different from dinner. Most brunch places have a scrambled eggs dish and Artichoke is no exception. It comes with several choices of sides, and one popular one is the sweet glazed bacon chop.

While the scrambled eggs was done decently, I really didn’t like the bacon chop because the one-dimensional sweetness didn’t fit into the rest of the dish and it was boring to eat a large crunchy piece of fat.

The other popular dish is their lamb shakshouka. Now this dish I really liked, very rich and full of flavours. There’s a great mix of different tastes here, from the sweet tomatoes, savoury roast lamb cubes and the sourish labneh. This is the one dish that I’ll keep coming back to brunch at Artichoke for!

Spicy Turkish sujuk sausages – didn’t like the taste of these sausages. In fact I don’t even remember what they tasted like but I do remember I didn’t like the taste.

All in all, I think the only time I’d return to Artichoke is when I’m craving their lamb shakshouka, otherwise I don’t see the rest of their menu as any draw for me. Their dinner menu is a different (and better) story however, and I’ll blog about it…someday.

Artichoke
161 Middle Road
Singapore 188978
Tel: 6336 6949

Considering it’s been a year since I ate at Forlino, I can’t say I remember much about the details on the meal except that it was all generally good, for the price, which was probably lowered for Restaurant Week.

Mystery cheese shavings. Would have preferred something a bit stronger as this was too mild, especially when eaten with the bread.

We were not impressed with the bread service, a bit too touch and chewy for our liking.

Tagliolini with spanner crab, sweet peas and tarragon cream. Probably my favourite dish of the whole RW lunch menu. The flavours of the crab were infused robustly into the sauce but it did get a bit jerlat as the portion was too much.

Crispy duck confit with Vin Santo sauce. Not impressed with this dish, too salty and I’ve had better, like at La Petit Cuisine or The Black Sheep Cafe.

Mediterranean seabass fillet with braised artichoke and apricot sauce. I wasn’t the one who had this but I was informed that it was actually pretty good, probably better than my duck confit.

Amaretti and dark chocolate pudding, vanilla and wild berries compote. Decent but nothing special. The flavours didn’t exactly wow me as a dessert should so it was quite forgettable.

Most of us didn’t even finish this as it was all dough and that’s not really what you’d want to eat at the end of a multicourse meal.

And a cup of mint tea to end off the lunch.

Truth be told, for the same cost I’d rather eat at places like Cugini or Pasta Brava because I seem to prefer the more rustic style for Italian food. And if I were to pay more, I’d just top up even more and go for a much better place.

Forlino

While it opened in 2011 at Queen Street, they moved in mid-2012 to another kopitiam at Holland Drive. In general the food is pretty decent fare, and their menu changes ever so slightly each time I visit them, with the addition or removal of a dish or two.

The taste does tend to be similar even with their new dishes, as the base recipes for their sauces and marinades seem to be the same so I only visit once every now and then. Besides, their food can get rather salty after a while too.

Bread platter (no longer on menu)

Soup of the day

Mushroom Pasta

Angus steak

Foie gras salad

Chicken roulade

Duck confit salad

Smoked duck breast salad

Australian Barramundi

Beef onglet