Fourth day food round-up

I'm trying to return the focus to eating now.  I thought I did a lot again today but it still only adds up to 3 meals worth.  Considering the 10+ miles I walked today, I should have been able to do better.

Went back to hawker food court across from the hotel to try some more of the classic street dishes.  I started with rojak, a salad of sorts with pretty random ingredients, including pineapple, cucumber, jicama, and fried tofu in a sweet shrimp paste sauce with crushed peanuts.  It was ok, but I didn't feel like all the ingredients actually went together, and it was too heavy on the sauce.

Second course was wanton mee, noodles with char siu pork and wantons.  A great dish, but I think the one I got was not one of the better ones, so I think I'll try again.  And topped it off with fresh sugarcane juice, quite satisfying.  I got it in China too and it was kind of bland, but the one here was sweet and flavorful.

After walking around the downtown area for a while to get some pictures now that the haze is starting to clear, I headed out to the suburbs along East Coast Road.  There's sections that are really cool, blocks and blocks of nearly nonstop restaurants and food shops, catering to locals, very reminiscent of Tokyo. First stop, 328 Katong Laksa for, well, laksa, a spicy coconut-milk-based noodle soup with shrimp and clams.  Served instantly and gruffly in a run-down shop, as all good noodle soup should be.

I then stumbled across a local-looking ice cream shop, and was pleased to discover they offered both soursop ice cream as well as "kaya toast" ice cream, a coconut base with pieces of toast.  Sadly the kaya toast one wasn't particularly flavorful, so I went with soursop, which tasted good but the ice cream quality was poor and gummy.

Then it was on to the East Coast Seafood Centre, a collection of restaurants at East Coast Park right on the southeast coast several miles from downtown, hard to get to but well worth the trek.  It was time to try the famed chili crab.  Some of my dining companions last night, both expats, had advised me that I should not wait until the last day to do the chili crab, as eating it soon before flying could pose a risk to one's well-being.  I was advised to try No Signboard Seafood for a high quality preparation.  They have several locations around town, and apparently the service varies quite a bit, but once there I can't imagine wanting to go anywhere else besides East Coast for this, as the setting is terrific.  You sit outside among a grassy park alongside the water and stare at the ships anchored just offshore and see the planes take off from Changi.

I ordered the chili crab (using a house Sri Lankan crab, as opposed to an Australian or Alaskan crab, which were obscenely expensive, ~S$40/kg vs S$200/kg), as well as fried butter prawns.  The crab was good, I enjoyed it, but honestly I don't get what all the fuss is about.  This is mainly because I don't get what the fuss about crab is in general.  I don't see why I should pay a bunch of money to work hard and make a mess picking out a very small amount of meat from the severed limbs of an ugly creature.  If it's expensive, shouldn't it be because somebody else did all the hard work?  It was a good meaty crab in a tasty sweet and spicy chili sauce, but I can hardly say it's worth the S$77 they charged me for it (they also have the nerve to charge you $1 for the wet-nap in your place setting, but that's unfortunately pretty common here).

Then I walked along the water to the neighboring East Coast Lagoon Food Centre, an open-air hawker food court, interestingly large and busy despite East Coast Park being far from everything and hard to get to.  But this place is incredible.  It's huge, very crowded, has tons of interesting stalls, and is set right on the beach.  This is kind of the ultimate night market for food.  It also specializes in satay, with skewers going for 60 cents a piece (10 skewers minimum), grilled out in front of the stalls.  I got an order to go, which comes conveniently with little sealed bags of satay sauce and vegetables, and headed for a beachfront bench to chow down.  Seriously delicious, and a great way to fill up after seafood.

Rojak.

Fresh squeezed sugarcane juice.

Wanton mee.

Laksa.

Soursop ice cream.

Fried butter prawns.

The famous chili crab.

Dinner with a view.

The view from East Coast Seafood Centre after sunset. 

East Coast Lagoon Food Centre.

Satay stand.

Satay to-go, picnic-style.

Satay with a view.

Day three food round-up

There's a decently well-regarded dim sum place a block from hotel called, appropriately, Yum Cha, so I started there.  Dim sum for one person is a bit of a challenge, you can't get the diversity of dishes, so the challenge is to fend off the cart ladies and focus only on new and unusual dishes.  My haul was, pan-fried prawn buns, chive dumplings, prawn and mango fried rolls, radish toast, xiao long bao (better actually than the mall Din Tai Fung ones from day one), and coconut balls, which seem to be the dim sum take on a macaroon, but soft.

Then it's back over to the hawker food court to try to get soursop juice.  I first find a place that has "soursop drink", which tastes poor and I think is simply a canned beverage poured over ice with soursop pulp added after.  Other stands offer "fresh soursop juice" which is the real deal and awesome.

Later it's a pre-dinner snack of char kway teow, which are flat rice noodles stir fried with cockles, lard pieces, Chinese sausage, egg, and bean sprouts.  It's pretty much Singaporean pad see ew, so it's completely awesome, and I'm hooked.  And for good measure I add to that a soursop and kiwi shake, because how often do you get to order soursop.  On my way out, I see a stall with nothing but a wok and two people preparing some kind of deep-fried dough.  I'm intrigued by any place that only sells one thing as that tends to mean it's interesting, so I get an order of these, which I think are some kind of doughnut filled with a bean paste and coated in sesame seeds and sugar.

In another serendipitous happening in this unplanned trip, it turns out my friend's friend is in Singapore as part of an extended trip motivated by a wedding.  So I met up with her and her family for drinks and dinner, the Singaporean take on Italian food, with a solid lobster pasta.

Pan-fried prawn buns.

Chive dumplings.

Radish toast.

Xiao long bao.

Prawn and mango fried roll.

Soft coconut balls.

Yum Cha restaurant.

Fresh soursop juice.

Char kway teow.

Soursop and kiwi shake.

Sesame doughnuts.

S.E.A. Aquarium

My main reason for going to Sentosa was to check out the Southeast Asia Aquarium, which claims to be the world's largest (I think this is computed by cumulative tank volume).  Also in true Disney fashion, you're faced with a queue to buy an expensive ticket, a queue to enter the outer museum area, and then a particularly long queue to enter the aquarium itself.

Overall I enjoyed the aquarium, lots of colorful tropical fish, and several sections with very large viewing walls which provide a nice opportunity to gaze for a while.  There was not a large diversity of sea life presented though, even though the place is huge it shows little besides tropical fish and dolphins, but fortunately that made it fast to get through.  The combination of intense crowds, small children, a culture that insists on photographing everything, and confined spaces does not make for relaxation :)

Sentosa

Sentosa is Singapore's other new massive integrated property development besides the Marina Bay Sands, on a largely man-made island just south of the central part of the city.  You can imagine it like a Disney-style resort, family-friendly with multiple hotels, beaches, a theme park (Universal Studios), a water park, an aquarium, and a whole lot more, plus a casino.  I mainly wanted to see the aquarium, since it claims to be the world's largest, and then at least wanted to see what the rest of the place was actually like.

There are three ways to get there, and in the true spirit of Disney, none of them require any exertion.  You can take a cable car from the mall across the water, you can take the monorail from the same mall, or you can walk across the boardwalk that crosses the strait that separates the island, but don't worry, the boardwalk has people-movers so you don't actually have to "walk".  Also almost anywhere on the island that has a hill is accompanied by an outdoor escalator. They've learned so much from us.

The place is impressive for its scale. And it's cool that its self-contained, so once you're on the island, all transit is free, for example.  It's tacky masquerading as classy, full of overpriced chain restaurants and faux-Caribbean music, and yet they wouldn't even let me check out the casino because I was wearing flip-flops.  But they've attracted fine dining as well, among the offerings are both a Joel Robuchon and L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in the weirdest setting imaginable, with L'Atelier offering menus going up to a whopping $455 SGD for the full dinner tasting.

The man-made beaches are weird, they appear nice enough, though perfectly rounded and sloped, but they face south into Singapore's surrounding waters, which have literally thousands of ships anchored due to Singapore's incredibly busy port, which makes for both an odd view and murky waters.

I left via the cable car to get views of Sentosa and the Port of Singapore, and because the cable car has a second station on the mainland at Mt Faber, a tall hill in the southern part of the city with striking views and is a milestone on the multi-mile Southern Ridges Walk.

Second day food round-up

Not as many places today, nor were they as good.  The day started off with Iggy's, so I wasn't really hungry the rest of the day and so didn't accomplish that much.

My afternoon snack was chapati with mutton curry and hot chai from Azmi Chapati, which was quite delicious, and worth it for the experience, since that place is a kick and right out of a different era.  I then ventured a few blocks to 320 Below Nitro Cream Cafe, a highly regarded dessert shop that flash-freezes your ice cream using liquid nitrogen, but it was completely closed without explanation.  I didn't feel that bad though (other than wanting something cold), Smitten in San Francisco does the same thing, and to me it's just a gimmick, the ice cream is not better for having been freshly frozen, and it's just more expensive and prevents you from doing tastings.

For a late dinner I went to check out hawker offerings at the Tiong Bahru market, though sadly the majority of the stalls had already closed even though it was only 8:30pm, so the pickings were slimmer.  Nevertheless, I finally got to try a carrot cake (a cake made from daikon and rice flour stir-fried with egg and other goodness), as well as mediocre duck noodles.  But a banana shake hit the spot, though after I had already bought it I discovered a place that sells soursop juice, which if you haven't tried before, is among the greatest liquids on the earth.  So that will be top priority tomorrow.

Chapati with keema (mutton curry).

Azmi Chapatis.

Duck noodles at Tiong Bahru market.

Carrot cake.

Banana shake.

The pros and cons of a toxic haze

Today's haze was the worst in the entire history of Singapore.  They have something called the PSI index, where 100 is considered bad, and the previous record high was 226.  Today it hit 401.  It was difficult to see down the street.  My first hotel room smelled like a forest fire.

In addition to ruining a lot of my pictures, a lot of outdoor activites were being canceled, which I discovere the hard way.  After missing out on seeing horse racing in Hong Kong, I was pleased to discover that they do Friday night races here that I'd be able to check out.  So I rode the MRT nearly an hour to the Singapore Turf Club to check out the action, only to find out that due to the haze all races had been canceled, and they were simply showing a video of races in Europe and elsewhere.  So I snapped a few photos o the empty facility and headed back into town.

But on the plus side, when I tried to go to 1-Altitude, the rooftop bar on the highest building in Singapore, I was pleased to find that they had stopped charging their cover, on account of the poor conditions.  Fortunately the smog situation had improved by the evening, so I even wound up with a few reasonable pictures of the skyline.

Bettors awaiting the start of the next European horse race.

Empty seats in the lower grandstand at the Singapore Turf Club.

A Friday night is typically packed but the viewing area was nearly abandoned due the canceled races.

View from the 63rd floor 1-Altitude rooftop bar atop One Raffles Place.

Central bar at 1-Altitude.  Really not great other than the view.

Downtown Singapore skyline.