This is seriously crazy.

One night, the Goonfather had a sudden craving for french fries with ketchup, and he kept talking about it until I was dying to eat french fries with ketchup, too.

Idiot.

So we went to Billy Bombers for dinner. (Mr B doesn’t have the best fries, but he has killer onion rings and killer burgers and killer milk shakes.)

We ordered a basket of fries and a bowl of onion rings to start off with. We considered sharing a burger or a plate of honey stung fried chicken (my favourite), but we remembered that the fries and onion rings are huge, so we told our waitress we’d think about the main course later.

The onion rings came first.

Beautiful, succulent, golden brown onion rings!

And then the fries.

Thick, crunchy, steamy hot french fries!

With a huge glob of tangy tomato ketchup.

What more could you possibly need at your dinner table??

Maybe a tall glass of creamy vanilla milkshake

Maybe I should stop doing that because I’m sounding like a TV commercial.

But that was some dinner.

The french fries in Billy Bombers are very long and thick. It takes so many bites to finish a stick, especially when its steaming hot.

I prefer smaller ones.

Not like the gimpy McDonald’s type, but something in between, I guess.

We started feeling full halfway through our meal.

Which is ridiculous considering that these were only sides and normal people are expected to finish these and have a main course.

As a side note, while french fries taste sublime with ketchup, onion rings must go with chilli sauce. The Goonfather didn’t believe me until he tried it for himself.

At nearly the end of our meal, when we had a single fry and two onion rings left, the Goonfather made this.

Don’t look at me. I had no part in this.

I asked him to stop playing with our food, then I ate up the leftovers.

And then we were too full to eat anything else. What a super unhealthy dinner!! (Like we care.)

Here’s the bill, receipt, whatever you wanna call it.

Freaking expensive for a fries and onion rings dinner!!

LOL.

I think the Goonfather and I are really bad influences on each other.

Survey: What sauce do you like your fries with? I think ketchup is great, but I also like fries with chilli sauce or vanilla ice cream. They’re all so good it’s always so hard to decide!

Damn, now I’m craving fries again.

Categories: Food Files
34 Comments »

When I blogged about curry seafood noodles last year, many people asked me for the address or directions to get there.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the info then, but now I’ve got it!

You know, I’ve asked around my Malaysian friends. And it turns out it’s one of those places, no one knows what the restaurant is called, no one knows the street name, no one knows how to give directions there. But everyone knows about it and how to get there on their own!

Maybe it’s just a conspiracy to keep people from thronging to the place and pushing prices up. Hahaha.

But I shall be kind (or inconsiderate, depending on how you look at it) and reveal it today!

The outlet is called Restoran Yu Ai. It may be called a restaurant but it looks more like a dingy roadside stall which offers only one food item.

Actually, once you know the name of the restaurant, you can google it. It’s out there, lol, and not really secret.

It’s located on Jalan Segambut Utara.

I took a picture of the street sign but I took the wrong one (because it was drizzling and I didn’t want to linger around outdoors for too long)! Haha. But this will work, because the restaurant is only about 30 metres from this corner. (And I’ll post a map and the full address at the end of this entry.)

We usually park behind the restaurant, where there are outdoor seats in the carpark.

I prefer to sit inside (upstairs) because it’s cleaner and more spacious. I mean the tables aren’t crammed together like you see here.

If you sit outside, you’re sitting beside this:

But then, people don’t seem to mind. This place is packed every time I go there.

The seafood noodles come in different flavoured soups — clear, curry and tom yam.

The smell of tom yam is the most prominent when you walk into the restaurant. It smells really really good and I always have half a mind to order it. But I’ve been there three times and three times I’ve ordered curry because it’s the best!

The Goonfather also likes the clear version. I hate it because the taste of seafood is so strong it’s almost raw.

There you have it. Please don’t go too often because I don’t want a bowl of noodles to cost $20 the next time I go there! Haha. Each bowl costs RM14 right now, which is S$6 or US$4.40. My KL friend says the price keeps going up.

Oh, and if you’ve tried the tom yam before, please tell me whether it’s good!

Restoran Yu Ai (Seafood Noodles)
42 Jalan Segambut Utara
Segambut, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia

Map taken from here.

Categories: Food Files
15 Comments »

At the risk of receiving death threats and suffering grievous bodily harm, I am going to write another food post.

Well, a girl’s gotta eat, despite what any of you will say.

Justyn used to accuse me of eating rabbit food. (The first time I was at a photoshoot with him, I brought granola bars for snacking on, so I became known as the Disgustingly Stick-Thin Model Who Eats Only Rabbit Food.)

Now, he accuses me of being a disgustingly stick-thin model who eats all the most disgustingly sinful food in the world (and gloats over it publicly).

I wish he’d make up his mind.

Anyway. Today’s disgustingly sinful food item is one which doesn’t sound at all appealing. In English, it’s called Flattened Chicken. In its original language (Malay, or Indonesian, I don’t know), it’s called Ayam Penyet.

I’m sure Singaporeans (or Malaysians, or Indonesians) don’t need any introduction to this dish, but I discovered this new place a couple months back at Parklane Shopping Centre and the ayam penyet is good and cheap (little over $5 or something like that).

The name of the shop is Ayam Bakar Selegie, ayam bakar meaning grilled chicken. I didn’t try the bakar. (I’ve been there twice and gone for the penyet twice.)

There were eight of us that night and only two people ordered the ayam bakar. I didn’t hear any complaints, although I think the chicken looks a bit small.

If you do eat there, remember to ask for the sweet sauce to go with your food. They have it in a bottle sitting on the tables but not all tables have a bottle. So if your table doesn’t have one, go grab one. It’s yummy!

This is the gado gado:

Don’t order it. It’s not nice. Haha. It looks better than it tastes.

But the ayam penyet is a must-try. It tastes better than it looks (especially after you add the sweet sauce). Ask for thigh meat if you prefer your chicken tender and juicy.

It’s a really small outlet situated at the spot which used to be the Chinese chicken rice place called Meat You There.

Well, that wraps up today’s food post. It’s almost dinner time! If you’ll excuse me, I have to go search for more disgustingly sinful food.

Categories: Food Files
25 Comments »

The Goonfather recently discovered this restaurant called Crab Shack when he went to attend a seminar at Bestway Building.

He didn’t eat there; he just checked out the menu and filed the info for future use.

It was a Saturday night when the topic came up.

My friends had been hanging out at my place all day and we were hungry. We had been talking about dinner for an hour but no one wanted to make a decision on a place. We joked about driving to Malacca and KL and Genting. But nothing came out of our discussions.

So, finally, I said, “What about Crab Shack?” (The Goonfather had mentioned it to me a few days earlier.)

Blur faces looked back at me. “What’s that?”

Anyway, the Goonfather managed to browbeat everyone into agreeing to try that place by telling them that the beer costs $4.50 a mug or $18 a jug ($16 happy hour) and you can get 6 crab claws for less than 4 bucks.

After half an hour of dilly-dallying which is so typical of Singaporean groups, we arrived at Crab Shack bright and early (8 pm).

The place was empty, as expected, because it’s in the CBD and nobody goes to the CBD on a Saturday night. And, in fact, we were looking forward to it being empty because we don’t like Saturday night dinner crowds.

But it was a little more empty than I had really expected.

We were the only customers in the whole place the whole night.

And then the menu came and all was forgiven (for the moment).

For a menu featuring crab, everything’s really cheap. Main courses for less than $10 and appetisers for less than $5. (There are, of course, more expensive items as well.)

The menu was pretty big, too. An abundance of choice. Besides crab by itself, there’s crab pizza, crab pasta, crab baked rice and crab sandwiches, among other non-crab things.

We got really hungry just looking at the menu, so we called the waitress over.

“Can we have the Stone Crab Claw…”

“Sorry, we don’t have that. If you want to order any crab dishes, you have to call us one day in advance to order.”

“Why is that?”

“We don’t keep crabs in here.”

“Your restaurant is called Crab Shack, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t have crabs in your restaurant.”

“We don’t keep live crabs here. If you want, you have to order one day in advance and we’ll bring the crabs in.”

“So, is there anything we can order today?”

“You can order all the other food that don’t have crab.”

“Tell me the name of your restaurant again?”

“You can order the crab pizza. We have frozen crabs for that.”

“Never mind. Can we have the fried shishamo?”

“We don’t serve shishamo.”

“It’s right here on your menu.”

“This menu is the old one.”

“Can we have the new menu, please?”

“Sorry, it’s not ready yet.”

It took us half an hour to figure out what’s available and what’s not. Virtually half of the menu was unavailable.

But we did get to eat some crab. We made four orders of crab baked rice and three orders of crab spaghetti marinara (featuring frozen crab).

And then, DJD Porko wanted to order coffee.

“Sorry, all the hot drinks are not available.”

“All of them???”

“We don’t have hot water today.”

What a riot.

I swear I thought I had walked into another dimension in another century, where it’s customary for restaurants not to serve what they advertise.

We stuck around, anyway, because we were too lazy to move.

While waiting for our food, the owner himself came out to speak to us.

Lucky thing he did, or we would have written off the restaurant forever.

The story is that he recently took over the premises and is still sorting out the menu and the logistics of everything. And the hot water machine (or something) had just broken down, which is why we couldn’t have hot drinks that night. And they don’t keep crabs in little tanks like other crab restaurants do because they only serve flower crabs, which die very fast, so it’s not feasible to keep them around and wait for customers to order them.

And he is very sorry for everything but business will be back to normal in a week or two.

He should have trained the waitress to explain all this properly, because her clueless responses had annoyed us.

But the owner was nice and apologetic, so we forgave him everything. He even gave us a complimentary dish of baked scallops, which was quite nice.

The rest of the food was mediocre, though, so there won’t be pictures and reviews.

But we like the place because it’s empty, and the beer and finger food are cheap. (You can’t go too far wrong with finger food, in terms of taste.)

And Morte likes the place because live soccer matches are projected on a huge wall for soccer fans.

But we made the owner play something else that night because the rest of us don’t like soccer and we enjoy torturing Morte. Haha.

Categories: Food Files
22 Comments »

There are only two reasons people should blog about food.

1. The food is really great and you want to gloat.

2. The food is really bad and you want to spread the misery.

But some people subscribe to a third reason:

3. The food is only okay but you took lots of pictures so you must put them all in your blog to show people that you took lots of pictures, never mind if the pictures are bland and uninspiring and the food is only okay.

I think food blogs should never be done for the third reason but people will do what people do, so who am I to stop them?

In retaliation, I’m coming up with a fourth reason, which I feel has more validity:

4. The food is only okay but the photos are great.

I’m not much of a photographer myself, so I made Erwin take the photos this time since he just picked up photography and he’s got a fancy camera.

Everyone in the group had to endure the torture of seeing their food get cold while Erwin spends five minutes setting up each shot because the lack of light made it very difficult to get a good shot.

“Can I eat my food yet?” whined someone.

“Wait lah. Almost done.”

“Can’t you do mine first?” whined another someone.

“Wait lah. Go and bug QY because she’s the one instigating all this.”

After putting everyone through this, I cannot not post the pictures up.

But at least they look good, the photos, which is amazing because there was hardly any light because we were in one of those alfresco candlelight settings.

I’ll show you how dim the place was.

Photo taken by me, with my camera.

Now I’ll show you a picture that Erwin took with his camera, without flash:

I don’t know how the heck that’s even possible, but he did it.

That’s the veal, by the way. I ate that. It looks great but tastes only okay. It’s not even consistent. There were two slices. One slice was tender and juicy. The other slice was tough and dry.

Next picture:

This is sauteed prawns with grilled mango. Looks really good. You can’t see the prawns because they’re hidden inside the tin. Too bad for you.

The menu says that it’s “to die for”.

So I asked Johnson, who ordered it, “How are the prawns?”

“Not bad.”

“Is it to die for?”

“Not really.”

Bad menu! Didn’t your mommy teach you not to lie?

Menu tries to change the subject.

Menu says, “Oh, look! Soup!”

Okay, let me try to recall the name of this soup.

It’s…

Cream of white asparagus with minced tuna soup.

It’s the soup of the day so the name is not in the menu. The waitress told me the name. Nobody else could hear it so I had to repeat it twice to different sides of the table.

Isaiah had a hearing problem that day.

I said to the table, “Cream of white asparagus with minced tuna soup!”

Erwin said, “Sounds good! I’ll have one.”

Isaiah said, “What?? Please avoid asparagus in the hoola hoop?

Morte said, “Wahaha. Nice name. I’ll have one, too.”

Morte is a… poultry of the male gender. (Insider joke.)

Moving on!

I’m not sure what this one is. You have to remember the whole place was so dark I had trouble seeing my own food, much less other people’s food. Maybe it’s the tenderloin pork. I remember Erwin ordering that and orgasming with his first bite.

“Oh, gosh, the fats,” he said, “Damn shiok, man! Wah lau, it’s damn tender!”

Erwin enjoyed his main course so much that when the waitress came by at the end of our meal to ask cheerily, “How was the food?” Erwin answered, “Not bad.”

I admonished him. “I thought you said your pork is damn shiok? Why didn’t you tell the waitress that??”

“Oh, yar hor! I forgot!”

I don’t know if that means that Erwin (like Morte) is also a… male poultry, or that the food at this restaurant is so unremarkable that even when it’s good, it’s forgettable.

Fish and chips:

Siya said she ordered it because it looked like the safest thing on the menu.

When I asked her how she liked the taste of it, she said, “Okay lah.”

I realise that Singaporeans are really, really fond of saying “okay lah” and “not bad” when asked for opinions.

It makes reporters’ jobs really, really hard.

Glasses clinked as they toasted to friendship under the star-lit sky. Pairs of rustic candlelight gave off a soft glow, accentuating the romance of alfresco dining. The friends enjoyed the company, the sweet red wine and the promise of an exquisite feast that was to come.

The first course was Soup a la Fragrant Rose Petals Cascading in Delectable Waterfall of Cream.

“Not bad,” was the resounding consensus, accompanied by thoughtful nods of approval.

How would Jane describe the taste? this reporter asked.

“Okay lah.”

Next!!

This must be the lamb chop because there are cute little leafy thingabobs on it.

I wish I had ordered that because Minou said that it’s “not bad”.

Well, my veal’s also “not bad”, but I think Minou’s lamb is a better “not bad”.

After being in Singapore for some time, you learn to differentiate one “not bad” from another.

There are signs. Subtle, but there are signs. Like how there is a cheerful lilt in a Level 3 Not Bad, while a Level 5 Not Bad comes with a slight widening of the eyes.

For example, the following dish is a Level 4 Not Bad.

The delivery of a Level 4 Not Bad is accompanied by a tiny hint of a smile, some teeth showing. Teeth which are most useful for biting into the succulent grilled corn on the cob.

It’s tasty and juicy on its own so I don’t know why it’s sitting in mayonnaise.

That’s the last picture of the lot.

The meal happened at Barracks at Dempsey Hill, where we went to celebrate Johnson’s birthday.

It’s a good place to chill out for the ambience… if you don’t mind spending 20-30 bucks on a main course that is rated between a Level 2 and a Level 5 Not Bad, and… if you don’t mind cockroaches (Minou has the story).

On the whole, it was Okay Lah (Level 3).

Categories: Food Files
29 Comments »