For more photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/chatterbox-mandarin-orchard/

We made reservations before heading down since it was stated in the deal. I reached promptly at 5pm and was given a window seat since the place was quite empty. It was pretty nice to watch the world go from the 5th level of Mandarin Orchard, so when you call to make reservations, request for a table by the window. Yandao was late, so they served me my drink and left me alone. While idling my time away, I noticed that I was the only local! The people seated around me are all foreigners – Hong Kongers, Indonesians & Japanese! As much as I tried to eavesdrop on their conversations, I understood none of it. Boring. Anyway, when Yandao arrived, they brought the set out almost immediately! Howinitiative & attentive of the waiting staff. I like.

The deal includes Chatterbox Half Chicken, 2 bowls of rice, 1 seasonal vegetable, 2 drinks (soft drinks or beer), complimentary parking at Mandarin Orchard (for 2 hours only) for $36.52 excluding service charge & GST which sums up to about $42+. Pretty good deal since I heard that 1 plate of Chatterbox Chicken Rice is about $25. Furthermore, the car park charge for 2 hours is about $10.70.

Our Seasonal Vegetable was Dao Gay. Not too bad though I was hoping for 油菜 cos Dao Gay is so cheap. Dao Gay was soaked in sesame oil & was flavourful. There were mushrooms in them& I love mushrooms. They also removed the tails of the Dao Gay so thumbs up for effort they put in!

Both Yandao and I were super disappointed by the chicken because the meat was tough. I was expecting tender, juicy chicken with the price people pay at this place. Chatterbox Chicken has nothing to rave about and I’ve had better chicken at many other places – Soup Restaurant, Boon Tong Kee, 925 Yishun Central and even Far East Shopping Centre. The good thing about this chicken is that it’s thoroughly cooked with no tinge of pinkness in the meat. Yandao can be pretty anal about blood in the food. Even though the chilli sauce had no kick, I liked it because I didn’t leave Chatterbox with garlic breath. I’m super conscious when it comes to eating Chicken Rice chilli because most places use too much garlic. No amount of mints will remove that garlic breath. It’s very embarrassing to let your colleagues or friends know what you had for lunch with your breath. Ack.

The rice was a bit too dry and white for my liking. Chicken rice is meant to be oily and slightly buttery! And the best way to eat chicken rice is mix in black sauce with the yummilicious chicken sesame sauce. This is how chicken rice should always be eaten. Plain dry rice becomes awesome chicken rice after my concoction. You MUST do it too. Drench your rice with the 2 main ingredients and you will be as awesome as me. I mean, your chicken rice will be as awesome as mine.

Two wrongs do not make a right. Despite the good service, I will never return as a paying customer because of the price and standard.

For more photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/island-creamery-bukit-timah/

After eating so much at The Curry Wok, we wanted to eat more. Naturally. Like kindness begetting kindness, eating also begets more eating.

We were shocked at how this looked like ulu land on the outside, but the parlor was bustling. So popular with families, teenagers, students, and bears aka fat gay men!

The decor looks like a bad and cheap imitation of 1950s American restaurants. Definitely not a date place, unless you’re a teenager.Mudpie was mine while Mr NGFL got two scoops of ice kalim. The mudpie was not bad, with coffee ice cream on the top, cookies-and-cream ice kalim at the bottom and a very awesome peanut-buttery(?) crust. After we finished – did we stop? OF COURSE NOT!

We shared an apple pie with a scoop of burnt caramel ice kalim. The two of them went very well together (I have good taste, I picked the ice cream although Mr NGFL insisted he was the one). The apple pie was cold when I like the apple pie to be hot. It wasn’t too sweet or sour. The crust wasn’t the flaky kind; it was the doughy kind. Mr NGFL liked it but I’m not sure how I feel about carb-by crust and wolfed everything down anyway.

You can see how run-down the ice cream parlor is becoming over the years. The ice cream is still good but then ice cream is ice cream – the few bad ice creams… we call it “sorbet.” But still, a nice way to end dinner. We liked everything we ate. Less noisy teenagers–or teenagers hanging out in groups with a confused teenager who doesn’t know yet he’s gay–would be nice but then again, in American movies, teenagers hang out at ice cream parlors all the time too. Recommended if you want good ice cream and don’t mind teenagers or are a pedophile. It’s Pedophile Hunting Ground, peeps! Licky lick.

For photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/sugar-granny-cafe-outram-chinatown/

I came here every Tuesday for near to two months in a row because it was quiet and convenient and cheap, one of the few cool cafes in Chinatown that is open in the hot afternoons.

Very interesting characters you will see here. I saw a boss with his secretary from a nearby company–they were doing some paper work but their hands were on each other, and ring ring! the boss’s wife telephoned. Once, I saw an uncle with his China Money Boy. (ps: trust me, I know a Money Boy when I see one because I cum in contact with them for work! Don’t think dirty.) Wow, the China Money Boy is so hot! He looks like a hunky version of Dai Yang Tian, in a very tight shirt, showing his ripped biceps. His body is tight! Drool. If I had $200 (that’s how much they cost), I’d put my money down. I tried very hard not to look at him, but he kept staring at me. I find the Uncle very poor thing. I’m not good-looking but the Money Boy felt that I was a better choice than the Uncle. And the Uncle tried so hard to impress him it was bordering on the point of pathetic. This is a Mandarin-speaking shop with Mandarin-speaking waitresses and the obviously Mandarin-speaking Uncle spoke in broken English to the waitress just to impress the Money Boy of his bilingualism. Very sad lah, in the Gay World, once you’re old, you lose currency. The nearby Keong Saik St is also known for the illegal female prostitutes. Underground Chinatown is very colorful.

I never ordered the food because it’s mostly fried food, calamari, fried chicken wings, fries, fried fishballs and sotongballs, etc. (See the menu here.) I’ve a firm belief that all deep-fried food are similar, unless the food is made from scratch and I don’t expect the food here to be made from scratch.I always ordered the Chinese desserts. I’ve tried the sesame paste ($2.50) thrice, peanut paste ($2.50), Bailey with gingko ($2), Mango sago with pomelo (pictured, $3.50), Durian sago ($4).

The desserts were ok, smooth, but taste-wise, they cannot be compared to Mei Heong Yuan, which is only a few streets away. Out of the desserts, I prefer the sesame paste because it is so kick-ass sweet. It disregards diabetes completely, like diabetes is no longer a problem. Dead Sea is so salty it doesn’t allow life in it–this is like the Sugar version of the Dead Sea. And it tasted very different from other sesame paste too. There was a slightly burnt/roasted scent which is nice.

Overall, I think the food is average, the service is borderline-lazy, bo-chap, and the decor is cheesy and uncomfortable. The food isn’t even value-for-money, since there are so much good food at a cheap price in Chinatown. The reason it survives in the competitive Chinatown is because there are no other cafes nearby. Pray Starbucks doesn’t open here.

For photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/shunjuu-izakaya-robertson-quay/

A lackadaisical day. Chiobu and I meandered slowly along Robertson Quay and settled on this Japanese restaurant, Shunjuu Izakaya. “Izakaya” means “place of comfort,” and of course, comfort means alcohol. Too bad we are almost teetotalers. Is the decor comforting? Well, it is fuss-free. Seats are placed along the corridor of Riverside View building, but still far away from the canal, so there isn’t a view to speak of. Not much of an ambience.

The restaurant is also known for its “sumiyaki,” or skewered BBQ meat over Japanese charcoal.The complimentary starters were quite appetizing. The raddish and carrots, as appetizers, were soaked in a miso-soup until the roots were throughly soft, absorbing the essence of the soup. Another free entree was a very hard white cabbage. (Chiobu said, “Can eat this raw meh???”) First, you squeeze sour lemon over the very salty, slightly sweet bean sauce. Then you dip the almost tasteless white cabbage in the sauce. Crunchy like celery but much tastier.

Mixed Sashimi for $40. While they were relatively fresh, we didn’t think it was value-for-money. $40 should buy you a meal, not a few pieces of sashimi.

We also had Set A ($19) and Set B ($25) of sumiyaki. Set A consists of beef short rib, asparagus rolled with pork, chicken meat ball, golden mushroom rolled with beef, and pork belly. Set B has rib eye, scallop rolled with pork, rice cake rolled with pork, chicken wing and goose liver (foie gras).

It is difficult to pick the better set because they all have positive and negative food in them. The bad ones you should avoid: from set A, pork belly (too hard), beef short rib (overcooked) and from set B, scallop rolled in pork (tasteless), rice cake with pork (too sticky and bland and starchy). The fantastic ones are: from Set B, rib eye (very tender), chicken wing (flavorful!), and goose liver (melts in your mouth!).

Service was good and attention.

Overall, everything–the food, the service and the ambience–was satisfactory but not overly memorable. We won’t come out of the way to eat this but if we are in the area, then we wouldn’t mind. Including $2 green tea per person, and GST, etc, we paid $104 for two persons.

For photos, please visit Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow: http://rubbisheatrubbishgrow.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/food-on-fire-capital-square-three/

Featured on 8Days, Wine&Dine, and Exquisite, the decor is canteen-style, so this is really a eat-and-go place but there are several selling points:
1. Guilt-free healthy Indian food! less salt, less oil, less cream, no MSG.
2. “We don’t own a freezer,” says the owner; food is freshly prepared daily.
3. Chefs are from India, so there is a degree of authenticity.
4. The owner’s ancestry is from Gujarat, and it was the first shop in Singapore to sell Gujarati dal dhokli, only available on Wednesdays 12-3pm.
5. Owner’s extended family lives in India so they buy fresh spices, pound and mix them themselves and ship it over to Singapore freshly.

A friend and I shared the angmoh-influenced lamb kebab wrap ($11) with plenty of fresh vegetables, a naan as wrap, and two sauces, a spicy one and a yogurt-based one. This is good lunch food, as I remember fondly of my New York Ah Beng Training Days when I ate wrap for lunch. There wasn’t a stench of the lamb. The texture of hot lamb and crunchy vegetables fit well together. The spiciness of the lamb was padded by the vegetables and the spice left a tingling sensation on my lips. Hot lips! Good to kiss any time!Meat Platter ($20). The food came sizzling on the hotplate and the aroma was mouthwatering. Taste-wise, it was average for us–we thought the spices could be heavier–but the meat was tender and succulent.

My friend and I also had Chicken Masala set ($9.50) and Chicken Makhani (butter chicken, $9.50), which come with a naan each and are popular for lunch. The Makhani is definitely the better of the two. The masala was salty for us but the Makhani chicken has a deep roasted, very smokey taste that I like very much and can’t stop eating. The chicken really absorbed the essence of the tandoor (clay oven). I’d come back for this.

I don’t like lime juice ($2.80), because it’s either too sour or diabete-ly sweet, but here, the balance was superb. This is the only lime juice I can recall that I like but I wonder if it can be cheaper. $2, maybe?

In general, although I love spicy-hot food, I can’t take it but the food here is ok to my palate. Unlike my other experiences of eating Indian food, after eating, we didn’t feel heavy and lethargic. It tasted decent too. The price seems reasonable as the eatery is in CBD area. An eatery that survives 8 years in such a competitive area can’t be bad.