Being situated just beside the escalator that leads from the Orchard MRT station all the way to B4, it's not difficult to find Men-ya KAIKO. Then again, it can be easily missed since its entrance is rather small and the glass panel showing signature items from its menu is further down the corridor. This is a no-frills place given its space so in terms of the dining atmosphere, it can get a bit noisy and crowded especially if there are many customers around.

I just needed a quick bite and settled for my usual combination of gyoza and ramen. The gyoza here had a nice crisp surface but the filing was pretty much standard so it lacked a "wow" factor to surprise me.Similarly, the pork ramen was decent and slightly unusual because the pork slices were not the usual char siew seen in most ramen restaurants. Instead, the pork here had a slightly chewy texture and didn't have as much fats as most versions. Then again, I thought the taste of the pork didn't blend well with the ramen soup base nor the ramen itself so I gather it must have been cooked in a different type of sauce. Seeing that stalk of xiaobaicai in the noodles was yet another sign that Kaiko seems to want to go local in terms of adapting to the Singaporean tastebuds but I find it really odd to see this type of vegetable in my ramen.

I wouldn't say that this place is bad but it does have its flaws here and there so I might be reluctant to return unless I happen to have no other food choices in Ion.

Was at Skinny Pizza for lunch and we ordered mains for each person and some pizzas to share. I ordered the black pepper prawn linguine where the pasta was cooked nicely but the prawns didn't taste so fresh and it even stuck to the shell. It would have been better for the prawns to be shelled before cooking so that they can absorb more of the black pepper flavour.The Macadamia roasted pumpkin pizza was very unique and amazingly tasted good. It's different from the usual savoury or cheesy type of pizzas we eat most of the time and is light enough to pass off as a dessert.The satay chicken pizza was also said to be a chef's recommendation but the general view across the table was that the satay chicken was a bit bland. However, I do like the abundance of vegetables spread across the pizza and that helped to take away any greasiness from the satay chicken.

For a detailed review and more photos, please visit my blog: http://shokushisouseikatsu.blogspot.com/2013/10/review-of-skinny-pizza-100am.html

Was here for a company dinner so obviously, this was not a conscious choice on my part. It's situated within Park Mall which gets really quiet and dim at night but surprisingly, there were quite a lot of people who were here. I started off with the usual cold items i.e. sushi, seafood and salads. The mussels were OK but the sushi was rather disappointing and didn't taste as fresh as I would have wanted. As for the salad, it was merely passable.Moving on to the dim sum and snack items, although there was a decent selection, I thought that there weren't many items which caught my fancy. It was as if nothing really tasted horrible and yet nothing could be considered as delicious.I didn't like the chili crabs but found the deep fried buns better. Strange when you come to think of it because the side dish got into my good books rather than the main ingredient. The other meat dishes were mediocre. As for the famed barbecue meats, the queue was pretty long and I didn't want to wait for that so I skipped this section.To end the evening, I had porridge which was really not what I would eat in most situations. I thought of using this to clear the saltiness that had built up over the evening but was unsuccessful.

Considering the price of around $30 in town, the spread is decent. However, more can be done about the quality so that it feels like a much better deal. Service was relatively quick i.e. clearing of plates was efficient.

For more food reviews, please visit my blog at http://shokushisouseikatsu.blogspot.com/

I was craving for something Japanese during lunch one day so headed to The Sushi Bar at Ngee Ann City to give it a try. Although the online reviews were generally quite favourable, I think it was a mix of hits and misses for me so it will take a few more visits to find out which items are the ones to choose and avoid.

First was the chicken katsu rice which came with some coleslaw and cucumber slices. The fried batter was OK but the chicken meat within was too thin so it felt more like I was eating the skin and batter rather than the chicken. In addition, the rice was rather lumpy and sticky which seemed to suggest that there was either too much water or it was way overcooked. Despite the presence of a sweet sauce to be eaten with the dish, the addition of mayonnaise to the sauce altered the taste and there was too little of the sauce thus making the dish taste rather dry on the whole. It might have better if there was more sauce or the meat was thicker and juicier.Next was the teba gyoza which means chicken wing gyoza. On first sight, this resembled the stuffed chicken wings commonly seen in Thai restaurants served with sweet chili sauce. The version here was made to be like gyoza where instead of the gyoza skin, the chicken wing which had the bones in the mid section removed was stuffed with meat filling. The accompanying sauce was replaced by mayonnaise. Overall, I thought that the taste of this teba gyoza was not much different from its Thai counterpart and the sauce didn't really do much to accentuate the taste of the dish. Although I thought that it was a pretty gimmicky idea to position this dish as a gyoza-lookalike, the dish probably needs a major change to make an impact on the customer's palate. Perhaps something like a wasabi-based mayonnaise might help in making this dish more interesting.The kani maki turned out pretty ordinary in terms of taste which can be considered a good and bad thing. The good thing is, it doesn't taste awful but on the other hand, it fails to leave an impression on me. Appearance-wish, I thought that it could have looked slightly better. Given that the name of this place is called "The Sushi Bar", I was expecting something better even for a simple offering like this. It's the simple things which need more skills so in this sense, I thought that it should have fared better. The only thing I liked was probably the wasabi which tasted fresh. Just be careful not to take too much of it at one go or you might find yourself coughing when you choke on the sudden rush of the wasabi's spicy flavour.The hotate miso yaki was one of the two dishes I liked during my visit. Despite miso having a pretty strong taste and potentially covering up the fresh seafood flavour if it turned out to be too overpowering, the good thing was that I could still taste the hotate's flavour and liked the texture i.e. still crunchy and not overcooked. When eaten with the spring onions, it added a welcome layer of texture to the dish. I didn't try eating with the salmon roe though. However, in order to do justice to the fresh seafood, it might be good to have another option where the hotate is grilled on its own thus allowing its natural flavour to be infused into the hotate due to the heat or adding soy sauce or some other lighter seasoning when grilling. I've tried eaten grilled seafood in this manner while in Japan and really liked the natural seafood goodness which was not overwhelmed by strong-tasting condiments.I've been craving to have some yakitori, not the sauce version but the salt version. Ever since I tasted the latter from a convenience store in Japan, I've grown to like the salt version a lot. However, a lot of Japanese restaurants tend to have the sauce version only so I was quite happy to find the salt version offered here. The disappointing thing was that, the meat was not grilled yet and lost its meat juices so the resulting product was tough and dry despite the use of the thigh portion (momo) which should have been juicier and more tender than breast meat. The salt flavour was also hardly detectable. Perhaps the sauce version will taste better so I'll probably give that a try next time. As for this version, I think I'll go back to Family Mart to relieve my craving instead.Last but not least, the tontoro yaki was one of my top 2 dishes that day. I don't know if this was done by the same person who did the momo yakitori but this version tasted much better. Not only was it juicy, the fats on the tontoro added some much-needed texture to the meat thus making it crunchy and nice to chew. The flavour was just right too. I think I might order this again during my next visit.

On the whole, I thought my visit to this place was not that bad because service was prompt and the restaurant was pretty spacious. However, the food turned out to be slightly disappointing. It could also have been that they specialise more in sushi than the other dishes but even so, the quality shouldn't be too far from one another. I would probably go back a second time to try a few more dishes but there's got to be more "hook dishes" to pull me back for the third visit onwards.

For more food reviews, please visit my blog at http://shokushisouseikatsu.blogspot.com/

Whenever I visit the Bali Thai outlet in Ion on a weekend, it's usually not fully packed which is considered good for me because I never like crowded restaurants to begin with. I've been pretty satisfied with the food served here so far but this visit seemingly wanted to buck the trend.

First up were the sides i.e. prawn cake and stuffed chicken wings. You can get these at literally every Thai restaurant so it's a readily available dish. Unfortunately, the version served on this day tasted a bit odd. The prawn cake appeared thinner than usual so I could taste more of the batter outside rather than the filing. The chicken wing looked much lighter in colour than usual so the skin didn't have that crispy taste and the filling was rather bland.As for the customised main dish, I chose seafood horfun in satay sauce which was what I tasted before. Strangely speaking, the 2nd time I tasted it felt a bit different and it felt oiler as you went further down the plate.

It does feel as if inconsistency is the key here because service was also less attentive than my first visit to this branch. I've tried other Bali Thai branches which were of a similar standard so it remains to be seen if it has improved now.