Brunch at Relish (27/06/2009)

Relish Breakfast Platter

Eggs Benedict

Birthday Birthday

Happy birthday to me!

Just added one more to the number of years I’ve been around. As a celebratory post, I will describe what went on during my birthday this year.

The day started just around noon. I met up with Dear and we went for lunch at Din Tai Fung, their Jurong Point outlet. Because there are just two of us around we shared a couple of dishes, notably their famed xiao long bao (steamed pork dumplings with savory sauce inside), pork rib soup, some sliced beef cold dish, and prawn and egg fried rice. In general the food matched up to our standard. The xiao long bao is my usual pick at the restaurant. To eat it, carefully place one on your spoon (not to let the sauce drip out), eat with a dash of vinegar and slices of ginger. yummy! The pork rib soup is surprisingly tasty. I say surprisingly because the soup itself seemed very simple, yet the pork rib and (what seems to be) bitter gourd makes great combination.

Our lunch spread

Xiao Long Bao

The fried rice however, was a little disappointing. Dear took a bite of one particular prawn that stinks - presumably it has turned bad, so from that point on eating the prawns felt a little like taking a stroll across a minefield. Unnecessarily stressful. Otherwise the fried rice was fine.

We attempted to bake our own version of black forest cake, one of my favourite of all time, and the result was “F”. Unfortunately that’s “F” for “fail”, not “fantastic”. Well, it was our first time baking any kind of cake, so it’s understandable that so many things did not turn out right. For example the filling was too wet, and the cream used to plaster the cake was too soft, so in the end it looked like mount Black forest was spewing hot cherry flavoured lava. In our defence, the cake actually tasted like black forest cake, although looks wise it was a disaster zone.

In the end the cake didn't look (or taste) so bad

Dinner was meant to be special, and we planned to have it at home. Knowing that we were baking cake we wanted to keep things simple. In the end, we chose to have steamboat.

Steamboat. Enough to feed an army

After dinner we relaxed for a while, slacking around while I open my birthday present. Nice! it was a Tintin book and a travel guide. Tintin and the Alph-art was the last in the series, uncompleted before Herge's death. Dear also got me the lonely planet guide to Eastern Europe, knowing that I've long dreamt of going there. Thanks dear!

Afterwards we went out to watch “Land of the lost”. Dear said that it was an entertaining “C grade” movie. I think it was probably closer to B grade, but has more than its fair share of absurdly funny moments. In one short word “Insane”. Loved the moments when they were trying to swing to a tree to escape being trapped by vines, and instead swung towards the open jaws of a hungry T-Rex.

Well, like any good party, the day (and this post) has to end.

Burgers at Relish (03/06/2009)

Following a friend’s recommendation, me and Sas headed down to Relish to try their burgers. The restaurant is located on the 2nd storey of Cluny Court, at a rather quiet part of the building. The whole upper floor seems almost deserted when we got there, and we only saw one other couple inside the restaurant. Actually neither of us knew that an upper floor existed in the first place.

The ambience of the restaurant is quite good, dimly lit for that relaxing atmosphere. Sas liked the fact that the place has high ceiling, giving a more spacious feel.

We both had burgers, the main offerings at Relish together with a selection of pasta. I had the Bleu Cheese with Pear burger while Sas had the Seafood Lemon one. Can’t remember the exact names of these burgers at the moment. The portion were adequate (we both had the 180g patties), and the burgers were served with either salad or fries. My Bleu Cheese burger was good – the beef patty cooked to my preference of ‘medium well’, and the sautéed pear was an interesting mix to the dish. Sas liked her burger too. (However I find the seafood patty taste a little like Thai fishcake due to the lemongrass used). For about $18 per plate it was quite value for money. They also serve burgers with interesting local twist, such as the char siew burger and Ram-lee burger.

The crowd started to flow in after 7.30pm, and by the time we left the place was more than half filled. We noticed that the crowd there tend to be older, with the average age of patron of about 35 years old.

Overall it was a good meal, and Sas enjoyed it even more because Wednesday is ‘Ladies Night’, which means that ladies get free dessert with every meal. We might drop by again to try their weekend brunch menu, but that would be another post.