PaiGu

Thai Thai is a gorgeous, classy restaurant tucked away in the Mandarin Gallery that I discovered one day entirely by accident. It is adorned in regal purple, with colourful pillows and elegant chandeliers.

Adorned in soft pastel tones, comfy high-backed seats, crisp white tablecloths, and with a warm light descending from ornate chandeliers, this intimate restaurant is more akin to a king’s palatial tearoom. Source: Time Out

I couldn’t have described it better myself. Service is extremely attentive, among the best I’ve experienced in Singapore. They also happen to have delicious Thai food, the kind that will be featured in recurring dreams afterward (I should know).

Pandan chicken is well-seasoned and very tender. Fantastic with the sweet Thai sauce.

The menu called this “Shrimp with coconut strips” but it did not prepare us for what came out. It was more like shrimp cake, with coconut strands in the batter, but after frying, there was no fragrance from the coconut at all, which was a little disappointing. The shrimp cake was executed well but the batter itself was just average.

Traditional duck in red curry is the dish that I dreamed about after my first visit, and was the object of my return visit. The first time we had it, the duck was tender and succulent. There were also many ingredients in the curry that surprised and delighted us, like pineapples and grapes for a sweet taste. The second time we ordered this dish, the duck was tough to chew and the vegetables in the curry were under-cooked. The curry paste itself was good, but overall the dish was a bit disappointing.

Pad thai came with truly enormous prawns, that were less appetizing in real life than in photos. The pad thai itself was very well executed though, with a harmonious blend of sweet and sour.

Custard with roasted pumpkin and ice cream was a unique dessert that initially surprised my taste buds, but after I got used to the custard-pumpkin combination, I really liked it. The ice cream, on the other hand, was supposedly vanilla but had a very bizarre after taste that made me think there had been an herb of some sort mixed into the vanilla.

Thai iced tea here is the best I’ve ever had. It is vaguely like bubble tea in that it’s black tea with milk and sugar syrup, but it is so much better than that.

This is a rather pricey joint if you have frequent Thai cravings like me, but I would definitely want to come back to try more of their menu. In future, I might only come for dinners as I have reason to suspect their chef skills are better for dinner than for lunch.

Rating:

Yogoberri is one of those places you pass by and you think, “Hey, that looks cute. I want to try that one day.” Well, that one day came on Saturday night, when my friends and I were driving up and down Yonge St, looking for a place to hang out after dinner. Suddenly, I pulled the car into a small parking lot.
“Where have you taken us?” They asked, as they looked up through the glass window of Yogoberri to see a few Asians chatting over dessert.
Without a word, I walked up to the door and held it open for them. In they filed, and up the stairs we went, arriving at a small but busy room, decorated with black and white leather seats, green highlights, and fake potted plants along the wall.

I immediately plastered myself against their cake display. There were only three cakes on display, sweet potato, butternut squash, and fruit cake, but I also saw signs for mocha and green tea. I was smitten.

My friends and I ended up ordering a slice of each cake, as well as half a waffle (I’ve never seen half-waffles being sold but here they were). Each slice was amazing, although I ended up buying the sweet potato cake to bring home for my dad’s birthday, because it had the kind of taste you can never get sick of – subtle, sweet, and smooth.


» Read the rest of this entry «

I’m a huge ice cream lover. There is no denying it. Sometimes, I try to pretend I don’t rely on ice cream to live, but who am I kidding? I go one day without eating ice cream and I feel like I’ve had an organ removed.

The great thing about ice cream is that it doesn’t really need anything else. Great ice cream tastes amazing by itself. That’s why I never really understood the likes of Marble Slab. Sure, their ice cream is good, but what’s with all the stuff on the side? Is that really necessary?
Maybe, maybe not.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first one to admit that cookie dough in ice cream is so delicious it should be a sin just to think about, but sometimes adding too much “extra stuff” takes away from the ice cream itself. Because, let’s not forget who the hero in this whole scenario is. It’s the ice cream. The cookie dough or the brownie bits or the M&Ms are just accessories.

But a few days ago, the very rock upon which I stood was shaken by Symposium Cafe‘s “East Meets West” ice cream crepe extravaganza. Yes, it was an extravaganza, nothing less. It was a giant plate of vanilla ice cream on the one side and chocolate ice cream on the other, wrapped in a paper-thin crepe and drizzled with chocolate fudge and strawberry sauce. But it was more than that. There were strawberries. There were bananas. There was also whipped cream. It was so good I was afraid I might have an orgasm right there in that plastic lawn chair¹.

I had to admit that perhaps, on this particular stage, the ice cream wasn’t the main star. Nor the crepe, the strawberries, the bananas, or the whipped cream. In fact, there wasn’t a main star at all. It was only when all the ingredients were taken as one that the explosion of tastes was created, and my ears were ringing with the tune of Symphony No. 5.

My friend was also conducting her own symphony with the mixed fruit medley cheesecake, which I had a taste of and also found to be quite good (though not nearly as explosive as mine).

1. Don’t worry, of course I didn’t. Not only would that be highly inappropriate, but it would needlessly divert my focus away from my mouth [↩]