Choo Choo Chicken

Chicken!!!! Nowadays Korean chicken are the in thing now. All sorts of chicken chain stores popping up in Singapore.

However recently i tried a less well known store at cinelesiure. Haha this was all by chance during the celebration of army day cathay cinelesiure they gave out 40 dollars worth of store cash voucher with no additional conditions. Just nice one of it was a 10 dollar choo choo chicken cash voucher.

The store was located at a corner of the mall on the 4th or 3rd floor (haha i forgot) anyway it is easy to find. Once you enter the store there is the korean vibe, korean workers, korean style restaurant which makes u feel that you are at korea.

Once we sat down the waiter using is korean style english served us and we were give the menu. We chose the happy set (however take note there is the lunch set which is quite affordable and v suitable for one person dine in as we noe usually korean chicken restaurant thier portons are not single diner friendly).

The happy set contains 8 pieces of chicken (4 wings 4 drumlets). While choosing the flavors (we can choose up to 2 flavors) we first decided upon the soy chicken which was proven to be the store best seller while the other flavor we chose was the garlic (recommended by the waiter). Other than the chicken there is also a rice burger! We were quite excited about it as we are certain this is not the mos burger type of rice burger. Also 2 drinks were part of the set (non-alcohol).

Before the food was served plastic 2-fingers gloves were given to us so that we can eat with our hands or rather fingers ( however utensils are also provided for those who do not want to use their hands ).

Finally the chicken is served first! The chickens served were piping hot and smelled absolutely delicious. We tasted the soy one first UHHHHHMMMMMM the smell was so nice, the taste undeniably is as nice too. The taste of the sauce coating was mildly sweet and not over powering which did not over power the taste of the chicken. Furthermore the mild sweet taste does not make you feel sick of it. The chicken was tender and the skin was very very well done. The crispiness was wad you absolutely crave for when you eat fried chicken and there was not a tinge of oiliness. Next the garlic flavor it was not as good as the soy one as there is some unidentified black substance on it which makes it slightly bitter. However the meat was still tender and soft hence no complaints over it.

Other than the chicken the rice burger! It was like kimbap, totally kimbap (korean sushi) taste. We ordered the beef bulgogi flavor. It felt like i was back in korea buying my daily kimbap breakfast from their convenience stall ( you all must think that huhhhhh convenience stall ar so lousy i dun wan, however for those who went to korea should noe that the food offered in their convenience stall will not lose out to outside restaurant), which brings me back to korea once again.

Overall the store was actually tbh one of the better fried chicken store i had tasted in Singapore, Worth a try!!!!

Choo Choo Chicken Orchard Cineleisure
Orchard Cineleisure, 8 Grange Road #03-06 Singapore 239695 (Somerset MRT)
Tel: +65 6299 0980
Opening Hours: 12pm – 11pm Daily

The Usual Place

Calling all Westies!!! A new cafe in Jurong East (near Chinese Garden MRT) has just opened!

The Usual Place Cafe

We arrived this place at around 2pm and there were surprisingly quite a few people there at this time.
The place was rather cosy (small), would expect it to be quite packed during peak hours!

Here's the menu!

We ordered our food at the counter and after a short wait, our food was served!

Honey Soy Chicken ($8.90nett)
With a generous portion of straight cut fries and greens!
The chicken was nice, it was juicy and the sauce made it really flavourful! Yummy!

This cafe ride on the craze of salted egg dishes and Tada~
Salted egg prawn pasta ($12.90nett)

On the first mouth of this pasta, it tasted salty, the salted egg taste was mild. But after a few mouthful of it, the salted egg taste started to get obvious and it became rather addictive (salted egg dishes fan here :P )!  The prawns (5 of them) were fresh and goes really well with the salted egg sauce too.

On a side note, there is no GST and service charge! And there's free flow iced water provided too!

Panorama view of the cafe

If you stay in the west side, do visit this cafe! The price is quite reasonable, and in fact a little cheaper than most cafe!

Website

Opening Hours:
Lunch: 11am - 3.30pm
Dinner: 5.30 - 10pm 
 

Address: 

346 Jurong East St 31 #01-73, Singapore 600346

Nearest MRT: 

Chinese Garden (Walkable distance)

Bangkok Street Mookata

Mookata literally means pan pot in Thailand, is a kind of steamboat from Bangkok.

As seen from the picture, you grill the ingredients on the center and the soup is at the circumference of the pan. Usually, pork lard is used to grill the ingredients (and prevents the meat from sticking on the pan), and basically all the oil from the meat will flow down to the soup, enhancing the flavor of the soup. But, one more important aspect about Mookata is the Thai spicy sauces!!!

I have been to a few mookata places and today the one I am reviewing about this Mookata in Jurong West!
Bangkok Street Mookata!

Location: 4/5 (walkable distance from lakeside mrt, or else you can take bus 49/335 and alight after Yuhua Sec Sch and walk there, if you drive, there are a lot of HDB carparks around)

Price: 4.5/5

Food: 4/5

Service: 3.5-5 /5 (service was quite slow when it first started, but now, it is really fast. Waiters are efficient too!)

Ambience: It’s in a kopitiam (depends on yourself) and is really crowded with people

Here’s the menu:

 

For the sets, there is a set for 2 and a set for 4. I have tried both before and I would say if you are here for the first time/ first time eating mookata, do try out the set so you will know what you wanna order next time for ala carte. The portion is enough for the number indicated if you are not a big eater. What we usually do was that if 3 of us are eating, we will order a set for 2 then ala carte a few more meat.

If you know what you want to order, do order the ala carte because i feel it's more worth it.

Meh…

Shisamo is a nono for me. I think it’s not a really wise choice to include this in the menu, cos I really don’t fancy this fish, same goes for my family. I think shisamo is still meant for deep frying, more than grilling. If you ordered this set, and want to try it, please add this as the last ingredient. Warning: the eggs of the shisamo will flow into the soup so it will make the soup unpleasant (for me) /nice (if you like it).

Thai fish cake is a nono for bf. I personally did not try it but according to him, it taste weird, so I’ll just give it a miss!

Fishball is a nono for mummy. The fishball is just a lump of fishy taste cake to her, cos it’s not the bouncy fishball but a more nua kind, but I still can take it cos there’s no pungent fishy smell, which means probably it’s fresh!

Egg

You can’t fry the egg, I repeat, YOU can’t fry the egg in the dome shaped pan! The egg will flow down into the soup! And the egg basically stucks to the pan and then if you removed it, the black chaotas that are stuck to the pan will fall in love with the egg.

Result= a clean pan but a chaotas-covered egg. L

The next option is to boil the egg(which probably takes a longer time than usual because the egg won’t be fully covered) or just break the egg and cook it with the soup or make egg flower(?).



Try these!

Chicken

There’s a love-hate relationship for the chicken. I like the chicken but it’s not that easy to cook cos it’s not a thin slice of chicken meat. Given its uneven surface and thickness, it is really hard to make sure every part is cooked.

Prawn

Grill the prawns, I like prawns a lot so I think it’s nice! It’s $3.90 for 4 or 5 prawns. Idk it’s 4 or 5 because when I ordered 2 servings of prawns, they gave me 9 prawns. And they are very considerate and thought of our needs, so they removed the shells, keeping the head and the tail shell intact. So you don’t have to use your hands to remove the shell at all, yes! Anyway the prawns are the bigger ones, and aka the king prawns.

Scallop

1 serving of scallop= 3 scallops. The scallops comes with their shells, but I’m not quite sure how to grill it with the shells so I usually removed it before grilling it (any idea is it to grill with the shell not?).

Hotdog

Ok this is a common ingredient in the steamboat scene but I still want to say it taste nice when grilled!

Pork Liver

They offer pork liver as well, this depends on whether you like pork liver or not. If you like it, you would think it’s nice and if you don’t, forget it then.

Vege

The oyster mushroom is unexceptionally nice, ok I’m biased here because I don’t eat that a lot at home or outside, so I think it’s quite a refreshing experience haha! Other than that, just order whatever vege you want and throw them into the soup. Le family favourite: jinzhengu, wangyabai, corn(my mum says enhances the flavor of soup), oyster mushrooms. Actually that was all we put in the soup. Meat is still the focus!

Must try!!!

Left: Marinated Pork Collar, Right: Pork Belly,  Bottom: Chicken
4 servings each

Marinated Pork Collar

Don’t be scared off by the word pork collar, because it’s just pork meat. This well marinated pork meat is what that keeps me going to this mookata. You don’t’ even have to dip into the thai chilli sauces, because it is just as delectable on its own, but of course, it taste as good if dipped.

Pork Belly

AKA sanzhanba (hokkien) and samgyeopsal(Korean). Who can resist this succulent piece of meat with layers of tender fats? This goes very well with the sauces since it is not marinated!

Recommended to grill this piece of meat first so that it can act as the cubes of pork lard given! Another recommendation is to wrap jinzhengu with this meat. It tastes really good! Disclaimer: this is my own recommendation, not by the boss!

Sauces

There are 2 types of sauces, the sweet one and the spicy one! My personal favourite is the mixture of the sweet and spicy one because I can't really take too spicy. But go for the spicy one if you like spicy stuff cos it's really good!

Pork lard is usually used as the oil to grill the meat. But if you don't like it, they have margarine/butter too. There are still some ingredients I have yet to try and I can’t comment on it so ya do try those in “Try these!” and “Must Try!!!”. ;)

Verdict: Must try if you stay in the west!

1. Address: 498 Jurong West Street 41, 640498
   Phone:9655 5771
2. Opening hours: 5pm-3am

In N Out Cafe BigBox

Went to Big Box at Jurong East to eat! Saw a pamphlet showing the newly opened "In N Out Cafe" by big box. The best thing is their one for one set meal!!!

We were initially quite dubious about the promotion...hmmm will the serving for the 1-for-1 promotion be very small????

We went into the cafe and it was sort of a open style cafe. Surprisingly when we arrived, we saw the tables and chairs and they were sort of like home furniture style. Our guess is that Big Box wanted to feature their furniture, as BigBox sells furniture on their 2nd and 3rd floor too. We settled down and quickly went to order our meals!

The gian peng (cheapskate) us decided to go for the most expensive set. We ordered both wild caught salmon sets  (each set includes a main, salad/soup of the day and dessert). One California Cobb salad( greens with egg, chicken breast and bits of bacon), one onion soup, and two set of desserts which consist of a cream cake and 2 apple strudel of which all are bite size. 

We were surprised by the size of the meal. It was quite large considering how expensive salmon was. The cut was very thick, definitely worth for money. The hollandaise sauce was not bad too except that it was a bit too little. In the end, when we ate the mash potato it was quite tasteless without any sauce or gravy. The soup was more of a standard taste where we can get anywhere and the bread was abit hard. However the taste of the dessert was above average (at least to me ><). Oh also the salad I must say if you don't know what Cobb salad is, better Google before you order cos it is abit too sour for guys liking hahaha, but the salad serving is really quite a lot for an appetizer tbh i have seen girls eating the salad this size just for a meal only.

The best part is ........it only cost us SGD$9.80 NETT!!!!!!!! for 2 sets hahahah omg super cheap! Average out to $5 each hahaha.

Since its cheap we decided to recommend it to our friends hahaha. However, one of our friend cannot make it hence we went there in threes. Still we ordered 4 sets ( since its 1 for 1) we decided we can share and have more variety.

Our friend ordered the salmon set on recommendation while we ordered Italian Meatballs & Penne in Red Sauce ( just meatballs and pasta hahaha ), Rooster Jokes and an additional order of the Rhino Mushroom Lasagna ( 100% vegetarian). I shall not talk about the salads as only the dressing changed and the soup is like ready made pumpkin soup. The dessert this time changed to sesame cake, taro+banana cake and cream cake.

The Italian Meatballs & Penne in Red Sauce was one of the more disappointing dishes we had. The meatballs were still okay as we could feel the texture of the meat and the Q-ness of the meat. However the disappointing one was the pasta it was like under cooked very hard and stale. The sauce is just normal spaghetti red sauce.

The Rooster Jokes was surprisingly nice. It was half a spring chicken and the size was quite big. Just by looks you will think that the chicken is very dry however our first bite into in it is surprisingly juicy and the skin tasted absolutely fragrant. This is one of the dishes we definitely recommend.

The Rhino Mushroom Lasagna ( 100% vegetarian) taste well too! even though the red sauce on it tasted like the one on the Penne the lasagna tasted very nice. The mushroom taste was significant and chewy the cheese tasted and smell nice too.

Overall, In and Out Cafe is quite a nice place to dine in and the food is worth for price. However, we would not recommend the Italian Meatballs & Penne in Red Sauce. 

Remember the promotion last only in the period of July and don't worry about the coupons as they will be giving out right at the entrance of 2nd floor of big box. 

  

Nook Pancake House

Shall kickstart this blog with a recent trip to nook!  It has been our to do list for quite sometime after knowing about its $10 (in fact $11, including service charge) pancake buffet (For weekdays, 3pm-6pm, and Monday, whole day) for students and $12(before service charge) for adults. Anyway, it was really fun to DIY your own pancakes, but I've to admit that you will get sick of the pancakes at the end of the session.

Let's get some pictures do the talking!

And here's the interior of Nook! A cute and cheerful cafe! As you can see it was quite empty since we went on a weekday and it was around 3pm.

The colourful decos and furniture added much vibrancy to the cafe!

And, here's our buffet DIY "materials", each person come with 2 colours of the pancakes and free flow of the following toppings. And so the 2 of us got 4 colours! We choose buttermilk, dark chocolate, pandan, red velvet. There are 2 more flavours: Strawberry (pink) & banana (yellow). We ordered the 4 colours because of the colours, since red velvet,strawberry and buttermilk,banana is of the same colour.

The free buffet toppings! You can ask the staff to top up!

And let's design and cook our very own pancakes!

Gotta CatchEm All!

Rabbit (Line's Cony) in the making.

Quite proud of my first pancake!

A green doraemon since there's no blue! :(

Gingerbread man and I don't think you can guess who's that! (Hint: Doraemon's best friend)

Merry Christmas Everyone!

An artistic signboard standing outside of Nook!

Overall, it's really a fun experience to decorate your own pancake! However, you won't really get to design a lot unless you can stomach a lot of pancakes. Honestly, the taste of the pancakes is just so-so, the pandan was in our opinion the best out of the 4 flavours we ordered! Dark chocolate was a little bitter (which I quite like), but there's this salty after taste which I don't really like. The maple syrup can be added to help to cover up the salty taste by adding a bit of sweetness. The toppings can be used both as decos for the pancakes and also to enhance the flavour of the pancakes! Haha and spam all you want since it's buffet! Good for bonding with family/friends/couple! Definitely worth a try for the fun experience! :)


Address: 21 Lorong Kilat, 598123
Nearest MRT:  Bukit Batok (take bus 61 or 77 from Bukit Batok bus interchange)