Spaghetti Goemon, Marina Bay Link Mall

Having had amazing Japanese pasta here with my sis one lunchtime, I decided it was time to introduce this awesomeness to my bear :D

Located at the strangely-laid out Marina Bay Link Mall, Spaghetti Goemon is typically packed during lunch hours - it was a little less so when we were there for dinner on Friday night.

Surprisingly this place has 2,500 chains in Japan @.@

You are greeted by this fella Goemon's seemingly semi-constipated expression of foreboding at the entrance. I'm sure what Mr Goemon actually intends to express is something like "EAT MY F*CKING SPAGHETTI, HATERS."

In the middle of the restaurant is a salad bar, which you can opt to assemble and consume within a set meal or ala carte for $5.80. May seem a bit pricey but you get to choose from very unique ingredients, like chilli-ed pickled turnip, kelp, longan, eggplant, alfalfa - in addition to your usual suspects like cucumbers, carrots and lettuce. You can also help yourself to japanese sesame and shoyu dressing. There is a catch however: it is a one-time fill-however-much-possible policy. So naturally we piled our tiny bowl high.

Missing the sliced cucumbers required to pile the wall high, we still managed to squeeze as much volume to our salad as we could, and believe me that salad was DENSE. Every veg was packed in flavour and we especially loved the sweet longan coupled with the salty kelp and the spicy turnip. $5.80 for this is rather worth it!

For my main I went with the crowd favourite - Mediterranean Tomato Cream Soup Spaghetti with Fresh Seafood ($13.80). It was my first tomato cream spaghetti so I had no idea what to expect, and lo-and-behold when this juggernaut came ...

Massive bowl of spaghetti in a light tomato cream sauce with sour cream, and prawns, mussels and clams. And holllyyyy crraapppp, the spaghetti was 100% al-f**cking-dente, perfect hardness to the bite, chewy and absorbs the semi-thick sauce well. And the sauce, whoa, the SAUCE. Your usual tomato base is too sour. Your usual cream base is too thick and jilat. Combining this two quite simply made the best insane sauce ever - slight sour tinge, but creamy and light and not cloying at all! So good ... and the portion huge for the price.

We also ordered the half-and-half set ($20), which is basically two half-sized bowls of predetermined flavours. This Meat Sauce Spaghetti with Mozzarella and Eggplant was extremely tasty! Never mind that it was just regular old meat sauce - the combination of this and the unmelted hunks of mozzarella and soft eggplant catapulted my tastebuds to heaven! There is a distinct sweetness in the sauce too which is very interesting.

The other half was this Mentaiko, Shrimp and Japanese Herb Ao-Shiso. In a way this is a good balance to the sweeter meat sauce one, because this was extremely Japanese and savoury, with the mentaiko (pollock roe) giving the whole dish a unique texture and taste. And there was plenty of mentaiko too! It came served as a huge pink lump, which you can then swish around to mix. Even when we were finishing the spaghetti there was plenty of mentaiko left. Excellent stuff!

Oh man, this shit was awesome. The mentaiko, ao-shiso (the leaf they usually serve with sashimi), and seaweed gives you the sensation of eating sushi or sashimi, but yet when you chew you get flavourful oily spaghetti. Confuses the tastebuds definitely, but sooooo perfectly executed and amazing.

After the both of us literally finished a meal fit for three, we left our fourth stomache for dessert (part of the half-and-half set meal). Chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream - the chocolate cake was warm and slightly fudgeh, and vanilla vanillaey. Quite a well executed simple and light dessert to finish our amazing dinner!

I loved the little bunny-sized biscuit that was served with this. The crunch went extremely well with the softness of the cake and ice cream.

We felt the sets and pasta were rather (extremely) value for money!! For a total bill of $45, we had a salad, a drink, a dessert, and enough high quality pasta to feed three typical Singaporeans (or 1 American). Definitely worth a revisit!

Service staff were pleasant and smiley and mostly alert. The counter dude informed us that there were a few more branches opening soon in the heartlands. Wee!

HGW Link : http://www.hungrygowhere.com/singapore/Youmen_Ya_Goemon__Marina_Bay_Link_Mall_/
Rating (out of 4) :