Tonkichi, Suntec City

Signing up as a Pokka member does make monetary sense - for a $30 annual fee, you get an immediate 10% discount on whatever you're purchasing + $40 vouchers for any Pokka food outlet. Little did we know that Rive Gauche (cake), Tonkichi (japanese), and Domani (italian) were all owned by Pokka @.@ The latter two gets additional discounts on some wednesdays.

So thusly armed with a 20% GSS discount and $40 vouchers, we sauntered into Tonkichi for some amazing Tonkatsu (or so we read).

We didn't think we'd use up $40 of vouchers on Tonkatsu, but damn these Tonkatsu sets are expensive!! After much deliberating we placed our order. First to arrive was this thingamajig ...

... which we later found out was a norm at Tonkatsu places. Grind the seeds in the mortar and pestle for the nice roasty aroma, then introduce the element of Tonkatsu sauce for ze dippin.

I had the Kurobuta Kata Rosu Set - deep fried black pig shoulder loin ($32.90). Seriously, $33 pre-tax-and-service-charge for tonktasu?!?!?!?!?! Well ... the cabbage rice and miso soup are free flow, but still ... anyway. A rather generous and thick portion of tonkatsu came seated on a metal grill (presumably to drain the oil?), huge clump of cabbage, tomatoes, some mustard, pickles, miso soup and rice. Took a bit of the tonkatsu and ...

... well it was simply put, bloody fantastic. The crumbly exterior wasn't too oily, thick or jelat, and was surprisingly light and very crispy. The pork was a thick cut, and my kurobuta slightly chewy and flavourful. And the layer of fat under the skin ... melts in your mouth for that fatty bacon sensation. Yum! And I learnt that mixing the mustard into the sesame / tonkatsu sauce makes it LEAGUES better.

Curious about the "layered " variety, I chose the Kasane Katsu ($26.90). I really liked the texture - slightly less dense, and doesn't feel like you're eating waay too much pork, especially when it's already battered and deep fried. Although I must say the crumbed bits were very nicely done! Didn't feel there was too much of it to render the pork loin irrelevant, and wasn't too oily to make one feel like this - D:

Personally I felt the shirobuta (white pork) was a little bland compared to the kurobuta, though the kasane was very very very soft to the bite whereas the kurobuta was more chewy (closer to well cooked beef). Regardless, dipping the kasane into the sauce made it AWESOME - I preferred white pork.

Just a little side-by-side comparison of the pork diversity.

Relevant:

While the yummy pork may be a star attraction here, I do feel Tonkichi is one of those 'package' places - meaning you get amazing food AND warm service. Waiters were genuinely pleased to serve (either that or they're too new in their job to be truly jaded, lol) - one dude kindly explained how to crush the sesame seeds and even offered suggestions how this can be mixed into the sauce.

I thought the spicy tomato salad dressing was imba too. But ... was the service great? Yes. Was the food great? Yes. Would I pay $30 for a Tonkatsu set? Probably not.

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

Swiss Grill, Coronation Plaza

Random, useless bit of information Trivia: a couple of months ago we compiled a list of restaurants/cafes to visit (on an Excel spreadsheet that we can sort by food type and price, no less), naively thinking it'd be a breeze to cross these out as we go along by just picking one out to go to every weekend or so. Today, the list is probably 3x longer (though we no longer keep firm record) as we keep finding new places to add.

But! today I am proud to announce we managed to tick one off the list! We decided to have dinner at Swiss Grill on this fine Sunday evening. Pleasantly greeted by a cheerful waitress, we proceeded to order while watching more and more people streaming in. The place was teeming for a Sunday night.

Butcher by day, chef by night, the inhabitants of this butchery sharpen their knives and hone their skills to feed the living with fresh meat. Which ... is all true though, except their cafe does open from the morning :)

Spicy Italian Sausages ($13.90) arrived first: here were two large house made pork sausages with spices, on a bed of mashed potato and purple cabbage.

Sausages were great - while cutting into it you can feel the tension of the firm, crisp skin giving way to a soft meaty interior. I had expected it to be more spicy as its name suggests, but otherwise the balance of flavours of the salty sausage, creamy mash and sour crunchy cabbage (together with a dash of mustard and blob of ketchup) was lovely!

The sausage was (once again) very dense. Very tightly packed if that makes sense ... the sausage meat was firm to the bite and bursting with flavours of spice (?). It's quite evident that it's made from better quality meat parts instead of mystery meat, and it's quite a generous serving of meat for the price to be honest!

I was contemplating the Angus ribeye but at $40 for 220g I wasn't ready out to shell out that kinda dough today. Overheard the nice couple next to us raving about the Swiss Portobello Burger, I just had to give it a try. At $15.90, comes with a grilled premium chuck beef, bacon, emmental cheese and creamed portobello mushrooms. Add $2.50 for chunky fries and mesclun salad, which I did gladly :)

Damn, that's what I call a burger. Burger wasn't horrendously massive, but the chuck patty and the huge portions of sliced portobello was some serious stuff. The mushrooms were awweesssommme, creamy they were, and overflowing too. Had to scoop the escapees back under the bun where they belong. The overall taste was pretty stellar, and definitely use your knife and fork (though I detest using them on a burger ...) as the juices from the mushrooms can and will escape when squeezed!!!

Personally I felt the chuck beef patty at Fatboy's kinda edges out in terms of flavour - not sure why but I felt this patty to be really beefy but at the same time a little bland. *shrugs*

Would recommend this place for quality hunks of meat (just, you know, real cow.. none of that frozen, questionable nonsense). There is also no service charge here, happy days!

HGW Link : http://www.hungrygowhere.com/singapore/swiss_grill/

Rating (out of 4) :

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) :