Now how often do you see a restaurant called "Turkish Cuisine"? Imagine something so overtly simplistic was applied to your regular zi char stall, - "Chinese Cuisine".  The most appropriate response to that would surely be: "Simi lai eh?".  They could have called it "Istanbul" or "The Turk Perks" or "Sheesh!", but no, they called it "Turkish Cuisine".  But all the same, the restaurant's bold, red neon letterings caught my attention when I was in a cab along Upper East Coast Road one day and I finally got the opportunity to check it out last week.

The first thing that strikes you upon entering their East Coast branch is that it smelled like a spa.  Yes, one of those places where you get your shoulders kneaded like dough and your body scrubbed with mud and sand and other weird stuff.  The other thing that strikes you is the beautiful little ornamental decorations that lines one side of the wall.  Not things that would remind you of anything Turkish but very aesthetically tasteful indeed.  I liked the simple menu too - restaurants which have over-zealous menus tend to have under-zealous food.

 We were treated to a surprise complimentary starter, or more accurately an amuse bouche.  Well-seasoned bulgar wheat or what was described to us as "broken wheat", served on top crisp lettuce.  A nice start indeed!

One of our mains was a "Incik" or baked lamb shank.   The meat was absolutely gorgeous, a true melt-in-the-mouth delight.  A good way to start.  The sauce was commendable; was adequately tasty but was lacking a bit of body.  I do prefer my sauces a little heavy and thick.  But it did go well with the rice though I think they could have used a more fragrant type of long-grain like basmati to enhance the entire dish.  This dish, as described in the menu, was supposed to be served with swiss chard, a type of lettuce related to the beetroot and has red stems.  But interestingly they used baby kailan as a substitute here ("Wah lan, simi lai eh?!") as the vegetable garnish given the high cost and highly perishable nature of swiss chard.

 Another one of our mains which kept me trembling in anticipation which thus explains the poor quality of the photo was this beef shish karavan.  Marinated and grilled meat cubes served with mashed smoked eggplant and yoghurt.  The meat cubes were quite excellent, not too tough and well marinated.  But what stood out was the eggplant and yoghurt mash, quite unlike anything I've tasted.  I've never had cooked yogurt before (except maybe in tandoori chicken, which is indistinguishable anyway) and to have it in such a manner was quite a pleasant surprise.  The pita that accompnaied the dish too was excellent, doughy yet tender, a bit like good quality naan.

And to top off an excellent evening was this house specialty called "Kune fe".  Our waiter was quite courteously insistent that we try their specialty so we gave in.  And I'm glad we did!  Made of crispy wheat flex (like crispy deep fried tang hoon) with a warm cheesy (mozarella?) centre and the whole thing sits in heavy cream and ground pistachios.  "Eat hot! Eat hot!" we were urged.  Yum heaven!

Service was excellent here, our waiter was courteous, warm, affable and knowledgeable.  When asked which was his favourite dish, he did give us an honest opinion (the lamb shanks).  More importantly, it showed he has actually eaten the food served here.  Our water was topped up frequently, food arrived promptly and not too long after our starters.  two thumbs up.

The decor and ambience was fantastic, a perfect setting for a nice date.  Not too posh as to put some off and the tables were spaced adequately apart to allow some privacy.  The nett bill for two with drinks will come up to be about $50 a head.

The location of this place was a bit of a drawback though, a little inaccesible but I guess they serve the high-end crowd living nearby.  If you do want to try the food, you could try their Suntec, sky garden branch, though no guarantees that standards or noise levels will be agreeable.  Maybe being inaccessible has its advantages after all....

Food 8, Service 9, Atmosphere 9, Value for money 8

Turkish Cuisine

www.turkishcuisine.com.sg

162 Upper East Coast Road

Tel:6244-9891

Fax: 6244-8981

 I had just gotten back from some long sailing exercise and was craving some seafood.  Fresh seafood is a pretty scare commodity onboard ship due to its inability to keep its freshness for long.  There are some notable exceptions e.g. white sutchi fish which masquerades as chicken and salmon (10%) patties.  Plus, PY LOVES scallops so I thought I'd give her a treat.  So we went down to the Paragon Market Place to get our grub.  This supermarket easily wins the "Singapore's Most Atas Supermarket" Award - hands down.  Lemons going for $3 a pop, $100 per kg specialty cheeses, $750 champagnes and strange things like "organic quinoa"; you cannot get more upmarket than this.  So next time you want to treat yourself to gourmet food, you know where to go.  We, wanting to get fresh scallops and tuna, certainly did.  7 huge scallops for about $30 and tuna steaks at $15 per slab.  The beauty of fresh seafood is that you do not need to meddle too much with the cooking and seasoning, let the natural flavours speak for themselves.  This is the cardinal rule.  And restaurants, knowing this cardinal rule, always use the less fresh crabbies for chilli and the fresher ones for steamed dishes.

Above we have some pan-seared scallops.  The trick here is to cook your scallops about 80%, with the centre a little bit raw and tender and the outside a little crisp.  I was pretty happy this turned out well, considering the cost.  You certainly do NOT want to burn this, its not salmon (10%) patty.  Season well with black pepper and salt and you're done.

Next up we have our tuna steaks.  Here, seasoned with only salt and black pepper.  Like the scallops, my first time attempting this.  Unfortunately, unlike the scallops, I over-cooked this one.  The flesh in the centre should have been much redder, like a tuna sashimi and the outside slightly charred and caramelised.  Essentially, you want your tuna 50% done.  Over do it and it turns hard.  I served mine with paprika sweet potatoes.  Skin and cut up some sweet potatoes into wedges.  Toss liberally with olive oil, sprinkle paprika, lay onto a foil sheet and oven bake at 200 degrees celcius for about 20-25 minutes.  We bought some rocket leaves and some rather pricey baby tomatoes for our salad.  The marinated goat's cheese from the cheese counter was most excellent - creamy and sharp. 

A money-saving tip is to buy your scallops and tuna steaks frozen.  An advantage to this is that you may actually end up getting a fresher fish.  The fresh steaks may not move so quickly off the shelves and you could end up buying one that has been there a few days.  Furthermore, it is also possible that the supposedly fresh ones are thawed from frozen anyway!                    

So our mini seafood adventure came to a somewhat hardy end.  But at least I ate my food without feeling being ripped off by some fancy restaurant!

I paid a visit to Viva Mexico yesterday as part of my plan to check out the new row of eateries at Cuppage, located in between Centrepoint and the Starhub Tower.  And this despite the fact that Viva Mexico had garnered a few not-so-good reviews in the papers and rather poor reviews online.  But this is no mere Taco Bell or char kway teow stall.  I figured that the extreme dearth of restaurants in Singapore (the only other place I can think of is Margarita's) serving up some authentic Mexican chow warranted at least a one-off visit to this place; if nothing, just to try out a new cuisine.  

Viva is the new brainchild of the Palatevine Group of restaurants, one of the boys in the haute cuisine market.  If you're a regular at Clarke Quay, you would have noticed an atas Indian restaurant called Ras.  No prizes for guessing who controls that. 

Cuppage terrace was pretty busy on a Friday night when PY and I got there.  We actually had to wait about 45 mins for our table.  It was somewhat heartening to see that Viva was the most crowded restaurant there.  The hip and classy looking Japanese establishments there hardly looked inviting.  But north Indian food was doing pretty decent on its own, and so were the pubs. 

Upon being seated, we were served with some corn tortilla chips that were NOT your regular dorito's.  These felt real stone-ground and were unseasoned.  There were two accompanying dips - one of green chilli and the other red.  I enjoyed the green chilli dip which gave a nice raw, natural flavour to the chips.  So first up was this Ensalada Tere Reyna.  On the menu it is described as "A special house recipe - lettuce, coriander leaves, onion, sprouts, roasted chilies and shrimps coated in sesame seed, served with chilipiquin vinaigrette".

I did enjoy this dish - especially the shrimps.  Cooked to perfection and the sesame seeds stayed stuck.  I suspect the shrimps were marinated, pressed against the seeds and baked for a few mins.  The combination of the veggies were good too, very fresh.  What I appreciated was the use of real good-quality, red and juicy tomatoes.  The vinaigrette oil, though, was a little too much, but if you like oily salads, this is the one for you.

Below here we have Pescado a la Veracruzana (Verascruzana Fish) :"A recipe from east coast, Veracruz, the first Mexican city built by the Spanish.  This dish consists of tender fish covered with bell peppers, onions, capers, olives and chilis".

This dish, unfortunately, was decidedly ordinary.  Even the rice gave it a food-court feel.  I could have done this myself and not paid 30 bucks for it!  I thought the sauce could have been thickened up with a little bit of butter or corn starch.  I couldn't even tell what kind of fish was this.  Granted, the sauce was flavourful, would have been a success if done at home, but at an establishment like this, nothing to shout about.

Below, we have Chile Engonada:"A fine mix of beef and chicken, dried fruits and fresh fruits such as peach, banana and apple; stuffed in a poblano chili and served with walnut sauce, garnished with pomegranate.  A grand delicacy savoured during festive season in Mexico!". 

Ok, this was the piece de resistance of our entire dinner.  Something uniquely Mexican at last.  A poblano chili is a heart shaped bell pepper but has thicker walls which makes it easy for stuffing.  And stuff it they did, all that meat and fruit inside proved highly delicious.  But the trophy goes to the rich and savoury walnut sauce, absolutely to-die-for! And with the deft touch of exotic pomegranates - one of the new class of superfoods with health-giving antioxidants. 

Right, so the food is a little bit of a hit and miss but what about the ambience? Although I sat outside, I found the inside a little too dark and its decor consisting of cactuses and such a little bit tacky.  The area in general was in want of a bit of space I felt.  Too many establishments squeezed together.  Although, like most pampered Singaporeans, I would have preferred air-conditioning, sitting outside was no sweat (pun), rather cooling on a cloudy night.

Service was generally ok, the Indian servers looked a little lost at time with out dishes but generally waiting times were acceptable and our waitress was attentive.  Nothing much to fault in this department especially since it was quite a crowd.

The real stickler has to come with respect to value for money - P. O. O. R.  Serving portions were absolutely dismal, and I say this not only with regards to my food but also to the tables around.  Mains were going at $25-$30 and appetisers $10-$20.  I felt that I was being treated in a seven-course degustation manner with every a la carte dish.  This is really cost-cutting the wrong way!

With that said, Viva is a place you want to go once.  And I mean once.  Splurge all you can on funky Mex dishes and then go to Taco Bell for the rest of the year to satisfy your burrito cravings...

Food 6.5, Service 7.5, Atmosphere 6.5, Value for money 4.5

Viva Mexico

23 Cuppage Road, Cuppage Terrace

Tel: 6235 0440

Email: vivamexico@palatevine.com.sg

Open Daily, lunch 12pm - 230pm . Dinner, 6pm - 1130pm

This was one of those off-the-cuff things.  It was one of those what-shall-i-cook-?-dun-wanna-eat-the-same-old-stuff kind of days.  Yeah, you've had one of those I'm sure.  PY has them one in a while - just replace cook with buy and stuff with clothes.  So I hope that I'm the FIRST IN THE WORLD (!!) to come with the concept of the IOS (Inside-Out Sandwich).  So instead of the "filling" inside, it goes outside ... you can probably call it the "peeling". 

So for the above, take some chix breasts or thigh fillets. Put them on a board and cover with film or into those transparent plastic bags, pound till flattish using whatever you can find ... a vase or an old keyboard or a block of nian gao left over from last year.  marinate up your meat; whatever turns you on.  I did a simple salt and black pepper marinade.  But you can do BBQ, spicy or cajun.  You can even brine the meat too.  Then I lightly toasted some bread (the reason will be made known later), sliced up some tomatoes, bought some smoked ham, grated some cheese and grabbed some dried basil and parsley.  So at the bottom, I started with a layer of meat, then bread, then in-no-particular-order, your cheese, ham and veggies with a sprinkling of herbs as desired.  I used parmesan and mozzarella in this instance.  And the smoked ham gives it wonderful flavour. Then you end off at the top with bread, meat and if you like more cheese at the top (for example, if you like browned mozarella).  The reason for toasting the bread is so that dry bread absorbs the tomatoes and chicken juices better.  (Well, that was my reasoning - I haven't tried this a second time with non-toasted bread slices).  Then you pop the whole thing into a 200 degree celcius oven for about 20 mins.  Make sure you check that the meat is cooked - use a small sharp knife to pierce the meat, if juices run clear, it is cooked! (Chicken carpaccio or sashimi does NOT work well here).

So the beauty of this inside out sandwich is that first you see MEAT MEAT MEAT outside, yum! And then the bread absorbs all these wonderful juices, so make sure to put meat next to bread.  I recommend using good quality ingredients - the cardinal rule to making a good sandwich.  Use expensive bread, vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh chicken - it's well worth it! Some good pairings with chicken include avocado, bacon and mayonnaise.  Play around with the flavours.  Try it also with beef patties, beef burgers, emu meat, zebra steaks, crocodile fillets etc - whatever pleases you.  Just find the right blend of "filling" and "peeling" and you'll be flipping happy inside-out in no time.

Actually this blog post was up a long time ago albeit only with the pictures and no text.  I had put it up last weekend but just had no time to type anything because I was busy preparing to fight this monster called The Manex Assessment due last monday.  Put simply, this involves driving your ship in a confined and exact way to variouspoints located only a few hundred metres away from each other.  So its something like "dancing with your ship" and testing your skills and to some extent your luck.  If you looked up at the big bright moon that day, you might have seen Chang'e,嫦娥, with a big question mark over her head wondering what the hell were these tiny grey vessels doing moving in a zig zag fashion in the world's busiest waterway with 200m long and 100,000 tonnes heavy merchant ships going at full speed.

But if you ever thought that the mid autumn festival was only about the moon and the moongal, you might be glad to know that it also celebrates the end of the summer harvesting season.  This means that farmers and their family members come together to celebrate the harvest by doing the usual eat-pomelo-burn-lantern-play-sparkle-and-eat-mooncake while the scholars buy atas Raffles hotel mooncakes and flaunt their haute and bulging "Raffles Hotel Mooncake I-Am-Not-A-Plastic-Bag" bag all over town.

So for awardees like me, who straddle the fence between this farmer-scholar divide, are burdened with the onerous task of performing both these mid autumn rituals.  But to serve our foodie purposes here, I present only the yummy mooncake portion.

So first up we have, this snowskin champagne truffle and white chocolate ganache mooncake from the famous Raffles Hotel, Singapore.  At $48+ for a box of eight, this has an atas-ness score of 10 upon 10.  If anyone tells you so-and-so chicken is melt in your mouth or so-and-so cake is melt in your mouth, take it with a pinch of salt.  But if someone tells oyu that Raffles Hotel snowskin mooncakes are melt in your mouth, boy are they right.  These sinful little ones are so fine that popping one in your mouth sends you almost to the pearly gates.  The secret I feel, lies not in the fancy filling but in the delicateness of the snow skin which is just exquisite.  Pity that this can't keep for long, best eaten up to five days after purchase.  But that shouldn't be a problem.

And after Raffles Hotel, I trekked down to Raffles City where there was a mooncake firesale since it was the last day of the MAF.  I managed to pick up this white lotus paste double yolk from Polar Cafe.  I got it for only $5, a real steal.  For a mid-range mooncake, the taste was pretty decent but I thought the skin was a tad bit too hard.  A little over-baked perhaps?  But the filling was quite kao-kao, or quite plentiful and the skin not too thick.  What I would have liked was more melon seeds!  Thre was only a grand total of like maybe 4 seeds in the whole mooncake.

And coming in at the bottom range, we have this roll of  豆沙仔 from NTUC.  Ok, so for five of these, you pay $1.70.  Hardly something you'll even find in Hotel 81.  They're hardish, the skin is quite thick and the filling is rough and a bit fudgy.  But after eating the first two, these little buggers kinda grew on me.  I'm the type who likes to eat hard stuff, as opposed to PY who likes soft.  So she eats the soft, chewy subway cookies while I prefer famous Amos.  And I was pretty happy just chewing and chewing on the 豆沙仔.  Rather therepeutic.

But of course, coming in at the "bottom bottom" are the home-made mooncakes by my Aunty Shah.  The cost price of each full sized mooncake is probably about $2 or even less.  The ingredients are from Phoon Huat and Bake King.  On the left is her famous green tea filling mooncake with a flaky parmesan cheese sprinkled crust.  It's not pastry-like flaky but rather cake-like flaky as you can see.  Each piece is slightly bigger than the size of a golf ball and contains two hazelnuts each.  On the right is the traditional lotus and egg yolk filling.  Once again, a thin skin with substantial amount of filling and melon seeds. Oh yes, in case you didn't know, the egg yolks in mooncakes are from salted duck eggs.

So there ends my mooncake culinary adventure ... at least until a year later.  Wishing you, my friends, a very happy harvest.