Putien, VivoCity Lunch

Now, there were four of us. Holiday was over for some. We wanted to go to VivoCity for some clothes shopping, but first, lunch. Putien was the chosen one and that's where we went. We tried a couple of new dishes and meatless rice noodles. We also ordered our favorite green drinks.

Hairy Crab Business, Wang Bao He

If you go to Shanghai when the season of hairy crab is on, it's like an obligation to have them at least once. People seemed to ask and tell us to go and eat them. It is the perfect place to have them, surely. Of course, you can get them elsewhere in other countries, but the experience probably would not be the same. I know some restaurants here in Singapore, sell them for $40 per piece, not a big one. They are rather small and it's a tad challenging to eat actually, at least for us.

While some people would be super excited to experience the delicacy, both DH and I were on "limited" excitement. First of all, we stayed in Pudong while the restaurant is in Puxi. It's a bit of distance. A friend had managed to book us a table at the very last minute and it was for dinner. I am famous for not liking to go out in the dark and most of the time, we do not take big dinner. We tend to take smaller dinner these days.

But, --. People had been so nice to us and we were in Shanghai for Pete's sake. Just go. So off we went to a restaurant called Wang Bao He, a restaurant that is well known in specializing in crab dishes. Probably all dishes there have crabs in them, except for their desserts and drinks. 

In the end, we were not particularly impressed about the crabs and the dishes we had.  We are glad to have gone and sampled such a popular kind of crab in Shanghai and tasted the dishes (see below) in this well known restaurant, but I don't think this is a restaurant that we'd like to return to. 

Homemade Bakmoy

Bakmoy is quite widely known in Indonesia, it is a Chinese-Indonesian dish, originally made using pork, but more and more people make it using chicken. Bakmoy is a sweet soy sauce soup based dish, eaten normally with rice. The stars of the dish are the cubed meat and beancurd. Very simple to make but tasty. 

Hakka Noodles, Holland Drive

Just in the recent months, I have become more willing to go places for breakfast and try different local food in the country. One of the places that we go to is Holland Drive Market and Food Centre. There are a few noodles shops that I get my breakfast from, one of which is Hakka Noodles. The above is only $3 but they fill me up and make me quite a happy person. It came with a bowl of soup with fish ball, dumplings, tofu and a few other items. Such a bargain and quite delicious!

Gado Gado

I seldom make complicated dish. This one is a little time consuming but it is not hard to do. Most the vegetables need to be blanched or boiled separately. I normally pan fried the beancurd instead of deep frying them, to make them healthier. Cucumber and tomatoes are served fresh. I also make the peanut sauce at home from scratch, although they are readily available in the super market as well.

Four Seasons Chinese Restaurant, London

Okay, by now, we feel that going to London is not complete without having a meal at Four Season Chinese Restaurant. Their famous item is roast duck, but I do not really care about duck and I do not wish to increase my cholesterol level by eating something that I do not even care of. DH loves duck, but he was unwilling to eat the ducks all by himself. We ended up with a plate of roast pork (with crackling skin, yum!), barbecue pork (delish!) and soya chicken (yum!).

We wanted to have more green vegetables and ordered Braised Beancurd in Oyster Sauce. It turned out that it had more beancurd than the greens we wanted. Oh, well.

We also had a small bowl of prawn dumplings, there were four pieces of them and they were just fine for us. Til next time!

Gyoza-Ya Lunch

There's a couple of new Japanese dining places at Robinsons' Orchard and one of them is Gyoza-Ya specialising in, of course, gyoza.  We, of course, had to try their gyoza. We thought the dumplings were really nice.

The two of us also tried their Chicken Karaage below, Seafood Fried Rice and Soboro Tofu. We'd like to go back and have more!

Lunch At Putien

DH apparently had been wanting to try the food at this Putien restaurant in Vivocity. The two of us were seated in a small table. The table got too crowded as we had three dishes and a bowl of rice on top of a pot of tea and two cups. DH and I successfully dropped a piece of chicken each. How disappointing! The pieces we dropped were our favorite parts. The above is deep fried chicken with garlic.

The one in the claypot above is Braised Bean curd with Minced Meat Sauce. I am not sure what kind of meat it was and the picture they put on the menu was a lot more presentable than what they served on our table. It was quite delicious, despite its look.

Fried Heng Hwa Bee Hoon that we ordered, looked sad on the plate given to us. The picture on the menu was way so attractive, no surprise DH wanted to have a try. It's a good thing that in terms of taste, all of the dishes were not too bad.

We also tried their dessert . DH picked Chilled Putian Loquat in Herbal Jelly (above) and I had  Chilled Lemon Grass with Fruits (below). Nice!

Ya Hua Bakut Teh

We had been eye-ing this place for a long time but we never really made it until recently. We came early before 12PM to make sure we could get a parking spot nearby. My favorite was actually the bean curd dish. Delish!

Crystal Jade Kitchen Lunch

DH and I had lunch at Crystal Jade Kitchen in Suntec City, it was all about comfort food. Aside from the above, DH had fish porridge and we also ordered a basket of Dumplings.