Review: Teppei

If there is one place where people take photos of their food, or rather photos of themselves receiving their food, it must be Teppei. Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you must have heard of this little hole-in-the-wall where people queue for hours for food, in Tanjong Pagar.

I myself walked by this place for months, always ogling the crowd and only belatedly kicked myself for not making a reservation earlier for their $60 dinner omakase. By the time I tried it, it was a choice of $50, $60 or $80 dinner omakase, that had wagyu beef and sushi as the margin-inflating extras.

As with all places that you go to with high expectations, it was inevitable that it should disappoint at dinner. But at lunch, where I had queued just a few days before, it was indeed a triumph to get a seat and I felt richly rewarded by the barra charashi that I'd seen online again and again.

Let's be clear, there is definitely a strategy for eating at Teppei. Lunch opens at 12 noon. The queue begins at 11am. There will be enough people in the queue, by 11.45am, to seat both the first and second seating. However, there is a lull at about 12.45pm when the whole of the first seating will have left. My observation after a few times, is that if you begin queing between 11.45-12 noon you can get into those slots. You will most definitely get there if you are in a group of one or two people, in fact, people who go alone get to the head of the queue all the time. If you have four people, you are out of your mind.

They won't seat you before your whole party arrives. And should you miss that 12.45pm slot well, then you will be waiting a long time. I think they do about 4 turns every lunchtime, at approximately $50 per two heads, that's 18 seats multipled by 4, and then $25, which is $1800 and an additional 50% takeaway, or $2700 revenue for each lunchtime. Which although substantial, actually isn't much for how hard the chefs work, and how many extra hands they hire. You'll see what I mean when you go.

The cheerful obliging man behind the counter is Yamashita Teppei, who hails from Fukuoka, Japan. The dishes at lunchtime are largely tempura priced at $16-19 and the barra chirashi at $16 which is a very decent mound of sashimi served in sauce atop a bowl of Japanese rice. There is a new special everyday, the day we were there, it was yellowtail sashimi and what we discovered after a few goes is that you can customize your barra chirashi (realized this because one barra chirashi is rather small and leaves you wanting). You can get an upsized barra chirashi, or one with tempura for $24.

Given the limited lunch menu, and the appetizers which you pick from table tubs- I believe it was hijiki seaweed, a small pot of oden and stir fried shredded pickled radish, the service is fast, efficient and hot. It is always really hot inside this place, but inside, the cool mix of ikura and chunks of salmon, tuna and scallops, topped with a yuzu ponzu and pea sprouts, is refreshing against the warm rice and the world is good. The chefs are buzzing and although everything is served out of plastic bags and packets, this place has a dive-bar type atmosphere that makes it kind of hip.

I have to admit that going in for dinner, was not without reservations. Haha, a good pun since reservations are what indeed you will need, the place is booked solid for most of the year and opens again in September for October-December reservations. I had seen pictures from my friends and between the rough thick sashimi, the random skewers and the slightly wobbly food texture, I had my doubts, but when offered a chance two 6.30pm seats late in the day by a absentee friend, I felt I couldn't turn it down just the way I suppose Singaporeans queue for Hello Kitty, or Taylor Swift tickets. Just because it's rare!

I don't know if there were really 22 courses, I didn't count but it's true that there were many many small plates. I felt a bit cheated that many of them were poked on satay sticks, like one broad bean, one thin sliver of Japanese tomato, one leaf of 'ice vegetable' that was handed to us by the assistant and one crispy orange little crab, also shoved onto a satay stick. The sushi was handed to you, in individual metal spoons. Those were 'courses'. One broad bean is not a course. Not in my book anyway.

There were also little itty-bitty saucers of again, sauteed dragon's beard vegetable, oden and three sad-looking char-grilled edamame (tasted the same as non-grilled edamame). There was an unappetizing, small salad that was served at room temperature, symptomatic of the lack of refinement in the food, just stuff served out at a breakneck pace. A plate of four or five roughly-hewn sashimi, salmon, salmon belly, tuna , hamachi (yellowtail) and swordfish. A deep-fried tiny fish with a slice of lemon. A slice of meaty fish tempura, with a slice of lemon. A bowl of ten littleneck clams, served in soup with a lemon. The clams were sandy. There was a small saucer of what the chef and assistants told us were Dinosaur. "But what is it really, is a clam or a barnacle", as that's what the gnarly footed shape looked like. It's Dinosaur, they said blankly. For the record, when you break off the shell, it evinces a small red flesh, similar to a crab leg, though not as chewy as a sea snail.

Everything tasted, a little briney. The fish tasted a little briney, the crab, the dinosaur, even the ice vegetable tasted briney. It just didn't taste fresh and the mouthfeel wasn't right, it wasn't turgid and distinct. For $80, I feel that I can get a full sushi/sashimi meal, at a decent if mid-range place like Hakumai at International Plaza or even Akashi, so it didn't feel like a steal and I walked out feeling slightly moorish in the mouth, like when you've binged on over-oiled yet slightly tasteless supermarket sashimi.

The buzz at dinner, was quite different from lunch, when the air was cooler (but still smelly on the clothes) and you ate with a line of people outside. At dinner, the area is deserted (it is Tanjong Pagar, after all) and the restaurant just seemed to get hotter and hotter as the two hours wore on. The shirts stuck to our backs and it became actually a bit unpleasant, especially as you could see the chefs busily preparing the next courses for the next seating at 8.30pm.

The best courses, I felt, were the Negitoro handroll. It came wrapped in a crisp seaweed with flavourful soft negitoro, wrapped with crispy tempura bits. The tenkasu really made the roll. I also liked the uni scallop sushi, the shabu chutoro, the chawamushi (pretty regular but tasted of milk and sweet potato at the base) and the slice of wagyu beef fried with crispy garlic and scallions.

By the time we came to the mains I wasn't so much full as I was, tired and confused from the array of little tastes and dishes. The choices are Fried Rice with Sunny Side Egg (spicy), Sashimi Rice, Soba(hot or cold), Udon (hot or cold). I was hoping the sashimi rice might be the same as the lunch's barra chirashi, but it was instead, four metal spoons, containing four kinds of small sushi. I had the hot udon, which was plentiful with pink-rimmed fishcake and wakame. Dessert was the choice of a scoop of Yuzu, Green Tea, Sesame, Calpis or Salted Caramel ice cream.

All in all, it is a decent amount of food, if not a lot of food, for $80, but I think the sweet spot in pricing is probably $60. It isn't very good quality and I dare say the standards have dropped as the restaurant has become really busy (I've personally experienced this even with the takeaway at lunch), but for an experience with friends, I would definitely still go for lunch, though probably not for dinner. I didn't manage very good photos at night because of the low light but there are many reviews online that have lovely pictures that make the food look very appetizing like here at PinkyPiggu and here at SGFoodonFoot.

Teppei Japanese Restaurant
Orchid Hotel
1 Tras Link
Singapore 078867
Tel: +65 62227363
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teppeirestaurant
Lunch: Mon-Fri 11.45am-3pm / Sat 12.15pm-3pm / Not available on Sundays
Dinner: 1st seating 6.30pm-8.20pm / 2nd seating 8.40pm-11pm / Closed at 11pm everyday and on selected Sundays

Review: Nassim Hill Bistro and Bakery

I was introduced to this place by a friend and even though I live fairly close by, I had never even associated the building with a bakery. This is a bakery-bistro-bar (in the morning, lunchtime and at night) that is sited at the back of the old Tanglin Post Office, behind Swiss Butchery and in what used to be the Friven headquarters.

The building is a hodge-podge of businesses that doesn't really make sense to me. Even the entrance, is either from the drop off, where these days, all the obscenely expensive super cars get to park, or else in the basement carpark via the cargo lift that I presume is used to transport furniture up to Domicil on the top floor. It seems very hard to fathom that it could be home to a good food outlet or bakery.

Odd though it is, this place is absolutely fantastic. This casual place is by the same group, Imaginings Pte Ltd, that owns KPO. I'm glad I didn't know that before I went, because I would have had the impression that it was slick or overpriced. The interesting thing about this place is that it doesn't really have much character, cement screed industrial floors, regular dark brown wood ones, the servers were yellow beer-sponsored tee-shirts- you know, it's just regular. It has random touches like a huge marble counter and stained glass panes, which are as inconguent as they are quirky.

But the food is excellent and consistent. The eggs are rich and nicely scrambled, the pancakes are fluffy, the banana foster french toast is thick and the fish and chips ($23) have a wonderful, crisp beer batter which puts it in at least the top three if not the best that I've had in Singapore.  The steak and eggs, or spanish eggs are very good, as are the sandwiches- ham and emmenthal cheese sandwich on walnut cranberry bread is particularly delicious and the hot rueben on Austrian beer bread was warm, juicy and massive. Everything comes with a side of salad, fries and a large variety basket of warmly, freshly baked bread, which is quite a luxury. They bake all their bread daily and I am told that it is baked and bought in by the artisan baker at Killiney.

Over the Easter weekend, they had specials of potato rosti with smoked salmon, sweet potato has, waffles and ricotta hotcakes- it was great to find a full menu that actually draws you in!

There isn't any service charge (granted, service is a little hectic when the place is full as it can get at weekend lunch) and the meals are priced at $15-18 for eggs, $18 for sandwiches and $17 for salads. The helpings are probably the most generous of any brunch place that I can think of. I like that there is ample choice with five pages of brunch, sandwiches, salads and pastas and also that the layout of the place is spacious and if you go in the morning for breakfast, fairly empty and peaceful.

Nassim Hill Bakery Bistro Bar
56 Tanglin Road #01-03 Tanglin Post Office, Singapore 247964

Tel: +65 6835 1128
Opening Hours: 8:00am – 12:00am (Closed Mon), 

Breakfast & brunch: 8am – 5pm, Lunch: 11am – 5pm, Dinner: 5pm – 10:30pm

All pictures courtesy of Nassim Hill Bakery's page. For more tantalising photos, check out gninethree's review in pictures here.

Review: GAEST Sandwich Shop

 

I always laugh a little inside, when people say, "you haven't been updating your blog these days, you haven't been eating out izzzit". Oh, if only that were true, I would have to resort to many days of salads to try to keep the bulge down (this is my second day of pure salads, so excuse me if the post is a little grouchy, I get really grumpy and start craving tiramisu and pizza by about Day 2).

Actually, we have been eating, making our way through the names slowly but surely. It's just that I've been trying to find inspiration to write about what we've been eating and many times I am just not that inspired, because the place isn't that differentiated. Also, I find that with the new trend of hip, casual places, the menus have become a bit more, dare I say, disjunct and sparse, such that it seems disingenously less than a full review to write that I found this place, that only serves, 7 kinds of burritos and 4 flavours of San Pelligrino sodas.



I could tell you about Assembly's great coffee and their 7 brunch items, but 4 of those were scrambled eggs done different ways. It would be the stuff of a Facebook post, but not necessarily a review.



GAEST or 'guest' in English, is a place that has opened in the Tanjong Pagar district, in the buzzing district of Mc Callum Street, just a couple of spots away from the lovely SPR MKT. This place is tiny, so a strike against it for me is the kitchen or sandwich preparation area, which is merely a bar extension of their coffee counter. They are a brand new clean-cut Scandinavian place, although personally, I didn't really see anything particularly Scandinavian except that the sandwich features potato and the decor is light wood and IKEA-rised lights (but isn't everything in Singapore these days?).



This unit was last a coffee shop and sits at the foot of the boutique apartment block, the Clift. There are only three tables indoor where the door is left open and the rest of the seats are outdoor or for takeaway. As I mentioned, the day I was there, the staff were busy and noisily chopping the roast pork and bread on the tiny counter, so I was a little underwhelmed. I was told that they make their bread daily and their roast pork, at their homes, which is real committment.

What I liked about it were the friendly owners and the bread- the sourdough bread had a proper sour kick to it and I couldn't stop eating the crust, it was so sharply delicious. That being said, the sandwiches, while more bespoke, are pretty small, a little dry and at $15, not terribly good value, as they are much smaller than those at Nassim Hill Bistro or just around the corner at Cedele or the Sandwich Shop.

We tried the potato sandwich, the roast pork sandwich and the chicken sandwich. I make roast pork crackling and smoked pulled pork at home, so I was not taken with what it was, but I liked the use of more varied ingredients, like pea tendrils, hazelnuts, sliced apples and rye crunch in the sandwiches. I could not taste the cranberries that were meant to come in the pork sandwich, but it was indeed the best of the three, with the chicken being the plainest. The salad, which was a heaping of mixed vegetables and citrus fruit seemed a much better deal, so I will try that next if we return. We were the only Asian table there, I guess not many consider a sandwich and coffee for below $20 a good deal- but the place looks like they are doing good business nonetheless!


GAEST
21 Mc Callum Street #01-01

The Clift, Singapore 069047

Singapore 66340922

Photos from GAEST's Facebook page

Giveaway: Naturai Personal Salad Maker NSM1501 from Mayer!

Exciting news! We are giving away a Naturai Personal Salad Maker from Mayer, model number NSM1501, a handy device that helps you to prepare a whole range of thin and thick sliced and shredded vegetables.

It comes with 6 shredding cones, for everything from crinkle-cut french fries, to hard cheese, fine shredding, coarse shredding, thin and thick slices. These can be used to quickly prepare salads that include vegetables, cheese, meats or roots. I can imagine that this is great for popiah, Chinese New Year pen cai or yu sheng. It is also easy to clean and safe for (older) children to use.

This item is worth $120 and is a stock piece sponsored by Mayer, meaning that the box does not look perfect and it has been opened for testing (by myself, once) but is unused and otherwise brand-new. Mayer provides a one year warranty for their products. I've attached the spex sheet here.

To win, all you have to do is leave a comment or link to your favourite salad recipe or current favourite place to dine out in Singapore . We will close for entries on the 31st of March. The item is for self-collection, in Singapore only. 

Review: Morsels Restaurant At Mayo Street

We had been meaning to try Morsels at Mayo Street for a very long time and this Friday, we decided to take a spontaneous trip there. Much has been written about this place and so I'm just going to concentrate on the food. The location is a lovely old shophouse, one side has been fitted out to be a steel kitchen and wood bar and the other casual tables with mismatched furniture and comfortable barstools at the counter. The general feel of the place is casual and unpretentious, much like their earnest and friendly co-owners, Brian and Petrina, who are behind the kitchen. A staff of perhaps 10 buzzes around the galley kitchen and bar, preparing and serving dishes, not quite with the masculine velocity of Burnt Ends, but definitely with purposeful and unintrusive confidence. 

We decided to leave our selection of small plates to the chefs and just sit back and soak in the night. We wound up tasting about 12 plates, cycling through half the specials and menu-featured small plates. To start, we had the limegrass mojito and a Hokkaido scallop cerviche with compressed plums and tobiko with home-made tortilla chips to start. The menu is based on small plates, Western concepts with Asian-inspired ingredients and this seems to be working really well. I was very encouraged to see that there was a great mix of demographics and age in the restaurant, and despite the slightly smoggy day and difficult Little India evening traffic and parking. Too often, restaurants in Singapore are not equally supported and attract a clientele that is either highly specific, or aligned to the chef/owner's ethnicity - rather like how Travis Masiero's Luke's is always white and Willin Low's Relish is always well, Asian, so I was especially happy to see that this wasn't the case here.  

Of the first three plates, I really enjoyed the home-made tortilla chips- just the right combination of crispness and puff, basically the kind of flaky pastry that would taste good with just about any dip. I felt the cerviche was a little too sweet with the plums, I would have liked to taste more sharpness, to contrast with the smooth mellowness of the scallop and more tobiko for crunch. I also really enjoyed the hamachi, with green manzanilla olives, shaved baby radish, radish sprouts, buckwheat, argula and heirloom tomatoes. Their yuzu ginger dressing tasted of juniper berries and softened black pepper- it was complex and really tickled your palette. This was one of my favourite dishes. Another was the third plate, also on the specials, the mesclun with compressed green apple, jamon, candied pumpkin seeds and creamy burrata, served with a simple salt-and-pepper toasted crostini and with a raspberry-balsalmic reserve. Simple and delicious.  

The next dish was the littleneck clams, cooked in a miso broth and with home-made kim chi. Despite Z's protestations that he could taste the butter in the broth, I liked it, it was rich with a good kick and I appreciated the clean and opened clams, with the spice of the kim chi just making the dish outstanding and different. The fifth dish was the pork pasta, served with what tasted like a green curry and sour cream sauce. This was probably my least favourite dish, the pork was a bit stiff and mixing the sour cream in actually made the dish very heavy, if filling.  

These were the first of the pasta dishes, the sixth was a black squid ink risotto, with octopus that had been poached for three hours in dashi, then grilled, sliced and basted again with dashi. This was drizzled over by salted egg yolk and topped with ikura. This dish is actually really in sync with what Morsels is about, the use of unlikely ingredients like the salted egg sauce, which was delicious and the octopus which was sweet, soft and charred. I also appreciate the little touches like the microgreens, the Japanese fish roe and sour plums and the edible flowers that garnished the plates. In some restaurants I feel that the cooking doesn't live up to the garnishes, but here I felt the attention to detail and the quality of food preparation did.

This was also the point at which I started to feel quite full and would have been happy to move to desserts, but the guys I was eating with were still able to eat and we hadn't yet moved on to the meats. The seventh dish was a nori pasta with Alaskan Ling Cod, topped with ikura. This is a special item, as opposed to a regular menu item. The chef told us that a new menu is currently in the works, so that is definitely a reason to return. This was my second not-favourite dish of the night, while decently executed, the fish wasn't flaky the way you expect cod to be, it was still a little turgid and too solid (as you can see I suspect, from enlarging the side of the fish in the photo below). The pasta was flavourful- the seaweed pesto is made by mixing nori with basil, pinenuts, sesame and olive oil in the regular combination but somehow the pasta was a little stiff and the taste of the nori also came out slightly bland, I think I would have preferred something saltier like Chinese black olive. 

The eighth dish was a grilled pork cheek. I think you can see from the photo below how marbled and well-seared it was. This was very good, but so marbled that it crossed the line from flavourful into fatty. I would probably have used a pork cheek jowl with paradoxically a little less fat, marinated it with rum and raisins to give a sweetness and served it with a sharp mustard to cut through it. But I'm splitting hairs here, it has to be good enough to inspire you, which it was and most, if not everyone, would have found it just fine the way it was.  

The prettiest dish to me, was the ninth dish of braised beef short rib. This was grilled and then curiously, it was sous-vided at 78 degrees for part of the duration of our meal. I didn't understand how it was so tender- having sous vided meat, I know that it can't be done in such a short period of time, but it hadn't appeared to be pre-cooked. Part of the magic I guess! It was then removed from the sous vide and braised in a pan, basted and glazed with the gravy and sat atop a bed of purple Okinawan sweet potato. It had never occurred to me to use sweet potato for such a purpose, let alone a purple one and I could see from it's vivid colour that it had also been sous-vided and not cooked or roasted. 

That's a lot of trouble to go through for the visual appeal of a dish and this was beautiful and delicious to boot, with the meat cutting well under a knife. The meat was supple, yet soft and flavourful. It was totally finished by the guys. There were other meat dishes on the menu which we didn't get around to because we were already full and it was getting late. We'd stayed at the restaurant almost two and a half hours and I was quite amazed for for a small place, they had the dedication and gumption to go with such a diverse menu, which required serving multiple small plates at each table. 

For dessert, we had the Morsels Signature Milo Tira-miso ($12 for a small and $16 for a large jar) and a Bluberry and Apple Jam Cheesecake, which was on the list of specials. Both were served in mason jars and were very good. The first was a tirmiso-like dessert, where the chef used miso shiro in the dessert to make a savoury-sweet tiramisu and had milo on the top instead of cocoa. It was excellent and not sweet but I have to say that it wasn't hugely different from a regular tiramisu, except it was more mellow and yes, savoury. Not as savoury as I expected when I ordered it, which I guess is good, although I would have been interested to taste miso. The cheesecake was more conventional but with a gorgeous almond, macadamia nut topping that impressed even our dessert-loving trio.

One criticism I've heard about Morsels, is that while the food is good and unique, people felt they weren't full after an expensive meal. The dishes ranged in price depending on the cost of the ingredients. The hamachi was $15 but the Burrata was $25. It depends on how many dishes you order, we were all very full but you would perhaps spend $100/person at dinner before drinks, so it may not be the most suitable place for a family. That being said, I don't think the prices of places like Esquina or Artichoke are any lower. I thought the fascinating mix of Brian and Petrina, his more free-wheeling ways and her clear discipline and attention to detail, which is required to keep time and bring so many plates out hot to the tables, is really something unusual for the Singapore food scene and in a way, cannot be done outside of a small, intimate place and at this sort of price point.  I really liked that the place was warm and friendly, as opposed to coldly commercial, which can be the case at a lot of the celebrity-chef offshoot restaurants and  that the food was inventive and well-executed, I would definitely bring friends for a good night out.

Morsels
35 Mayo Street
Tel: 63966302
Dinners only, 6-10pm Tuesday-Saturday