Tim Ho Wan (添好运) - Plaza Singapura Branch

I've heard so much about Tim Ho Wan and how good the dim sum is, so I've been wanting to try it prior to coming back Singapore. And I finally had a chance to. :) I went out with my besties 2 days before, and we initially wanted to go to Swee Choon (again, because we have heard fabulous reviews), but Jalan Besar was too far and we were lazy to travel, so we (or rather I) decided to queue up for Tim Ho Wan. The queue was long but not scarily long as a 2-hour-wait, which I've heard of before. =/ I think going earlier before the dinner crowd and making sure that all your dinner partners are there with you helps you go in faster. We started queuing just before 6pm, and there was already a snakelike-queue. DON'T go there just to wait unless of course you don't mind seeing other (smarter) people go in before you, even if you came first.

We waited for perhaps 30 minutes or more before we finally got a table. The place was bustling and all the tables were crowded and that stayed the way till after 8pm. We ordered a whole lot of food since it was our first time there, including the Big 3 Heavenly Kings (meant to be 4, but we missed one), but unfortunately, not all were hits. I'm just going to do a quick review on the hits and the near-misses. :)

Hits
1) Baked Bun with BBQ Pork (脆皮焗叉烧包) - $4.50

Source: Google Images (Pinky Piggu)

This has a lot of raves and it's one of the Heavenly Kings. Personally, I think the BBQ pork filling is rather generous and the taste hits all the right notes. However, the bun is sweet too, so that made it a little too sweet for my taste. But I love the texture of the bun, it's really quite fluffy. :)

2) Congee with Lean Pork, Century Egg and Salted Egg (金银蛋瘦肉粥) - $4.20

Source: Google Images (thediningtable.sg)

I love this congee! It tastes really good, and the lean pork, century egg and salted egg makes a very good combination. The congee is also not the thick kind but has a watery texture which I quite like too. I shared this with my 2 other besties and, almost, wished we could order another bowl (which we couldn't because of the amount of food that they ordered.). :(

3) Vermicelli Roll with Shrimp (Chee Cheong Fun) - $5.50

Source: Google Images (mydailymoo)

Another one of my favourites! I love the smooth velvety skin of this rice roll and the shrimps they use were also very fresh! :) The sauce was also not overly salty which made it easier to drizzle the sauce over and eat it together. :)

*Apologies for no original pictures for the above 3 foods, I was busy playing "Plants Vs Zombies" on my friend's iPad even when the food arrived, so I had to source the above images from Google. :)  

4) Garlic, Spinach and Mushroom Dumplings (金蒜香菇菠菜饺) - $3.80

Source: My own

I have to admit, when this first appeared on our table, I was a little apprehensive because of all the greens and I was quite full as well. So I wasn't sure if I could stomach this, but after my friend's goading, I decided to try it, and it was surprisingly good. :) Very healthy but very nice and it's vegetarian too. :)

5) Poached Fresh Seasonal Vegetables (白灼清油菜) - $5.50

Source: Google Images (qingmoments) 

Usually I don't order vegetables at dim sum places because it's bound to be overpriced, but my friend ordered this. =/ So well, it was actually quite good too. The soy sauce and sesame oil drizzled over was balanced and went very well with the cooked-nicely vegetables. :)

6) Prawn Dumpling (Har Gow) - $5.50

Source: My own

The har gow were pretty decent, in my opinion, the prawn filling was fresh and juicy and the skin was alright as well. My bestie loved it, she said that she doesn't have the jelat feeling that she usually has when she eats it, and she could eat another basket of this by herself. Lol. :)

Near-Misses

And now comes the near-misses, which could be a personal preference problem because the other 2 found it good but I just didn't quite like them. 

1) Pan-fried Carrot Cake (香煎萝卜糕) - $4.50

Source: My own

Another of the Heavenly King dishes; this looked to be a sure-winner when it first arrived because I really liked how brown each piece of carrot cake looked like and it looked like it's going to be really crispy. And it was... on the outside. The inside was soft and it just tasted pretty weird to me. =/ I.. expect pan-fried carrot cakes to be crispy and firm, not crispy and soft. It just felt contradictory to me. :(

2) Steamed Egg Cake (马来糕) - $3.80

Source: My own

Personal preference aside, I still don't like this. It tastes very much like huat kueh but a lot more expensive for just one square block of this. =/ And it is too soft. I took just one bite and almost gagged. Haha. Passed the rest to my besties to finish it off. :) 

Summary

After eating Tim Ho Wan's dishes, I can understand the hype that many Singaporeans has built around it, but I'm reserving my thoughts about this place till I've tried Swee Choon and I'm able to make a fair comparison between the two of them. But, this is still the better place to go for dim sum compared to Crystal Jade and Ding Tai Feng. Although I would advise to come with a empty stomach and a optimistic attitude while battling the queue. Or just come early and wait happily in a much-shorter queue. :) 

Price-wise, it would still be reasonable, we ordered 3-5 more dishes in addition to those above and yet the bill came up to <$25 pax and that was for 3 people dining. I think DTF and Crystal Jade would come up to more?

Food: 3.5 / 5 

Service: 4.5 / 5 (Very efficient service, food came fast) 

Value: 3 / 5

Ambience: 3.5 / 5 (Cosy place and air-conditioned, plus the place is not too noisy and you can still hear your friends talking to you. :))

Tim Ho Wan (添好运) 

68 Orchard Road, Plaza Singapura #01-29A

Opening Hours: 10am - 10pm (Monday - Friday)

9am - 10pm (Sat, Sun & PH) 

The Oyster Bar, Adelaide

The start of summer often means the start of great summer food to come. For example, stone fruits and strawberries are usually widely available in summer rather than autumn/winter. Another example is oysters and crabs. Although oysters are available all-year round, frozen or fresh, but I usually like to eat it when it's in season, mainly because it is fresher, bigger and usually cheaper. :)

I paid a visit to the Oyster bar in Adelaide East, mid-November because I was hankering after au natural oysters and Adelaide East was much nearer than Glenelg. Since I've tried the Glenelg branch once during my 1st/2nd year, I decided to give the Adelaide East branch a go. :)

For those who are planning to pay this bar a visit, be sure to head down on a Tuesday as the oysters are much cheaper then! The day that I and another friend went down, was fortunately a Tuesday, so we had the chance to order and try out more oysters. :P We ordered one dozen of Oysters Natural and one dozen of Oysters Mixed.

Oysters Natural, with 2 wedges of lemon and 1 triangular slice of bread.

I love, love, love the oysters from this place! It's fresh, firm and succulent. Absolutely divine! The only gripe about it is the size. Why is it so small!? :(

Oysters Mixed: Darleyfella, Kilpatrick, Natural and Chilli & Cheese (Clockwise from Top)

This plate was not all-good though, it had hits and misses. The hits were the Chilli & Cheese (my favourite!), Darleyfella (Spinach & Mornay) was not too bad but it had a strong tuna mornay taste and Natural was awesome (as usual). Haha. The miss was the Kilpatrick (bacon with special sauce), it tasted queer, I'm not too sure if the special sauce was meant to taste as such but it was just bad. And very salty, bacon itself is already salty, plus the sauce = too salty! :( Again, the sizes of the oysters are pretty small. But I think having the extra ingredients helped to make it seem more worth it?

Summary

I would highly recommend oyster lovers to go for the Natural oysters and Chilli & Cheese oysters. Stay away from the other two, unless you like having tuna flavoured oysters. I heard that the Pesto oysters are quite good too, but it wasn't included in the mixed platter, so we didn't order that to try. The total damage done to our wallets that day was AUD$39. Not too bad for the quality of the oysters (mainly the Natural and Chilli & Cheese), but I wouldn't go back again because the sizes of the oysters are too small to justify the price. 

Food: 3.5 / 5
Service: 3 / 5 (Service was pretty slow as there was only one staff working and oysters were shucked to order, so it would have been better if there were at least two staff present.)
Value: 2 / 5 (It would have been better if oysters were much bigger, $16 for a dozen small oysters, is indeed quite steep a price.)
Ambience: 3.5 / 5

Adelaide Oyster Bar
14 East Tce, Adelaide, SA 5000
(08) 8232 5422

Maki Maki Japanese Cafe & Takeaway

I love Japanese food, it's one of my top most favourite cuisines in the whole wide world. :) And I'm very blessed to be born in Singapore where a favourite cuisine of Singaporeans is Japanese. So the supermarkets often stock sashimi, sushi and other Japanese food like unagi (eel) which is pretty affordable, although not as cheap as Japan.

Unfortunately, Japanese food in Adelaide is not so cheap and affordable as Singapore. So I do have major cravings now and then, and I'm quite glad that I've found this eatery tucked away in Gawler place. It is pretty secluded and I daresay I would not have known about this place, if not for a friend's recommendation. :) I remember the first time I tried to find this place, I got lost. -_- Even Google maps did not know where Parc Arcade was, can you believe it!? I can't. Haha. So yes, I walked for a good 10 minutes before I found this place. :( A pretty good tip to find this place is to walk in from North Terrace, and soon after you turn into Gawler Place, you will see Parc Arcade. :) Walk in and you will spy Maki Maki on the left.

I think one reason why this place remains relatively unknown is because it's situated in a place where not many people go to. Although it's pretty near to Rundle Mall but I don't go to Parc Arcade at all, and that's probably why the food prices here are cheaper than the other sushi places nearby. :) A bowl of udon costs roughly from $8 - $12, and that is relatively cheap compared to Maru near Flinders Medical Centre, where one bowl starts from $14.

Maki Maki is a nondescript place, it's not heavily furnished with Japanese decorations, it is simple and the colours of the walk-in eatery is mostly red and white. I've went twice so far, and only for their udon! I love their udon noodles. Chewy yet firm and very yummy to slurp it up. The soup comes steaming hot, so hot that if you are hungry, you have to be very careful not to burn your tongue! I did that once, and I was left with a scalding burnt tongue at the end of my meal. =.= It was definitely not pleasant but that goes to show how good their udon soup was - too good that I could not wait for the soup to cool down before chowing it down.

The first time I went, I had their Crispy Chicken Udon.

Crispy Chicken Udon

I was pleasantly surprised when it arrived because as you can see, it actually has spinach leaves inside. This is uncommonly seen in udon and it is, secretly, a gripe that I have with udon soup: too little vegetables. The only vegetables commonly seen in udon is usually kelp and seaweed and it is only 1-2 pieces. Haha. So the dietitan in me was pleased with this bowl of what seemed to have more vegetables than usual-udon noodles. :) The soup was delicious, love the noodles, spinach, seaweed and kelp inside. The chicken was actually quite tender too. But one thing I didn't like about this was that the chicken (deep-fried) was put into the soup. So the oil from the chicken actually seeped into the soup. -_- And I didn't like that oily taste from the soup, plus the chicken which was suppose to be crispy became soggy instead. :(

It would have been much better if the fried food was kept separate from the soup. So that it will really be Crispy Chicken (+) Udon. Haha. 

So with that in mind, I went back to Maki Maki for a 2nd trial, which was about a week later (yet another testament to how delicious the udon noodles are). This time, I decided to try a different variety of udon and so I ordered the infamous Tempura Udon. Now, for those who are fans of Japanese cuisine like me, you would know that there are 3 foods that a Japanese chef should not get wrong: sushi rice, tempura and udon. It is actually the mark of a Japanese chef to be able to cook all these 3 well enough as they are pretty simple yet very easy to get them wrong too. So if either of the 3 foods taste bad in any Japanese restaurant, well, I don't have much faith in trying out the other dishes then. :)

So I had high hopes for this dish, seeing that the udon met my standards. And I specially told the cashier that I would like my tempura separated from my udon soup, please (as I would really want to eat my udon soup as it is - free from any oily taste).

Tempura Udon 

And so it arrived. I was pretty happy with the presentation. Glistening udon soup with spinach leaves & two fried prawns (Note: This is not tempura) on the side. I was pretty puzzled by the round fried thing though, had no idea what it was. 

Thought it looked suspiciously like a prawn vada (a Indian fried dough snack with prawn shells) and tasted like one too. It was not too bad, really. So I happily ate it and I left the fried prawn for last and attacked my udon noodles first, being careful not to scald my tongue like last time. And I'm happy to say that the udon soup noodles tasted as good as the one I had last time. :)  

The big puzzle was, the "tempura" prawns that seemed more like fried ebi instead than tempura. And it didn't taste like tempura batter at all. Which was a big disappointment as it doesn't matter how fresh the prawns are, once the batter is off, it throws the whole balance of the dish. :(   

Summary

Not too happy with the tempura dish and most likely won't order the Tempura udon again. I would most probably give the Crispy Chicken Udon another go and order the Crispy Chicken separately from the Udon, because I really like the udon noodles, soup and the chicken, just not together. I've read from the other reviews that the bento sets are pretty decent too, especially the sashimi and unagi set. This place does hold potential with its decent food and affordable prices - but don't expect it to have the same food standards as Wasai or Sushi Train. 

Food: 3.5 / 5

Service: 4 / 5 (Friendly and helpful staff)

Value: 4 / 5

Ambience: 2.5 / 5

Maki Maki Japanese Cafe
Parc Arcade, Gawler Place, Rundle Mall, SA 5000
(08) 8231 9334

Sexy Look Black Cotton Masks {Review}

I'm a big fan of moisturising masks, especially where I am at now. I'm in Australia, where it's one of the driest climates I've ever been to! So when I went to Taipei, I stocked up on a lot of them! Hee. And one such brand that I bought was Sexy Look; their black moisturising masks were one that I've heard a lot of, but never tried because it was so expensive in Singapore. :( So when I finally had a chance to go Taipei, I decided to try it too. :) And I was pretty lucky because the shop I went to was retailing it for a buy-1-get-1-free! :) I can't remember how much I've bought it for now, sorry. :(

Anyway, there's 3 different types of Sexy Look Black Cotton Masks:

Source: Google

1. Intensive Moisturising Black Cotton Mask 
2. Intensive Repairing Black Cotton Mask
3. Intensive Whitening Black Cotton Mask

The box that I brought here... is the Moisturising box! :) From the packaging, one thing that is different about this mask is that it is BLACK. Kudos to the team behind Sexy Look masks as they use advanced technology to infuse activated carbon into the cotton sheets - allowing the mask to absorb dirt and excessive sebum from the skin yet also refines the pores. It also rehydrates and repairs the skin for a natural glowing complexion. The moisturising box also has added Vitamin C enriched with blackcurrant that boosts nutrient circulation and roserock that moisturises the skin giving it a more radiant look. 

Whenever I find zits suddenly appearing on my face (especially during that time of the month), I would quickly put on a mask to soothe my skin and moisturise it, and hope that the zits won't leave scars. So I like how moisturising and cleansing this mask is. :)

One thing I really like about this mask is that the size of the mask is just right, it fits and contours my face nicely. I find that for the other masks, it is usually too big for my skinny face, so I always have to make the mask sit nicely on my face and try not to have too many wrinkles on the sheet. The mask essence also doesn't drip during application, which is super good in my opinion, and it stays right where it is, till you remove the mask. :) Each box has 5 sheets and each sheet is well soaked with 28ml of essence (very visible when you first remove it from the packet). The instructions say to leave it on for 15-20 minutes, but it takes longer than 20 minutes for the mask to dry up, so I usually leave it for ~30 minutes before removing it. :)

I do find that my skin looks more glowing after I used it, pores looks more refined and my skin feels moisturised and not dry, which is awesome! :) Unfortunately, this doesn't carry on till the next day. :( But I would say this is very good for emergency use for parched and thirsty skin. :)

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

Repurchase? Yes.

One step closer... to G-day!

What's G-day? Graduation-day! Hahaha. Yes, I'm finished with my exams and I must say, it's a bittersweet experience. It's my final exams of my whole university life. And I'm not going to take another one till I decided to study again, perhaps Masters next time? So yes, quite relieved but also sad that a new chapter beckons soon and I have to bid farewell to my student life and all the holidays and term breaks that comes with being a student. :( Say hello to 14 days of leave a year from next year onwards. Okay, that's very sad. Sigh.

But it also means that I have time to blog! Yay! :) I've got quite a number of food places to write up, I reckon and I think it will be good to reminisce about them before I leave Adelaide for good. :( Boo. I can also type up a number of beauty posts as well and clothes too! :) I've been pretty blessed by God on Facebook because I've won quite a number of contests. All praise and glory to Him. :)