Maxwell Food Centre

And so we’re back. After some irrelevant posts for our last few entries dating back to last December (tsktsk), here’s one written in the true sense of the makantrail spirit! (Applause pls)

We decided to go back to Maxwell food centre again because sadly I’ve not tried Tian Tian Chicken Rice despite telling myself I should eons ago.

And so bearing a runny nose with a sneeze rate of 20/min, I went to meet the 2 hungry losers guys to fill our empty stomach with yummy local food.

Frankly, 1:00 pm is not a good time to visit the place because it was frigging lunch hour and the queues at the stalls are insanely long. 11:00 am would be a good time because it’s not the mass lunch hour and all the stalls should be open.

So after camping around and finally securing a table for ourselves, we went ahead to queue up for the food.

And here’s what we came back with.

Tian Tian Chicken Rice

Chin Chin Porridge

Char Kway Teow

Don’t be fooled by the appearances. 1 second after this was taken, we began devouring the food like hungry wolves. Can you see the hunger in our eyes?

Still full of ingredients after we’re halfway through it.

On to the reviews!

WL: The chicken rice was not particularly nice neither was it bad. Maybe because it was left on the table for quite some time while we waited for the porridge. (Curse the long queue!) But the sauce at the bottom thick with oil and chicken juices was particularly flavourful. The chilli if I remembered correctly was quite refreshing, not too spciy but it still has a subtle sting and sourish tinge that lead the way for subsequent helpings.

PB: It tastes different from the last time i ate, which i can conclude that they might not be very consistent, i tasted better and also lousier servings. Not really worth it since you going to be prepared to queue for more than half an hour!!!! (3.5/5)

WL: Onto the porridge! This is the first time I’ve tasted such smooth porridge. Seriously it was real smooth. If it was sold at a desert stall, they would have called it rice paste along with yam paste and black sasame paste. Along with generous amount of century eggs, pork and garnishing, every spoonful is like the first spoonful! Pity we didn’t buy doughsticks to go along with it.

PB: This porridge really rulez! is extremely smooth till u can find a grain of rice in it. Together with their tasty ingredient, this ought to be one of the best porridge we have eaten. Haha but do be patient while queing for it, else you might get a high blood pressure before tasting it (4/5)

WL: The fried kway teow honestly tasted normal and was a little cold when we got around to eating it. (Thanks to the #$%#$ long queue for porridge again).

PB: haha Just like any other hawker centre fried kway teow. was bougth just becoz our beloved zi xuan is craving for it….. (2.5/5)

So here you go! Look out for our next entry when it happens!

PB: See you guys next time!

Shiver Me Timbre’s!

Half a pint of Erdinger – $10.50

Service Charge – 10%

GST – 7%

Hearing the song you requested played by the band when you’re just about to leave – Priceless

A piece of the Donut Pie

Having some alot of free time on our hands during the holidays, me, Nerite and our neighbour from hall decided to engage in Singaporeans’ favourite activity – QUEUING!

And so we arrived at Raffles City to queue for the famous donuts from Donut Factory, the queue wasn’t so bad as it was about 2-3pm in the afternoon. I’m sure everyone has tasted the soft, fluffy donuts with oh-so-sweet-but-yummy toppings before so I’m not going to talk much about it.

After Raffles City, we went to Bugis Junction to check out this new store called Chewy Junior. Presumably wanting a piece of the donut pie (no pun intended), they are selling this donut looking pastry except that it’s a bun with (coffee?) flavoured cream stuffed inside and of course it comes with the many savoury toppings that is the main attraction of the many donut shop that has popped up all over our sunny island.

So there is this guy giving out pamphlets to people in the queue telling them how wonderful their stuff tastes and pointed out that it would taste better than the donuts in my hands. Well that remains to be seen

The queue was longer than Donut Factory’s maybe because it was pushing 5pm and it’s kind of a novelty amid the many donut shops.

Here are some pictures showing the variety they have and the cream pump they use to stuff the cream into the puff.

I guess the workers there are mostly students/part-timers judging from the way they prepare the buns. Most of them seemed a little lost and the guy I was watching doing the toppings seemed to take a little longer than I would expect. All these small delays made the waiting longer, maybe that’s why the queue was so long. Heh.

Finally we got what we wanted and then proceeded to Starbucks to rest our tired feet and find out just how wonderful they are.

(Yes, those are my sexay arms)

Nerite – Oh yea we didn’t mention Starbucks was giving free coffee on that day to raise money for Salvation Army. We had our chewy junior thingies with coffee! Kudos to Starbucks!

And as the name suggests, it was really chewy and it was kinda special having the toppings and cream in your mouth at the same time. The filling was generous, too generous in fact, if you didn’t read the instructions (yes there are instructions on how to eat this), you would probably made an ugly mess with the cream going all over your fingers and cheeks.

And obviously I didn’t and only saw the instructions after I was done with them.

Well for me, I thought it was a tad too chewy and a little hard, making it difficult to go smoothly down the throat. So IMO Donut Factory takes the cake, or donut in this case.

Edit: Ok, feeling I haven’t given it justice because I ate it hastily the other time, I’ve decided to give it another go. This time I had the Double Chococlate Crunch. Anyway, like the last time, it was hard to chew off and the fact that it was chewy was exactly because it was hard to chew. Am I making sense here? I also figured that it was impossible to finish it without having the cream dropping everywhere because when you squeeze hard to bite off a chunk, the cream comes out. Yep so Donut Factory anyday, although props for the delicious chocolcate topping.

But hey, that’s just me and I’m a fusspot as everyone knows. So this shouldn’t be stopping you from trying it out.

(Pictures are not up yet because we are lazy to resize the big ass pics so that we won’t bust the 50MB cap for uploaded content.)

PS: Oh yeah and italics have been used a record-breaking 4 times in a single post on this blog.

PPS: Just FYI

JB to JP

Hi guys,

Makan Trail has gone over the Causeway and Back!

Xeniel and I went with a mutual friend to Johor Bahru to Jiak Png (eat). Firstly, a stop off at Citi Square to catch a movie for RM10 (around SGD5) at Cathay (Yes, the Singapore owned Cathay Cineplexes). With the rising ticket prices in our sunny island, it was worth it!

After that, we went to Taman Sri Terbau Food Centre to have our dinner. FYI, It’s a Malaysian food centre (sorta) popular with Singaporeans for the cheap seafood. There are many stalls but we just randomly chose one seafood store to order from. For our dinner, we ordered Butter Crayfish, Cereal Prawns, Sambal Stingray, Sambal Kangkong and Hotplate Deer Meat.

Well, of all 4 dishes, the best were the Cereal Prawns in my opinion. The prawns were fresh, did not have any fishy smell, and was deep fried to perfection. The crayfish was not enough for the 3 of us, but we weren’t complaining as it was RM30 for it. Somehow, the crayfish was not very meaty but were still fresh nevertheless.

Wee Lin: My favourite was the crayfish though, digging out the whole chunk of white succulent meat from the crayfish and popping it into your mouth to enjoy the chewy and slightly crunchy texture was simply an orgasm in my mouth.

The Sambal Kangkong was very spicy but nice. Not overcooked but the portion was minuscule which was kinda disappointing. The stupid lady boss forgot to serve us our stingray piping hot and left it standing on the countertop. Hence it was lukewarm and totally spoils the taste.

Wee Lin: Yeah the portion for the kangkong was definitely pathetic, I mean come on it’s only vegetables, how much can you skimp on vegetables? But the chilli definitely packs a punch for me

We also had our seafood with freshly made sugarcane juice (RM 2.50). Kinda expensive you think? Well, consider that spicy and oily seafood plus the fact that the sugarcane juice was served in large beer size mugs, it was worth it.

Wee Lin: The sugarcane juice tasted kinda weird. Firstly there’s not much foam at the top and I didn’t taste the sandy sugarcane taste you find in local sugarcane juice. It also looked kinda dark as compared to the local version. Not my cup of tea sugar cane.

To get there, tell the taxi driver Taman Sri Terbau Food Centre or Da Ma Hua Yuan in Chinese. It should cost you around RM7 to get there from City Square.

Till then,

Eat the good stuff. And don’t get robbed ;P

Astons Specialties!!

Well, after a lot of procrastination and postponements by the makantrail team, I dragged Xeniel and a mutual friend to Astons to have late lunch on a lazy Friday afternoon. Xeniel is no longer an Astons virgin! He can safely say he tried Astons.

Astons is located in East Coast Road, just opposite Katong Mall. It is characterized by the insanely long queue which forms during lunch hours and dinner time. If you wish to eat at 7pm, be prepared to start queuing at 6pm as it takes roughly 1 hour to get a table.

Anyway, the 3 of us reached at 3pm so there wasn’t much of a queue. We managed to get a table in 15 mins. Xeniel and I both ordered the Sirloin Steak @ $10.50 while our friend ordered the New York Strip @ $13.50. The sides as you can from the pictures, are mashed potatoes, onion rings and baked potatoes.

Plain water costs $0.30 which we werent complaining since we didnt had to pay service charge at all. Nett price!

It took insanely long for the food to come, around 20mins, considering it was off peak period of 3pm plus they had an insanely large number of 8 waiters in the restaurant serving just 20+ tables? Maybe the cooks were slaughtering the cows in the kitchen.

Interior of Astons looks abit like Swenson’s with the stained glass lighting as seen in the picture.

Anyway, the sirloin steaks came first. The portion was kinda disappointing. I kinda expected a larger portion. However, the great taste of the sirloin steak made up for the small portion. On biting a piece, the grilled burnt taste of meat hits you. It was cooked to perfection and had that hot-from-grill taste. Now thats what I call I grilled sirloin steak. It was a little dry though, probably it was almost well done already instead of medium well. The mushroom sauce which came with it was not bad. Button mushrooms were visible in the sauce. My mashed potato was also good and the gravy was delicious and not diluted. My only complaint was the fries which were somewhat lukewarm and dehydrated.

Xeniel’s sides were disappointing. 5-6 pieces of onion rings and a over cooked baked potato. Hence I would suggest you guys not take the onion rings and baked potato sides if you do ever go there.

Then came the New York Strip. It was a very large portion, thicker and almost twice the size of my Sirloin Steak. Damn, I should have forked out a little more to get 7th Heaven. The meat was nicely cooked and was very tender. There was a layer of fat present around the meat, which made it extra delicious but yet artery clogging. The three of us felt our arteries filling up with the beef fats =(

However,as can be seen from the picture below, the beef is nicey cooked, with just a tinge of pink in the middle. Thats how beef should be cooked!

I would recommend you guys get the New York Strip if you guys do go there instead of the Sirloin Steak. For 3 bucks more, you get better beef. Overall, I’ll rate the dining experience 4/5 for Sirloin Steak, 5/5 For New York Strip and 3/5 for the service.

Oh yeah, there is a black pepper sauce you could request and it goes very well with your steak in case you don’t want the mushroom sauce they give.

Astons Specialities

119 East Coast Road

Opening hours 1100-2300hrs

Closed on Mondays

http://astonsspecialties.blogspot.com/

Till next time,

Eat the good stuff.