Arab street groovy ice cream parlour

Funky decor, funky flavours

Bitter chocolate (left) and D24 Durian (right)

Woah. Awesome ice cream parlour at Arab Street. At first xf thought it was a branch of Island Creamery, but we found out that they actually just purchase ice cream from all three famous local ice cream parlours and, in the process, choose only the good stuff.

The three ice cream shops are: Island Creamery (no website), The Daily Scoop and Ice Cream Gallery.

To be fair, I had one from each. The bitter choc is from DS and D24 is from ICG. The bitter chocolate is pretty good stuff. Unfortunately there are many other dark chocolates out there that are pretty comparable, like the one from Venezia and/or Movenpick. Don't be mistaken though, that is still pretty wicked company.

But hey hey hey, the Durian is just out-of-this-world-awesome. I can see why other bloggers are raving about the durian ice cream from ICG. It IS that good. Smooth and with just the right amount of sugar, the richness of D24 durian is perfectly captured in one teaspoonfull of the yellow stuff.

Normally you know for most Durian ice cream, the more pulp there is the better it tastes? This one doesn't have the most pulp I've had before but it doesn't have to. It's so incredibly... decadent that you don't really care.

On the flip side, Benjy pointed out that the richness of the D24 ice cream would overwhelm the other ice cream flavour I had chosen. "Sure cannot taste anything one," - Li, B.

There are only five smallish tables that seat about ten people comfortably, so don't bring an army with you when you do decide to visit this interesting and quirky shop. It sells vintage wear and accessories too, if you want to know.

Ok, this is weird, because I think I should just rate the shop where the ice cream originated and not the retailer.

Oh. One more thing to note, their scoops are pretty small, so not exactly value for money, relative to where they are originally sold.

The Daily Scoop Bitter Chocolate
Taste: 4/5
Value:3/5
Ambience: N.A.

Ice Cream Gallery Durian
Taste: 5/5
Value: 3/5
Ambience: N.A.

Cost of double scoop: $4

Of Ice cream, duck and looftop football

Horlicks and Apple Pie Ice cream in a cup

And in my mouth!

Now, I've never been a Horlicks fan, but the horlicks ice cream from island creamery is something else altogether. It is incredibly rich without being overpoweringly malty, like the drink is prone to be.

I can't wait to try their other wacky flavours. I've always been conservative with my ice cream choices. Dark chocolate, choc-choc chip, Belgian chocolate, Midnight cookies and cream, you get the idea.

Big thanks to Deejay xf for her recommendation.

What more could you ask for?

Island Creamery
Food: 4/5
Value: 3/5
Ambience: 4/5 (If you're into Jack Johnson cos they play him on loop it seems)

1F, Serene Centre
10 Jalan Serene, 258748
Tel: 64688859

They have another branch at Arab Street

Made my own sundae at HD

The grand old dame of ice creamery, at her irresistable best.

Old-school taiwanese porridge place

Oasis taiwan porridge is a rocking old-school joint that opens till late. The best dishes there are the kong ba and chye poh neng. Equally sinful and delightful. I like many many.

Oasis Taiwan Porridge Restaurant

Food: 5/5 (for the two specialities and 4/5 for the rest)
Value: 3/5
Ambience: 4/5

Oasis Building
50 Stadium Boulevard, 397796
Tel: 63464418

Johnson Duck 1/2 Duck for $10

Simple. Plain. Unadorned. I like.

Unlike their flashy neighbours BTK, Johnson Duck continues to dish out the same fare in the same way they've done for the last decade (or however long they've been around).

No service charge, reasonable prices and good food. Irresistable. I think I shall be coming here much more often.

Johnson Lock Roasted Duck & Chicken
Food: 4/5
Value: 5/5
Ambience: 3/5

11 Upper Boon Keng Road #01-939 Singapore 380011
Tel : 6741-1438

Musking tape football on the loof

Exams are playtime for c.s. folk it seems. Then again, maybe there's just something about the loof that makes us just wanna be kids again. Felt like primary school again. Too poor to afford the real thing, musking tape balls and balled-up drink packets were all we knew. But yeah, it was probably more fun anyway.

Sigh...285 views and counting

Loof Fool

6 hours after the party began, no one could move any longer

Clarence kept trying to set fire to Bacardi-soaked paper... it worked

Brokeback Benji

Journos turned up in full force

Mama Mia Thatsa power pizza

Hang on hang on. Sarpino's is really really good. It's so awesome I'm never ordering Pizza Hut again. Frickin rip-offs. Its what, 31.80 for two large pizzas!

Woot!

But damn heng the food was enough. Was scared there wouldn't be enough food, but hey, it's all good.

People who turned up in hats (Dong's is out of frame)

Sayheng. With bunny ears. awesome.

Ah Boon will turn in his grave

Same ole chicken, but what the heck is up with the potato chips?!

I went to BTK chicken rice tonight, and boy was I in for a surprise.

They re-did the entire fricking place. It wasn't so much the obvious in-store changes that surprised (and disappointed) me. They screwed with the essence of the BTK brand: the chicken.

I don't get it. What's wrong with serving your chicken the same way you have been the last 15-20 years? Why do you need to put it on a fancy platter (which elevated the chicken 3cm off the table) and put POTATO CHIPS on it?!?!

CHICKEN VERY LONELY AH??

The strongest thing going for BTK is it's heritage. Along with Loy Kee and Johnson Lock Duck (which, coincidentally is located next to the bt timah outlet we went to), BTK must be one of the most recognised and loved truly Singaporean food brands around.

The tables now sport gaudy (in my humble opinion) pseudo-leather table-cloths with gold trim. Service staff are dressed in spiffy all-white uniforms. Cutlery is encased in a pain-stakingly creased piece of paper made to look like banana leaf.

It.doesn't.work.

Ok, so their style of shaping their rice like a pyramid,

Like so.

so, so only lah. Nothing special

Has helped to differentiate the BTK brand, but really, Singaporeans are better than cheap tricks like these. Or so I thought. The queue that built up in the 1/2 hour we were there was quite impressive.

Bah.

Oh, right. One more thing. Because Nawaar said the Godiva chocolixir was "better than..." I thought I should try it, especially on the back of having Starbuck's signature hot chocolate yesterday.

So, it was with a view of comparing the two that I parted ways with $8 to the grumpy girl over the godiva counter.

I was presented with...

(the middle one, Dark Chocolate)

Chey.

Eh, nawaar, go and drink the Starbucks one lah. No fight.

(Cheaper also)

Anyways, Vivocity rocked! so big, I like.

Hot chocolate the way it should be done

Woah, the new Starbucks hot chocolate is every bit as good as it says it is. Each sip feels go damned decadent it's good.

You see those fake-looking peaks of whipped cream?

Well, they really look like that. They don't use the regular strawberry face whipped cream even. It's some special one that comes out really firm and cold. I kinda like it.

But the star really is the hot chocolate. I realise I've used the word really three times now, but I really don't care.

Each sip of the chocolatey brew deserves its own moment. I guess that's how I ended up taking about three-quarters of an hour to get through a cup of chocolate.

The thing that really hits you about each sip is how incredibly (which, really, is just really-really) gao(3) the drink is. It's like half and half of a melted chocolate bar and cream. And, and, if you close your eyes while drinking this, I swear you'll see Charlie of Charlie and the chocolate factory fame.

There was this scene in the book (I never saw the film) where he dips his mug into the chocolate river and describes how the warmth spread to every end of his body. Now we can all be Charlie.

Hurrah!

and Hurray for Starbucks for bringing a piece of heaven into my tummy today.

p.s. it goes really well with a book and an afternoon with nothing else to do

Long time no blog

Phew, being back at school is great. Just goes to show you really need to do something to benchmark your school experience against, be it army, working (anything but holidaying), to show just how good the life is as a student.

Anyway, FOOD!

There's only one picture of food here, but I'll be damned if it ain't one of my favourites.

MUDPIE FROM ISLAND CREAMERY!!!

Totally rocked my socks. They also have strange flavoured ice-cream, the strangest of which must be the tiger beer flavoured one.I had the apple pie-flavoured ice cream and it was really good.

The sign above the counter says their ice cream is made fresh daily and it really shows. The best part really is the texture of the ice cream. It's fluffy and moist and combines real apple pie, not those bs bits you get in even haagen daaz or bnj for that matter. Of course it isn't as rich as haagen daaz but they more than make up for it with their fresh ingredients. If there was one thing that didn't really work for me, it was the slightly over-cinnamonned taste of the apple pie ice cream, but hey, you cant have everything.

So if you wanna try it out, it's at Serene Centre.

Yeah, anyway, check out this absolutely cool vespa!!

Does it not scream BEN AND JERRY'S???

Becky and Xiaofen liked it so much they decided to get themselves in the photo.

Wah, the other nite as I was going home on the bus, I saw this:

Weird guy watching DVDs on a portable DVD player.

WTH!!

It's ok if it's like a movie or something, but this chap was watching KARAOKES. Tamade.

So I figured he's some cheena guy who can't get enough of Jolin Tsai but NOOOO.... he decides to switch dvds to...

FIFTY-CENT!

Damn funny lah, he was bopping his head to "candyshop". One minute Jolin, the next 50-cent.

And the last thought of the day:


Super crappy parody of Harry, nothing is sacred in this entire range of parodies.

Later guys.

Last friday was the last day at BM and they had a farewell party for me!! I wasn't really expecting anything so it was nice how Pat surprised me with an Adidas voucher (which will go towards a new pair of shoes - Thanks guys). It then hit me why she asked me out of the blue if I preferred Nike to Adidas -.-

Too bad I didn't have a camera on hand (since i wansn't expecting a party) or I wouldv'e been better able to capture the my last day there, at least for the next 5 months. Even though you got the feeling that it's something they do for every person leaving the company, it was kinda nice how they bother to have a celebration at all.

I guess I'll miss the folks there for their intelligent sense of humour, easy-to-get-along-type personalities and, well, their widely-read knowledge of obscure facts brought about by reading 14 newspapers every morning of every day.

So, thanks guys. You could've made it hard, but you didn't. Like Krishna says to Lathi before enlisting in Michael Chiang's 1998 play Army Daze, "This is not goodbye, it is merely a farewell..."

(I didn't get it either)

Loof on the house

The folks at BM had a night's out last Tuesday, and it was pretty interesting, haha. .

Anyways, PHOTOS!

(Luwyn, Aaron, Eric, Pat, Gen, Me)

Damn. I could get used to this.

Ok, this deserves a paragraph all on its own.

This, my friends, is a WET CUCUMBER. hahahahaha. The names of their drinks are damn funny lah. E.g. Steady-pom-pi-pi, Wet Cucumber... and ....

wait for it...


wait for it...


Pimp's Cup!

WTH!

They don't taste too bad, especially when they're free ;)

I suppose you're never too old for some bunny ears.

(Girl Gamer, Hot-Bod, Mr Pfizer, Ms Yellow-ribbon, Eve,
Back: Danny-the-magnificent, Anush, Amit)

We are suckers for publicity.

Oh, and this is like, the only picture with Carol, one of the people I work closely with. All Blacks!

These are the amount of drinks...left.

Disillusioned with beautiful celebrities

I don't know what reel beauty is anymore.

Living la vida loca?

This is what greets you as an entry-level public relations executive each and every monday morning (actually every morning, but mondays are especially bad). Without fail, the horizon of newsprint promises to extend from one end of the rather long table to the other, three waves in all.

Prelude to an interesting conversation

One of the guys that works at an adjacent company popped by and exclaimed:

him: you know, you guys have the best job in the world!

us: *blank, groggy stare*

him: All you guys do is read the papers every morning and drink coffee, fantastic!

us: *groggy stare*

him: I wish I had..

us: *stare*

him: your...

us: *glare*

him: *picks up breifcase and walks off*

hahaha.

Oh well, here's my favourite candy store in the world. OKAY, Singapore. OKAY, so it's the only candy store I know. Bah.

Ahah! what's that she's holding on to?

let's find out...
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Smith's sweet thai chilli sauce crisps!!

And here's a shoutout to my dearest darling, who somehow managed to endure four years of 2-day study weeks and unlimited overnight mahjongs

@ Suntec Convention hall. Darn. Why is everything better at smu?

I heart Changi Airport

I think you kinda figure out you're weird when you enjoy travelling the length of the island, small as it is, to eat fried chicken. It's not just popeyes though, I like many things about hanging about both terminals: the cafes, the refreshing sound of many different tongues and, of course, popeyes. They all make the airport one of my favourite places to go on a weekend when we both don't feel up to mixing with the maddening crowd.

You feel free. Free like you can jet off to some exotic island in the Carribean or join the world cup winners in Milan. Free like you can throw a dart at a map and disappear without worrying anybody. Free like that. The moment often passes, but sometimes I see myself at a time where I'll jet off with the missus every year for that short break where we don't have to queue everywhere, betting outlets will offer something more tempting than 2.20 for an Italian win and dry wit is accepted rather than interpreted as an attempt at dethroning the government.

Which is why it infuriates me to take the sky train between terminals. There's no reason for me to take the damn train, really. Popeyes is at T1, so is the deli that stocks honey-mustard-onion pretzels. But I take it every time anyway. Just to see if Singaporeans change over time. If, given time, they will learn to allow passengers to get off the train before rushing into the half-full carriage.

I. Don't. Understand. It.

It travels for the better part of 200m, taking a grand total of what, 30 seconds? Yet we are gripped by the relentless desire to be rude and devoid of all social graces on the sky train. Bah. Which is why I want to go overseas whenever I can.

Oh well, at least while we're here we can enjoy this...

Popeyes rocks my socks

Just HAD to post this picture, haha, nostalgic snack

Peace.

Straits Times wishes me happy birthday

Recent makan trails

It's amazing what we find hidden amongst dreary housing estates. I was just trudging along after lunch one day when I came upon what surely must be the mother-of-all-eggtarts. It was an old-school bakery with a shelf filled with the most incredibly huge egg tarts I've ever seen.

Period.

It's so huge its almost the size of an average ricebowl (my thumb is nearer to the camera than the tart, so its not to scale, doh!)

Mother-of-all-egg-tarts

And then, there was the time we went to Parkway for the good ol' Mee Rebus. $3 and chock full of everything Mee Rebus should contain, if you don't mind the owner's own take on the historical dish which now comes with black sauce and a very practical-factory-style kind of presentation. Still, a tummy-filler.

This is the amount left after she's done with it.

The long, ardous road to completion

And then, the other night before heading down to the Liang Seah Street dessert shop, we had dinner at this Purvis Street place selling 'authentic' beef noodles. The sand-looking thing is really just ground peanut.

oodles of noodles

I don't know very much about this dish, though this stall claims to have been around for the past like, 3-4 decades so, I guess if there is a definitive 'authentic' beef hor fun, it's found at Purvis Street.

Yay, going to Hong Kong (cafe) on wednesday...

Peace out~

Ps: My office people are totally freaked by the no-smoking ban which was enforced today. Haha.

Long week

Phew.

It's been a long, long week with loadsa stuff going on right now. Thankfully, in the moments between work and chron and other non-leisure related activities, I've managed to take some snapshots of the past week. Am so tired now I'm just gonna post photos and maybe if the pictures stir something in my food-man i'll leave some comments...

Tea at mark's and spencers in centrepoint. Perfect for resting those tired legs.

Dinner at Da Paolo's. Me and duck liver-ed pasta

Sigh, I guess there's really a reason why these expensive places cost so much. It's really worth it for that special night.

9 little pieces of heaven. from sins. oh, the irony

And that, my friend, is how you celebrate a 23rd birthday. Oh, with a mention in the Straits Times too ok, mai siao siao.

Anyway, here's the view of a tower-dweller.

Ah. The rarefied air of the 40th storey.

Got executive toilets also, haha.

Cheerios~ Next stops: Hong Kong Cafe, Pirates of the Carribean, Popeyes?

-Peace out-