Birthday triology edition 1: Saboten

It's Gracie's birthday again! Being a busy month for her, we finally got to do her belated birthday outing on a fine Saturday. I have cravings (as usual) for Saboten's pork cutlet and ONLY Saboten's pork cutlet, so she has no choice but to satisfy my cravings, we then decided on the Parco Marina Bay branch since its near to our dinner venue.

The mall is extremely quiet for a Saturday afternoon, when walking to Saboten, I saw the receptionist and masseur of a massage place sleeping in the store! Needless to say, we were the only ones in Saboten as well. Without much debate, we decided on the Twin Special set ($46) to share and with an additional order of curry sauce ($3). The Twin Special set consists of Breaded Pork Loin, Asparagus Cheese roll, Breaded Shrimps x2, Crab Cream Croquette x2, with pickles, dessert, free flow of miso soup, cabbage and rice.

Cabbage and Sesame

Sesame sauce and Ponzu sauce

Twin Special Set

Miso soup, Rice, Radish Ponzo Sauce

Although there isn't much crowd, food items are kept fresh, cabbage is crisp and cold, perfect for a Sunny day. I strongly recommend adding the sesame sauce, it's slightly sourish and adds a flavorful and refreshing taste to the cabbage.

The fried items tasted very nice on its own, especially the pork loin, the breaded crust was light and non-oily, locking in the natural juices of the pork loin. For those that prefer a sweeter taste, you can grate the sesame seed and add it to the tonkatsu dipping sauce for more fragrance and flavor. As for me, I prefer my meat to be more saltish so I'll dip it into the curry sauce. Freshly fried shrimps, with the light crust were just perfect, aparagus with cream cheese was good as well. Crab cream croquettes were creamy and warm and fluffy. We noticed that the "crab" was referring to crabstick meat and were greedily hoping for real crab meat. =)

Something worth mentioning is their rice which is pure heavenly! We had an additional serving of white rice, that's how marvelous it is, soft, shiny, bouncy and has a nice chew to it.. with a spoonful of curry sauce on it, hmmmmm.... 幸福！(this is happiness!)

Downside of Saboten, the set came with matcha ice cream that's pure mediocre, sweet and without green tea flavour and I found a short hair in my matcha ice cream and requested for a new serving, server was apologetic and quickly replaced a new one. However, being near the kitchen, I overheard some unhappiness with the kitchen staff replacing the ice cream. Well, I believe it could be a one off incident and most probably I will still be back for their Tonkatsu but there are certain much room for improvements for their service.

Saboten (Parco Marina Bay)

P3-01 

Tel: 63333432