Toby's - The Dessert Asylum

We happened to be in the far east (Marine Parade) to attend a wake, and decided to hunt for dinner somewhere nearby. I suggested Parkway Parade since it was nearby, and in no time, we had parked and started looking for dinner places. I did scan the website on the ride there to try to find suitable eating places. Hubby rejected most of those I suggested, but he spotted Toby's bright signage from from far away and dragged me over to check it out. Turns out the menu seems pretty alright, something I wasn't able to tell from it's name on the website. I honestly thought it was just a dessert place.

The menu is actually quite playful with cartoons all over, and somehow a little reminiscent of NYDC's format and variety. I was actually tempted by many items ranging from pasta to pizza to pies. I finally decided on what I want, and added on a set meal. The set meal came with a soup of the day, which in this case, was a mushroom soup. Portion wasn't huge, but its nice to see a non-campbell mushroom soup, served with a super well toasted slice of bread (which really, is more like a cookie given how toasted it is.).

Mushroom soup

My final decision was the beef lasagne, which for some reason was served with a buttered toast on it. The toast was totally out of place, but I dutifully ate it before digging into the pasta. The pasta is actually pretty alright. The sauce well flavoured, the pasta cooked right, the whole combination is pretty decent.

Beef lasagne

Hubby was hungry and straight up ordered a pizza and a pasta. The mushroom and spinach pizza had a generous scatter of spinach leaves and toasted almonds. I liked the pizza, and helped eat one, maybe two slices. That's because he was too full from his pasta and couldn't finish the pizza. There was something he didn't quite like in the vegetarian spaghetti but I can't remember what it is. Oh! I think it was the greens in the pasta. I was pretty sure they were spinach but he said they tasted weird and left them all behind.

Mushroom and spinach pizza

Vegetarian spaghetti

Ironically, we had no space for desserts. The food isn't too bad, but wasn't so amazing that I will drive all the way back to the east for it. But if I happen to be in the locality, I will probably want to return to try their desserts.

Toby's - The Dessert Asylum
80 Marine Parade Road, 

#02-68/69/70 

Parkway Parade
Singapore 449269
+65 6346 2435
enquiry@tobys.com.sg

Verve Pizza Bar (Marina Bay)

My family and I went for the Cavalier show at Marina. After the show, we wanted a simple dinner before heading home. Since we all parked at the open carpark beside the show stage, the most accessible place to dine was actually Verve Pizza Bar, right beside the carpark. Moreover, it seemed to be vegetarian friendly enough, so we settled for there. Since all the seating is alfresco, and it's pretty late at night, and I didn't bring my camera and had to rely on my phone camera, I apologise for the poor photos.

First up, french fries. No truffles, no garlic. Just good ol' fries. Ordered more for my nephew's benefit than ours, but he didn't eat alot of it so we gained from him. Regular fries, not much I can comment on.

Fries

My mom and I shared a somewhat interesting sounding pizza. Enzo - peking duck pizza. How fusion is that? Turns out it wasn't very Chinese flavoured after all. But the influence is there. Sweetish sauce, duck meat pieces, and topped with cucumber and spring onions. My mom enjoyed it, I found it not bad.

Enzo - Peking duck pizza

When there's my bro and me, there's always fried chicken wings. We CANNOT resist. But their's were so-so. Crispy, yes. Seasoned, yes. That's about it. It wasn't those super nice ones. But it's not bad. It's very hard to make bad fried chicken wings... agree?

Fried chicken wings

The hubby went for the Franucci, a tomato, mozzarella, basil pizza. It looked good! He polished the entire pizza off alone, which is impressive by itself. Then he amazed us further by ordering a pasta, and finished that too! I tried a mouthful of his pasta, which I forgot to take a photo of. I like it! Their pasta are homemade fresh pasta. The texture is nowhere like those dried kinds we get in supermarkets and find in almost 90% of the restaurants in Singapore. I love fresh pasta!

Franucci - tomato mozzarella basil pizza

And of course I managed to forget to take photo of my sis-in-law's pasta before she mixed it. But here's a look at their yummy fresh pasta. Urgh, the poor lighting is soooo not helping the food look nice. Ok, and my poor photography skills.

Aglio olio linguini

I like their pizzas for the thin-crusts, and love their homemade pastas. Overall, we liked it. In fact, so much so that the hubby asked me a few weeks later where else got sell pizza and pasta like the one we ate after Cavalier one. You see, he doesn't remember places very well, so it's no surprise he forgot the name. For him to actually remember the food he ate after Cavalier, it goes to shows how much he enjoyed it. 

Verve Pizza bar

11 Marina Boulevard
Ground Floor
Marina Bay City Gallery
Singapore 018940

Ikoi Japanese Restaurant

This post is a place highly recommended by JK. This post doesn't have a lot of pictures. Because this post is about Ikoi Japanese Restaurant, which was serving Japanese ala carte buffet. And it was 11 of us visiting. So, with 11 pax and an ala carte buffet, you can imagine the speed at which we were ordering and wolfing down our food. But I will do my best to describe some of the favorites from my memory.

Sashimi. Really, at $38++, free-flow sashimi is a deal. We started with three plates of mixed sashimi. That meant it came with Salmon, Tuna, Swordfish and a few others. The few others probably included octopus and mackerel, but because we didn't enjoy those as much, they didn't stick in my brain very well. THE SWORDFISH IS AMAZING!!!! Cold, juicy, sweet. I was inhaling swordfish like nobody's business. Even J, who usually don't take sashimi because she dislike the 'fishiness', could try and liked the swordfish. She did ask my opinion which sashimi she should try, and I told her very pointedly, only the swordfish. N, our Dutch intern, loves salmon and tuna. She said back in the Netherlands, Japanese buffet will never include sashimi, so she was going to town with the salmon and tuna. Somehow, all the sashimi lovers were seated at my end of the table. The other end had a few who don't do raw fish or don't do fish in general. So as one of those at the other end observed: "it was entertaining to see sashimi disappearing down your end of the table".

Our table some time in the middle of the meal

They also served a soup in a little tea pot. I'm actually not sure what soup that is, but it's a delicious soup. They also served chawanmushi in the cutest little cup. When placing order here, you pretty much don't need to worry about portions. Because one portion is for one. So for example, grilled salmon. We were expecting the usual restaurant size piece, so we ordered two portions to try. Ended up it was tiny two-mouths slices each. You get the gist.

Things we loved: grilled saba fish, grilled salmon, yakitori, shishamo, soft-shell crab handroll, sushis (that's what the colleagues said. They disappeared so fast I didn't even know we ordered them).

Things we didn't love: tempura were generally so so

We totally ignored the noodles and rice.

We loved this place, and returned with a huge food coma. Needless to say, it was a very unproductive afternoon that day.

Ikoi Japanese Restaurant

Hotel Miramar Singapore
401 Havelock Road
Singapore 169631

Lobby, Main Wing
Phone (65) 6887 3788

Ristorante da Valentino

It's my birthday!!! And the hubby and I arranged to have dinner together. But he didn't mention where we were going. Knowing how bochap he usually is, I was expecting one of the usual places we go. To my surprise, he didn't say anything, just asked me to get in the car when he picked me up. I fell asleep, and woke up to find myself in The Grandstand. Still he kept mum about where we're having dinner. He couldn't find the place and we were staring at the directory. I asked him which restaurant he still kept quiet. Just dragged me all around the Grandstand, until we found the restaurant at some ulu corner with it's main entrance from the outside of the mall. And no signboard. It was until he spotted the menu with the restaurant name on it then he was sure he got the right place.

So here we are at Ristorante da Valentino. A quaint little Italian restaurant hidden at one corner at a mall in the middle of nowhere. He actually found it by random search online. After we browsed through the menu, the server came by and gave us a verbal commentary of the specials, of which I understood only parts of. But one of the recommended starters was something he described and sounded like 'mozzarella with tomatoes'. Hey, that sounds like Caprese salad and I like that! So we went with that (without even knowing the price actually).

When it arrived, the waiter let me take a photo of the whole plate, before he divided it into two side plates for us. And that's the moment that I was blown away, and HAD to immediately google what I thought I heard the dish is called. And I found it. That's a Burrata cheese. Something I've never heard of before this point in time, but something that replaced Buffalo mozzarella as my favourite cheese from this point forth. Imagine the freshness of Buffalo mozzarella. Now, keep that same taste in your head, but imagine a creamier, richer version. That, is Burrata. It was sooooo creamy... I looooove it. Totally. And the accompanying cherry tomatoes were so sweet and juicy, complementing the Burrata so well. I was totally in love with the whole dish.

Burrata cheese

I wanted a mushroom soup so we got mushroom soup. Theirs was served in a cup, and it was the velvety, mushroomy kind. As opposed to chunky or creamy kind, if you get my drift. Nice warm start to the meal. But pales in comparison to that amazing salad I just had. And what's Italian food without good crusty Italian bread? We were given three crusty rolls to go with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Hubby stopped at one so I polished off two. Yum. I love bread.

Mushroom soup

Crusty Italian bread

The hubby went for a Spinach lasagne. It's creamy and fragrant. I tried a bit of it and I liked it. The pasta was perfectly cooked, and the sauce perfect. But it was a little to rich for the hubby and he struggled through the second half of it. He never really did well with cream based food.

Spinach lasagne

I greedily went for the Carbonara. This was a REAL carbonara. Made with mainly eggs and lots of cheese, very little (if any) cream. It was RICH! I did enjoy the 'realness' of it, but I found the pasta a little too al dente to my liking. I would have preferred the pasta be cooked that little bit longer. So actually, I found myself liking my hubby's dish more...

Carbonara

Overall, I enjoyed the dinner. I'm not sure if the Burrata totally skewed my impression of this place to a highly positive bias. That may well be, because now as I'm writing, I remember I didn't enjoy the Carbonara. But it's a nice cosy place for that special occasion. In fact, we were almost the only Singaporeans in that restaurant. Almost all other guests were Caucasians! Guess that speaks volumes about its authenticity.

Ristorante da Valentino

200 Turf Club Road, #01-19
Singapore 287994
Tel: 6462 0555
Email: ristvale(@)singnet.com.sg
SMS - 9463 8033

Feedlot Steakhouse

It was post-gym, we had steak cravings, it's the night before my birthday, sooo... we thought we'll eat "better". We had came across Feedlot Steakhouse on those 'best steak in Singapore' lists, so we thought we'll give it a try. It took me a two drives pass it to find the entrance into its carpark, so do take note to turn into the left side of that road because the carpark entrance is right after the turn, there's no time to make a filter to the left after you have turn.

Post gym we are alway ravenous, and always welcome something warm. So mushroom soup sounded lovely. And it was served in these super pretty bowls! Pretty bowls aside, the soup was very nice!! Fragrant and truffly and smooth. Totally hits the spot.

Cream of mushroom with truffle

We requested that everything else be served at the same time, rather than starters first. First to reach, our Black Angus Ribeye steak, served with bordelaise sauce. We asked for sea salt and Lynn loved it. The beef was good, and well flavoured. I hardly ever need extra salt for my steaks most of the time, unless the salt is flavoured. But Lynn loves her beef with sea salt, and she especially loved it this time round.

Black Angus Ribeye

For sides we ordered truffle fries. Although it looked impressive with the black truffle bits, it wasn't super truffly. Yes, I know the strong truffle taste of truffle oils are just factory synthetic flavouring. Call me a sucker if you will but I love that factory synthetic flavouring. Lol...

Truffle fries

Our 'starter' that we requested be served alongside was a pan seared foie gras. It was very flavourful, but wasn't very melt-in-the-mouth. We enjoyed it nonetheless. How far wrong can foie gras go right?

Pan seared foie gras

The second main we ordered was the Iberian pork chop. I... actually cannot remember much about it. So I'm guessing it wasn't super impressive, nor was it bad. I guess it just was normal.

Iberian pork chop

We actually liked the atmosphere, service and food at Feedlot. They subsequently had a lobster mac n cheese promo that Lynn wanted to come for but we couldn't find the time. But sure, I'll love to come back for more mushroom soup and beef please!