Monday, July 03, 2006

Flowerbed Kitchen & Bar

C says:

After coming here for lunch a few times, I was pretty impressed so I brought A here on Friday night. It’s a fairly simple joint specialising in noodles, located next to Savoir in Far East Square. It’s supposedly opened by a pair of TV artistes (Mediacorp? Fly? No idea…) but I can’t for the life of me remember who, and can’t seem to locate the newspaper article that mentioned it.

Anyway, being really boring, most of the dishes that we ordered were those that I’ve tried before. We shared the ‘Chili’ noodles, which were like dry you mian/la mian with a very generous topping of mushrooms, minced pork, ikan bilis, a sunny-side-up egg, and a dry paste with finely chopped dried chillies. This looked a lot more lethal than it really was – yes, it was slightly spicy but nothing unbearable. The noodles were quite yummy, but because of all the ingredients, it was slightly salty and could potentially be a little gelak if you have an entire bowl on your own. It comes with a small bowl of clear soup with some spinach, which does help to alleviate the saltiness somewhat. Still, I would recommend ordering just 1 noodle per couple to share. This frees you up to try some of their side dishes as well.

We shared 3 sides which were all quite delicious. In order of preference (with my favourite first), we had the beer marinated chicken wings, potato skins, and fried yam cake. The chicken wings were great, I could eat a whole bucket of these while watching tv. They only serve the mid-joint portion, so none of the drumlets, which suits me just fine. There is a faint taste of the beer marinade, but mainly it’s a little sweet and fried to a perfect golden brown. The potato skins had a slight asian twist to them – they were filled with a mixture of minced pork and spring onions, then topped with a very generous layer of baked mozzarella cheese. These require a 10 minute waiting time, and we waited even longer for ours because apparently there was a problem with their oven, but they were worth the wait. The fried yam cake was pretty good too, but to me it was slightly over fried and too hard and crunchy. It was topped with nice bits of fried garlic chips though, and served with 2 dipping sauces – a sweet sauce and a sambal chilli.

This place is absolutely packed at lunchtime and can be quite frenetic, leading to quite poor service at times. It’s a lot more enjoyable at dinner time, and I know for sure that we’ll be going back to try the other things on their menu.

A says:

Highly recommended. Food is cheap and good. Staff and service are efficient and intelligent, although C says the girl with dyed hair was blur the previous time she went. Also, if you have a sweet tooth, try the fruit-flavoured ice blended. I had a lychee one that hit the spot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Found out who the celebrities are who opened Flowerbed - Benjamin Heng and Deborah Sim. She does the cooking, and he does everything else, according to the article in Lifestyle.