Friends Favourites: Beef Noodles at Ngee Ann Poly

School food...used to be a dread...but these days, schools compete for students, and have gone upmarket. Today I feature in Friend's Favourites, a brief food tour of Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

In my day in NUS, the best canteen was Eva's Kitchen. While the food was good, the environment was basic. But Canteen 4 of Ngee Ann Poly was like a high end food court in the Orchard belt. Air conditioned, well kept, clean tables and chairs. Very nice.

We were there to try the Beef Noodles, which my friend, a lecturer there, highly recommended. We ordered the upsized portion...increased noodle portion as well as additional ingredients...all for the princely sum of $4.

And a $2 plate of deep fried wantons to be shared.

We helped ourselves to the soup, as well as the pork lard crisps

The noodles were very nice. Cooked to perfection. The noodles were like the ones used in wanton mee...yellow, thin, springy, and very nice texture. The beef sauce was very good as wel...thick, smothering, and savoury. Within, boiled white radish accompanied...I found the radish to be quite flavourful. And the beef itself...very good. Contained slices of beef, brisket and tendon. All extremely tender, and very flavourful.

For dessert, we took the campus bus to Blk 72, to try out the brownie at Fahrenheit 8, a very interesting stall for artisinal ice cream set up as a social enterprise by the students.

They make the brownie on the premises. It was nice, chocolatey, but I did not find it very special or unusual. I was expecting some bits of semi-melted chocholates within, and perhaps some nuts. But this was just a plain brownie. The ice cream we had was salted caramel and rum and raisin...both quite good.

Interesting place to go for lunch, though the canteens get rather crowded during meal times, the food was excellent, and the pricing unbeatable. Recommended.

Noodle stall
Blk 43 Ground floor, Canteen 4.
Bus stop is Bus stop 4.

8 Fahrenheit
OurSpace@Blk 72
Ngee Ann Polytechnic

Zen Zen and Brownie Factory: havens in overcrowded CBD during lunchtime?

Lunchtime on a weekday in the CBD can be a harrowing experience...hordes of office workers descent en-masse to fill up their hungry tummies. Raffles Place is particularly stressful. So when Kin found this place tucked in the Basement of OUB Center...where Burger King used to be...she went in for a taste...impressed, I joined her for lunch on another day.



The place is designed like a fast food outlet...queue to order, pay...get a number, and take a table. The food is served in a few minutes.

We took the set lunches...reasonable value $10 to $12 for a soup, main course and drinks.

The soups were rather good...



The clam chowder in the foreground was nicely rich, fragrant, and had actual chunks of clam and potato. Nice tasting too. The mushroom soup in the background was also very nice...chunks of mushrooms. Nice and rich. And best of all, not too salty...in fact erring on being a bit under in the salt department...but I won't complain. I eat too much salt anyway.

The maincourse I selected was the cashew chicken:



A nicely browned, pan fried chicken thigh, smothered with a rather nice brown sauce. A cup of flavoured rice, with one cashew adorning the top. And some boiled vegetables. The meal tasted...healthy...little oil, light on salt. But still managed to be rather tasty. The chicken was quite nicely browned and crisp. The gravy quite good. The rice was well done too...and within the cup, small chips of cashews were found.

Kin had the Basil Chicken Pasta



Not the best...the linguini was over cooked till it was super limp. I am not sure how the chicken was done, probably stir fried, but it retained some of the frozen chicken smell. The vegetables were similar to the cashew chicken. And the pasta sauce...which was to be the main attraction in a pasta dish, was not to be. It was pale, limpid almost, and rather tasteless. I'll avoid this pasta.

Kin had tried their sandwiches in her earlier visit, and she thought they were quite good.

After the meal, we went next door, and had a brownie...this was the Brownie Factory's bestseller:



My neice loves the brownies here. The cake part...if that's what you call it...is rather thick, rich chocholatey. The vanilla ice cream was almost as large as the rather miniscule brownie. And threatened to overpower the taste. Overall, a messy, but very tasty brownie.



Zen Zen and Brownie Factory
Basement 1
1 Raffles Place

Swedish cafe: Fika...

For some reason, Swedish food is rather popular in Singapore. The Swedish furnishing giant Ikea runs a roaring business with their restaurant serving up literally tons of Meatballs, Salmon and dessert. I too have eaten several times at their huge Alexandra store, though found their meatballs to be too salty, the salmon a bit frozen tasting.

Kennard, one of my makan kakis suggested we saunter over to Fika after a bak kut teh meal at Bliss Cafe...and we did...Fika as the restaurant was known...according to the restaurant's own website, the word fika in Swedish means taking a break from work...what a wonderful word.

We only had dessert and coffee...and amongst the 6 of us, we shared 3 portions.

First the Swedish Pancakes, thin swedish pancakes sprinkled with icing sugar served with whipped cream and jam.



I found the pancake rather hard...and firm consistency...a bit like just slapping regular flour mixed with some water and egg, and frying it on a griddle. They were like very hard crepe. As you can guess, I didn't like them very much. I am not sure what ice cream they use, but the vanilla served with the pancakes were superb...nice, rich, milky, thick.

We also had Brownies with Ice-cream



The brownie is a dense warm rich brownie, also served with a rather generous scoop of the excellent vanilla ice-cream. The brownie lived up to its name...very nice rich chocholate, with some nuts embedded...moist inside...goes supremely well with eh excellent ice-cream. Satisfying.

And the Apple Crumble with Ice-cream -



The warm apple crumble was also excellent. The shortbread crust was crumbly, and not too sweet, and provided a nice textural counterpoint to the soft, sweet but acidic and slightly sour apple insides. Again perfect with the delicious vanilla ice-cream.

Interesting desserts, had us satiated.


Fika Cafe
No. 257 Beach Road / Arab Street, Singapore
(on the corner of Beach Road and Arab Street)
Mon-Fri 11am-11pm
Sat-Sun 12am-11pm