Who likes all day breakfasts? Toby's Estate for Eggs Benedict

I featured Toby's Estate in my series on espresso joints in town. But equally interesting is the food at this relaxed cafe by the river. I particularly like their Eggs Benedict which I feature today.

Of course we had to start with a coffee. this time a cappucino...nice, beautifully drawn espresso, with a great foam, with nice latte art. Very delicious. The beans were flavourful, with a punch, even through the milk. Very nice.

But I want to talk about their Eggs Benedict

I am a bit of a sucker when it comes to Eggs Benedict. I don't know why it should cost so much...not to single out Toby's, but a typical EB cost north of $10, some even asking for $18 for two poached eggs, sitting with a slice of ham on toast and Hollandaise sauce. The least expensive is at Al Dente Pronto at Great World City...$7.50.

But Toby's $14, is almost double the price, but I do think is a bit better...the eggs were done perfect. Just runny inside, but holds well to its shape outside. The toast, perfect. Instead of ham, they use a slice of prosciutto. Quite nice!

Here is another pic...

The texture of the egg exterior suggested to me they were poached in vinegar...but as mentioned, they were perfectly done...and one poke with the fork, and the yolk oozes out.

The restaurant features outdoor al fresco seating...and for a nice breakfast by the river, is bicycle friendly. In fact, this is one of the more atas (upmarket) places my cyclist friends and I like to have our morning sustainance before our ride.

Toby's Estate
8 Rodyk st4
#01-03/04
+65 66367629

All day breakfasts: Wild Honey at Scotts Square

All day breakfasts are an interesting concept. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage. Even thinking about it gives me a comfort feeling. Homely.

One of the standard bearers of this kind of lunching or dining is Wild Honey...the original outlet in Mandarin Galleria was a great success...so much so that long queues often form outside. The restaurant had a "No Reservations" policy.

So when they opened at Scotts, now newly refurbished and refreshed, they started taking reservations...so we thought, let's go lunch there.

I arrived a bit early but was showed to my table immediately by the cheerful hostess. Service was a bit spotty here. The hostess who greeted me, and indeed everyone of the waitresses were smiling, warm, but it did take 2 reminders before they brought me some water.

I ordered the Canadian...three fluffy pancakes, with Canadian maple syrup, berry compote and Canadian bacon back.

Pancakes are a comfort food for me. For some reason, I love the ones served at IHOP...a chain store only found in North America. I love them light, fluffy, tasty...and goes so well with a blob of butter, a generous drizzling of maple syrup or honey. And a nice generous helping of blueberry compote.

Wild Honey's version almost lived up to those expectations. The pancakes were nice and fluffy. Quite tasty on its own, and nearly divine with the maple syrup. The compote was a bit sour, tart...perhaps. But not in line with the richness of the pancakes. No cream or butter was offered...but I didn't need any. The bacon was crisp, fairly lean as bacon goes...but I found it altogether too salty.

Lionel went for the Full English breakfast

Full is the operative word. Two scrambled eggs, tomato, halfed fried button mushrooms, fried potato cubes, sausage, baked beans and almost half a loaf of bread. I didn't taste the dish, but it smelled heavenly, though the scrambled eggs looked a tad over cooked.

We also ordered some coffees...but they were nothing to shout about...typically overextracted brews. The foreground coffee was a cafe machiatto...altogether too milky for a machiatto...even the out of focussed top tells this tale. The main cup in the picture is a fancy mocha coffee.

Nice place...beautiful interior. Good crowd, a tad noisy at times. The crowd was perhaps 80% female...tai tais and ladies who lunch, I guess.

Wild Honey
03-01, Scotts Square
#01-14/15 Robertson Walk

Eating USA: IHOP

with Eddie, Prof Horolographer

This trip to the US, being on the road...I drove some 3000 miles (about 4800km) in the 14 days we were there...treking mainly the coastal California cities and the US National Parks of Yosemite, Bryce, Grand Canyon. So it meant having to set aside fine dining, and nicer food, for fast food on the road.

The US highways are literally dotted with many such oasis of food, gas and whatnot. And in many of them, the usual suspects - McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Denny's but also IHOP.

Easy to find, with their characteristic A frame blue roof...



Interesting and typically American to name your chain of stores International House of Pancakes...when the chain is not quite international (they have outlets only in North America), and their menu is quite complete...a bit like Denny's...all day breakfasts, and other American Diner style meals. But of course, special emphasis on pancakes.

I had earlier been kind of hooked on their pancakes...so in our little party of 3 for breakfast before breaking for Gilroy for some retail therapy, we started with a blueberry pancake stack:



This was superb. The blueberries were fresh berries, but totally immersed in a compote of blueberry jelly-jam. The pancakes were huge, fluffy, buttermilk pancakes, which were embedded with blueberries. Eaten just like that, or if you are decadent, with some whipped cream...oh...delicious! Oh, did I mention blueberries are very healthy? They contain a good dose of antioxidants, and are delicious too.

We also sampled the plain pancakes...just a stack of 3 huge, fluffy.



Breakfast, eating this with either Maple Syrup or Honey is just wonderful. Gives you the energy to bounce off walls for the next 10 hours!

We also decided to add some protein, and went for the American staple big breakfast...



Two eggs, ham, sausage, has browns, bacon...all the grease one can take...and smelled wonderful, tasted great.

IHOP...eat like the Americans...and certainly worth one breakfast when in the USA.


International House of Pancakes (IHOP)
everywhere in the USA
www.ihop.com

Feasting in Penang: Toh Soon Cafe

with family

Located in a side street along Lebuh Campbell, this small cafe is almost perpetually full...the actual cafe is no more than a hole in the wall of a corner terrace shop, and a tentage is set up to cover the side road...with tables and stools setup for customers.



This shop has been around for ages. The attraction is the coffee, and the various offers of bread...toasted, steamed, with kaya, with butter...huge list of offerings.

We started the morning breakfast with black coffee...kopi-o.



Black, totally opaque, the coffee is probably brewed from coarsely ground robusta beans. Typical of the kopitiam coffee, this is usually roasted with maize, and often with margerine. The grounds are brewed using the sock method...where the grounds are placed in a muslin bag, and brewed in a pot with hot water. Toh Guan's coffee is thick, flavourful...a robust, full body flavour, and a distinct fragrance. The nose is not like those we get from the more aromatic arabica, but a thick, dense, smokey fragrance which is also very addictive.

But on to the breads. We start off with steamed local bread:



Two slices of local bread...commonly known as bengali bread...this is different from the factory made bread like those offered by Gardenia, in that I think it contains less gluten, and often free of preservatives. Just flour, yeast, often allowed to rise fully...making the bread very airy, and baked till the outer crust develops into a deep brown. The crust is typically cut off and not served.

Steaming causes the bread to become a bit more elastic than it would have been. It also softens and moistens the bread. Very nice. I wonder why steamed bread is seldom offered.

Also lightly toasted butter kaya bread.



The same bengali bread is lightly buttered and spread with kaya. And toasted in a truly old charcoal oven, shown below:



I am not sure why the oven is situated in the lower part of the stove...toasting bread becomes a back breaking exercise of having to stoop low to insert and remove the bread.

But the bread is excellent. Toasted lightly, it maintains a crisp exterior, while the interior is nice and soft. The butter is fairly generous, but the kaya is a bit lacking. It did not have the fragrance, nor the intensity as that found in Killiney, or my mom's home made stuff. On top of that, the amount of kaya spread was not generous.

We also ordered just plain buttered toast, to be eaten with half boiled eggs:



This was quite brilliant. Nicely toasted, with melted butter. And torn into small bite sized portions and dunked in the liquid half boiled eggs. Very nice.


Toh Soon Cafe
Lebuh Campbell (Penang Road side)



View Toh Soon Cafe in a larger map

Hatched!: nice and cozy...and full of memories

with family

Located right at the former Eusoff College residential hostel of the National University of Singapore, and just a short walk from Raffles Hall where I stayed during my undergraduate days...Eusoff was then an all girls hostel, and hearts of Rafflesians of RH as we called ourselves...and especially so for those who hot blooded male RH residents, would throb at the mention of "going to Eusoff". In those days, men were only allowed into the receiving foyer, and no further. Eusoff College has moved to its new grounds within the Kent Ridge campus, and for a while, it remained a residential college, but opened to both sexes. But it has since been commercially redeveloped. The old buildings still retain their old world charm, thank goodness the new tenants did not totally modernize it. And where the dining hall of Eusoff used to be, now housed Hatched!, The Wine Company and a prata shop. The Wine Company is worth a visit, so more of that in another blog entry, but the prata shop...despite its popularity, is not worth the calories.

The subject of my entry today is Hatched!

The menu was certainly interesting...as was the cheerful gentleman who served us...



As implied by the menu and the catchy name Hatched, every item on the menu features eggs...All day breakfasts were offered. A quick perusal of the rather large number of options indicate that this was going to be interesting...the folks who wrote the menu have a sense of humour.

The restaurant was laid out and decorated more like a canteen, or a cafe...with a huge blackboard with specials etc scrawled on it.



I ordered the pancakes, of course...regular readers of this blog will know of this soft spot for big, hot, fluffy, pancakes with rich butter (or whipped butter) and maple syrup.



And indeed they were as promised. Hot, rather large (about 7 inches in diameter and about 1cm thick), fluffy. The batter was well done...with just a right tinge of sugar and salt. A small cup of maple syrup and another small cup of whipped butter was presented with the pancakes and a few blueberries. The blueberries were a bit stingy, I thought...I expected more blueberries...but no matter...the pancakes were quite delicious, and the maple syrup was also excellent (wish there were more generous with the the maple syrup and butter).

Kin had the Bacon Rap



Three slices (lumps really) of mozzarella cheese, wrapped in streaky bacon, baked and served with some fig jam. The dish tasted fine...the mozzarella tasted fine...and cooked nicely...sometimes mozzerella can be tough and have a tannic bite when overcooked...but this was done right, and very pleasant. The bacon was lightly fried, and wrapped around the cheese. A simple dish, but quite effective in busting the hunger pangs.

Edward had the Burly Benedict:



Our server recommended the young man to go for the double...double poached eggs, each topped with mornay sauce (Mornay sauce is a bechamel sauce with cheese...usually gruyere or and parmesan) sitting on a slice of wagyu beef and half an English muffin. Eggs benedict is not the easiest dish to prepare...though the idea of poaching an egg is easy enough, getting it perfect is rather difficult. The best I have eaten is at the breakfast table at The Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. I found the eggs to be nicely done...just right, when cut open, the outer had just begun to solidify, and the insides were still runny. Edward didn't like the eggs as much. The wagyu was a bit tough. On the whole, decent dish, though not spectacular like it can be given the way it was presented.



Interesting restaurant...one which brings back some memories, but mainly one which serves solid, traditional breakfast items...done well, if not not exceptionally well...but good enough for repeat visits.


Hatched
26 Evans Road #01-06 Evans Lodge
Singapore, 259367
Tel: 67350012/13
Sun-Thu: 8am - 10pm
Fri-Sat: 8am - 12am
(Closed on Mon)
Website: http://www.hatched.sg/

Australia in Singapore? Spruce Cafe

with family

Phoenix Park used to house the Ministry of Home Affairs...with its buildings full of secret and nationally sensitive information. But since the Ministry has moved into its spanking new premises in Novena (known as Phoenix Park II), the place vacated is a scattering of colonial buildings within beautiful foliage of the rain forest. Now the buildings are declassified, and house arty farty establishments.



Spruce, an Australian concept restaurant is one of the first such places to open. Beautifully renovated, and nestled with rustic timber flooring, right next to the trees, the restaurant is serene, calm, and unhurried...much like a typicaly Ozzie might be.



We dropped by one Sunday morning for breakfast.

First off...hot cakes...



I had originally thought I would be getting fluffy, buttermilk pancakes, thick, large, and a huge pile...with blueberry, butter, and lots of maple syrup....an image harking to the days when I visited Southlake (near Dallas) often to experience the huge breakfasts which make Americans what they are. I had also had equally good experiences with pancakes in Sydney, where the serving was somewhat smaller than in the US, but nonetheless just as good.

But I was served 3 pieces of what looked like McDonald's hot cakes...perhaps the name would have given it away, but I did not suspect that. The cakes were already drizzled, albeit a bit frugal, with some syrup, a sprinkling of a few fresh blueberries and what looked like blueberry sauce zig-zagging across my pancakes. The ensemble was finished with crushed cookies and what looked like half a banana.

Cutting into the cakes, and trying to scoop up what little blueberry compote there was, trying to balance a bit of the cookies...in the mouth, it tasted quite good. Certainly more than meets the eye...in fact, good enough for me to finish the entire plate. If only they were more generous with the blueberry and the syrup.

Kin had the English Breakie:



Typical English big fry up...comprising two eggs sunny side up, English styled sausage, bacon, stir fried fresh mushrooms, some baked beans, half a fried tomato and bread. The sausage was kind of average. The eggs were perfectly cooked. The mushrooms were a nice touch...not the button type you get in England, but what looked like oyster mushrooms. They were delicious. The bread is a type of country loaf and was thick, and gorgeous. Lightly toasted, it was wonderful with the eggs.

Edward had the Big Breakie:



Scrambled eggs, German style wurst sausage, bacon, grilled yellow and red bell peppers, half a grilled tomato, and the same gorgeous bread.

The coffee was also very good...here is a espresso macchiato.



Overall a very nice place...reasonably good food, relaxing. Good place to chill out.


Spruce
320 Tanglin Road
Phoenix Park
Tel: 6836 5528
Weekdays: 10.30am - 10.30pm
Weekends: 8.30am - 10.30pm

Riders Cafe, breakfast with the horses

with Kin

Once in a while, on a lazy Saturday morning, Kin and I would drive around to look for unusual places for breakfast. We thought we'd go back to 60's Live Seafood and try the Nasi Lemak, after a nice breakfast there where Kin waxed lyrical about mee rebus and the meaning of the universe...when we caught at the corner of one eye, a glimpse of a black and white bungalow amidst the horses...we decided to detour and have a look.



Charming place, this cafe...there is a terrace overlooking the meadows and the stables, but reserved for members only...but peasants can sit in the main hall...quaintly colonial, timber stripped flooring, fans spinning in the ceiling...no air-condition. But pleasantly cool.



Waiters were dressed Australian style...plain black T-shirts with CREW emblazoned on their backs, dark trousers...only a stripped apron was missing. Cool methinks. Relaxing place thinks Kin.

I ordered the pancake with berry compote.



A comfort food of mine...pleasant memories of eating fluffy buttermilk pancakes, stacked high on a large plate with honey or mapel syrup, huge chunks of butter. One of the things the Americans do right, other than char grilled air dried steaks is pancake. Even the one which is served by the huge chain, now defunct in Singapore - Denny's is very good. And in Texas, a cornmeal biscuit completes the huge breakfast to provide enough fuel to drive the cattle for a week!




The Rider's pancake was excellent. Thick, fluffy, fragrant with a generous sprinkling of icing sugar covering almost the entire plate like snow flakes...very beautiful. Served with whipped butter on top of 3 pancakes, a gorgeous lump of whipped cream and a small bowl of maple syrup on ithe side. All is well until the berry compote was slopped unceremoniously on top of the cakes. I would have preferred the berry on the side...so I can decide how much of it to eat. I dislike raspberry...too sour and too many small seeds to interfere with the taste experience. This was a mix of some raspberry (I think...or strawberries as I can detect some of the small seeds), and blueberry. Would have preferred just blackberry or blueberry.

Kin had the breakfast...with scrambled eggs, sausage, toast...kinda of like a traditional English fry-up breakfast.



Two slices of brown toast, butter, jam. Two pork sausages. Baked beans, roasted potatoes and curiously 3 grapes. Nothing exceptional, seemed home cooked. But nevertheless, good food, done right. A dozen other places can serve something similar.

We reminisced about Sebastian's for breakfast. A quaint French Bistrot right in Greenwood Avenue which alas is no more. There is something special about having a good cook even if just to fry some eggs...a case in point is one of my favourite restaurants in Germany The Caroussel at the Residenz Bülow in Dresden. An eatery with a one star Michelin under its belt, the chef de cuisine comes in to cook even for breakfast...I am amazed, considering that he must have left for home no earlier than 1am from the evening's dinner, before having to appear in the restaurant again at possibly 6am for breakfast. The scrambled eggs, fried eggs are absolutely divine.

But I digress. The sausage, eggs and toast served at Riders is just plain ordinary in comparison. Just hearty breakfast.

The place, especially the building, the ambiance is spectacular. The view as one looks out into the terrace...horse riders working with their horses is just plain wonderful. The food is quite ordinary. We also felt the prices a bit on the high side...pancakes were S$10, and the sausage/egg combo S$13.


http://riderscafe.wordpress.com/
Riders Cafe
51 Fairways Drive
Singapore 286965.
8am to 10pm, Tuesday - Sunday.

Photo notes: First picture is a compilation done HDR style with Photomatix and Photoshop, a technique with exaggerates details and tones.