Wednesday 4 February 2015

SINGAPORE: Tampopo

Greetings ladles and jellyspoons,
While we have been talking about hawker centre food a lot, we do eat at other places, such as this time when we ate at Takashimaya, a popular shopping mall on Orchard Rd. This .. restaurant I suppose, is called Tampopo, which I believe means dandelion in Japanese. (Song here: Off topic, there's a pretty good manga called Tanpopo, quite old, good though..)
It was a little crowded considering it was no longer lunch time but maybe lunch is eaten late in Singapore. It seems to be a family restaurant, and quite popular. It has art on the walls but I wouldn't consider it especially decorated in Japanese things as most Japanese restaurants are. It's a nice, clean and bright area to eat with a nice atmosphere for maybe a casual date or something with friends. It's bright and welcoming and doesn't feel like there's much of a standard for diners to have. The waitress was attentive and cleared the table quickly, and was nice to kids so that's a plus.


I ordered the chef recommended curry, pictured above.
Songie ordered a chef recommended curry too, but a soup type while mine was a pork Katsu one. His had beef and udon. The beef in it was few and far between it seemed like there was some sort of famine happening, but on the other hand, was so tender and just melted in your mouth. I guess the udon was nice too, I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of udon so yeah. They had a good texture to them though. The curry was a bit spicy but bearable, perhaps a result of our Singapore food training ;) It was a pretty filling dish. However, that being said, I could probably get filled up on water alone as well. Just. Not. Enough. Meat. For $20 ish SGD, I expect at least double of what I received. Kind of ridiculous.

so happy haha
Mine was just a huge plate with rice, salad and Katsu, with watermelon on the side. The curry was served on the side in a shallow dish with a cut up boiled egg. It kinda looked like something to dip my katsu in rather than an actual curry. The taste was similar to the curry from You Japanese Dining, so vaguely spicy but not enough to really bother you. It was very mild but it seemed like packet curry, I guess? Was a bit bland to what I was expecting I suppose.
It was definitely filling but didn't seem worth the $21 I paid. Maybe it's just in comparison with hawker centre food prices. Essentially spent almost $50 on 2 dishes though, and that kinda irks me somehow. However I will also consider the fact it was in Takashimaya which seems to up the prices of everything, presumably just because of the cost of being in such an area. So the food is alright and the price is alright if you think about the area, but it's probably not somewhere I would go specially, just on a whim. From this post alone you can probably tell how the eating scene is in Singapore. To eat local food, which to us is exotic, worth it, and satisfying, is cheap because, it's local. Almost every small area of Singapore will serve similar things. However, go to a more modern setting, such as places on Orchard, and you'll find prices soaring and food becoming really similar to what we see in New Zealand. It's great to break the monotony of local food and to rub shoulders with the more wealthy but other than that, I don't think it's worth anything more than an experience.

Cheers,
The Lambs 

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