Wednesday, July 25, 2007

和楽の楽しみ

Met up with K today at Central for dinner; it's been about 2 years since I last met K, so it was great to catch up with him while he's back in Singapore (he's a sec-sch-JC jap class buddy of mine who has gone to UK to study Medicine) and chat about our lives heh.

We found our way to Waraku after a short while contemplating the other possibilities such as Tomton (too much fried stuff, so we went for variety instead). Surprisingly there wasn't a huge queue at Waraku, after all I've heard about the long one-hour queues there; maybe it's because we were there about 6.15pm where there wasn't much of a dinner crowd yet. We were shown a nice seat by the window with an excellent view of the riverside, though the roof of the open-air Manhattan Fish Market on the floor below wasn't all that nice a sight, covered as it was in -ahem- guano.

The menu was frankly breathtaking, mindboggling, and leaves my Libran indecisiveness expanded to monstrous proportions lol. This was probably one of the most expansive Japanese restaurant menus I have ever seen, with nearly 20 pages (I didn't count, really, slackmouthed as I was at the array of food choices) of food lavishly divided into one- or two-page sections of rice, curries, cold noodles, warm noodles, cream noodles, sashimi, sushi, set meals, ala-carte, and so on. It took the two of us probably 15 minutes to fully look through the menu and come to a decision.

I ordered a Rindo set - cold soba and udon with dipping sauce, along with a bowl of tonkatsu with rice; as well as Chawan Mushi, one of those must-have Japanese staples that I almost always order at every Japanese restaurant, if only as a surrogate marker for my assessment of the restaurant's standard (heh). K got a Beef Curry Soba as well as an Age Dashi Tofu.


My Chawan Mushi came first; notice the drastic difference between the picture on the menu and the reality. The menu picture was obviously blown up and arranged stylistically to show the various ingredients hidden in that bowl of chawanmushi. I eventually managed to find the piece of unagi shown in the menu at the bottom of my bowl of chawanmushi, so at least there wasn't any misrepresentation involved haha. The chawanmushi was average, in my opinion; the taste was not breathtakingly sublime nor the texture luxuriantly smooth; in fact there were quite a number of noticeable bubbles in the custard. The various added ingredients such as a slice of lime, some pork, a slice of Japanese fishcake, and of course, the unagi, lent their own flavourfulness to the custard, though, making it still pretty enjoyable. The clear broth that remained at the bottom after savouring the chawanmushi was also quite a refreshing end to this little pot of goodies.


Here's my Rindo set which came as I was halfway through my chawanmushi. It's actually quite worth the price, $14.80 for both cold noodes (and both soba and udon at that) as well as a bowl of rice with tonkatsu. The cold noodles were pretty standard (one of my favourites in Jap cuisine) though I haven't actually had cold udon before, and it went pretty well with the bonito flakes that were scattered on it which lent a strong smoky salty aroma to the noodles. The soba, udon and dipping sauce were icy cold, so no complaints there; liked it. The rice is essentially oyako-don, with the tonkatsu buried in semisolid egg drenched upon a mound of rice. It was actually not that great a part of the meal for a number of reasons: the tonkatsu was exceedingly thick and I had the distinct feeling the center of the pork cutlet was uncooked, and the sauce was also overly salty, making me gulp down quite a bit of my tea. Otherwise the cooked portions of the pork cutlet were satisfyingly marinated and fried to a juicy tenderness. I think I had left the rice sitting for quite a while as I attacked the noodles, thus the cutlet was already pretty soggy by the time I ate it, thus I cannot comment on it's crispiness heh, but that's to be expected in a dish of its nature.


K's beef curry soba (couldn't try it because it has beef) - he complained that there was too much soba and thus made him rather bloated, but otherwise quite a satisfactory dish. The Age Dashi Tofu was quite standard, again; the tofu was very soft and silken and coated with a crisp outer layer that yielded easily (some agedashi tofu I've tried have skins that come off in one piece when you try to cut through them, thus leaving the tofu shaking nakedly on your spoon - not a pretty sight), and the sauce was also very light and full of flavour.


We took quite a while to finish our food (mine especially, since I had three servings of carbs to attack haha) and after that sat admiring the view of the river, sipping our green tea, and chatting. The serving staff were nice enough not to be very obvious about the fact that we were hogging their seats while a queue was forming outside (guess the reason why there are queues is because of people like us? hehe), but we didn't overstay our welcome too long. I think Waraku is great for its large variety of food choices - you can probably visit countless times and never run out of new things to try - and the food is also reasonably priced and pretty good value for money. The quality is also good, if not breathtaking; a great place to go for a nice meal. No wonder there are long queues all the time (when we left there were three or four groups of people waiting at the entrance area).

We left Central to take a nice little walk along the riverfront and cross over to the Clarke Quay side, exploring an area which I have never really visited for a long time and seeing the interesting restaurants and bars/clubs/pubs(whatever the difference may be) that lined the shophouses, and being rather surprised with the liveliness of the whole place on a weekday night. We saw this club called Clinic C which is possibly a branch of Aurum (that medical-concept restaurant with golden wheelchairs) with seats that look like mental institution benches, screening curtains and drips, and even the golden wheelchair in a room that appeared to be modelled after a mortuary, complete with central dissection table. So interesting.

Eventually we settled down at TCC for some drinks - I ordered an Azuki Coffee Cooler which is coffee with red beans, while K ordered an Azuki Freeze which is a red bean blended drink (what's the fascination with red beans? I don't know, I just wanted something sweet).


I quite liked my drink (it's the one on the right); thought the coffee was a bit overly bitter at first but after thoroughly mixing it with the layer of red beans at the bottom I found that the sweetness of the beans were quite the delightful counterpoint to the bitter coffee, forming a very interesting amalgam of flavours. I love sweet red beans so I may be biased here. But there goes my self-imposed restriction on caffeine intake other than the cup of tea at breakfast; I'm probably still under the effects of caffeine now which explains why I'm blogging at such a late hour bleah. But I don't have to wake up early tomorrow so it's okay.


It was really great catching up with this great friend of mine; we can still talk about so many things under the sun haha. Also ate a lot of good food and enjoyed myself thoroughly with the mad photo-taking haha, it's been quite a while since I had pretty good jap food.

Avaris / 7/25/2007 11:54:00 PM

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