Spicy chicken nanban. A Singapore-exclusive item, and essentially the concept of “dish localization” executed to perfection. The spiciness doesn’t just dwell in the sauce – it looks all creamy and harmless but oh, boy – but also in the chicken’s marinate. Thus, it’s spicy inside out yet restrained enough that…
Crispy chicken skin. Essentially the best bits from fried chicken minus the tedium of having to actually finish off the meat. Each individual piece is darned crispy and comes with a bit of meat and just a bit of fat, so it’s less KFC and more Har Cheong Gai-esque. Worthy…
Spicy pork noodle – glass noodle, pork ball, minced pork meat and vegetables. My favourite from the four Thai boat noodles available, and notably the only one that uses glass over rice noodles. It was sour, mildly spicy and rather refreshing, almost like a salad. I was most intrigued by…
Tom Yum Fried Rice. The rice was quite wet and sticky, with the grains fusing with each other into clingy lumps and each spoonful being a big lump of small lumps. I would have preferred if the rice grains remained independent and loose, like comfortable underwear. Fortunately, the glue that…
Deep Fried Stingray with Mak Bibik sauce. The stingray tasted very chewy, like a tough chicken who made it to command school during NS. The titular sauce was like the soya sauce you get with steamed fish during Chinese wedding dinners, only slightly saltier and with a badass spiciness from…
Chirashi. Apart from the variety they offer in terms of sea catch – you get singular pieces of many types of sashimi instead of multiple slices of the same few things – what I adore about Sugisawa’s Chirashi is their inclusion of denbu (sweet semi-dried fish flakes) which tastes like…
Red Tom Yum Soup. Like Willy Wonka’s Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum, this soup morphs from form to form while it swishes in your mouth, all within seconds – it starts off as piquant tomato bisque, then becomes classic spicy tom yum soup, but in the final few seconds it…
BBQ Pork Neck. If you only order one item from Spicy Thai – Thai Café, let it be this. Smokier than a singlet at Chomp Chomp on Saturday nights at 9PM and more tender (although equally charred) than the flesh of a tanned, buff dragonboater wearing said singlet, with just…
Chirashi – salmon, swordfish, tuna, and amberjack sashimi with ikura and tamago on a bed of rice. Essentially Chikuwa Tei’s chirashi but now in a round and not square home, and the definitive chirashi that bitchslaps all others and demands that they bow down. It’s only $25, yet the thicknesses…