(report from Singapore) What rhymes with Peranakan?

So, I was in Singapore for the last five days and as always when in Singapore, it's about the food. The next couple posts are some fantastic places I ate in the land of multi-ethnic food. Besides these places, if you go to Singapore, be sure to try Jumbo Seafood for Chili Crab or Pepper Crab, and of course any hawker place for Chicken Rice!

Leo
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Name: True Blue
Address: 117 East Coast Road Singapore
Style: Peranakan
Website: None, but you can Google quite a few reviews with "True Blue Singapore"

Peranakan is the word in Singapore for the culture also known as Straits Chinese. In a sentiment that seems sensible to Americans (but unusual in Asia), Peranakans happily relate that theirs is a culture resulting from the blending and intermarriage of migrant Chinese with the Malays found on both sides of the Straits of Malacca, and now settled in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Peranakan culture has a lot of the decorative motifs of Chinese culture, but incorporates Malay manners of dress, and, significantly, cooking!

On Saturday night in Singapore we went to a great Peranakan restaurant called True Blue. It's located in a beautiful traditional building (117 East Coast Rd. for any Singaporeans reading!) that includes a display of lots of Peranakan antiques and arts. The proprietress clearly kept the house in order as we assembled our array of dishes. Happily, twice on this trip to Singapore, I went to dinner and did not know the names of hardly anything I ate! At True Blue, we shared around about 8 dishes; the only dish I had ever heard of before was the delicious version of Beef Rendang, which was good but not the highlight of the meal.

The standout was probably the chicken-nut dish (like most of the food, I've forgotten the real name). It's made with a black Malay nut, resulting in a very dark brown appearance not unlike a Mole sauce. The taste is as deep a taste as a Mexican Mole but with more earthiness, and since this is infused in a slow-cooked piece of chicken-on-the-bone, the dish comes with a tiny spoon that you use to essentially scrape the chicken meat off of the bone.

However, every dish we got at True Blue was absolutely delectable. We actually chose to try wine with our dinner, but truth to tell the food is probably better served by Singaporean juice drinks or beer. Prices were reasonable though this is no hawker restaurant! The only downside I can list for True Blue is that if you don't have someone who knows Peranakan cooking with you, it may be hard to order -- even though you can read the menu, you just won't know what any of the dishes are! Just ask the staff, who are very friendly.

Our friend David Hook's birthday happened to be the day we went, so we asked the staff and from somewhere they consed up a birthday cake for the confused honoree.



The picture also gives you some idea what the interior of True Blue is like.

Yum! Yakiniku!

Name: Maritan / まりたん
Neighborhood: Shimokitazawa / 下北沢
Style: Yakiniku
Website: None, but there's a Yahoo Gourmet page

At the recommendation of Polygon's head of Human Resources, Kikuchi-san, we trekked north from Shimokitazawa on Friday night to this allegedly superior yakiniku restaurant.

Yakiniku is the style of Japanese eating with a charcoal pit in the center of the table. The raw meat is brought thinly sliced on separate plates -- usually they'll try to bring as many slices as you have people at your table, roughly -- and diners grill the meat themselves, followed with dipping in ponzu, shoyu, or lemon sauces.

Yakiniku is always pretty good, we actually have a yummy place right next to work with very reasonably priced lunch yakiniku set (Y1000). But Kikuchi-san attested that Maritan was special in that regard, and so we found ourselves trekking north from Shimokitazawa station.

Unlike the extremely nigayakana (lively) south side of Shimakitazawa, the north side is actually very quiet, and it took a little backtracking to find Maritan, especially because we were distracted by the barkers for the restaurant upstairs (Maritan is on B1). They were very friendly and tried their best to convince us to abandon our reservation and accompany them inside their street-level new restaurant. With diligence we pried Damien away and went down to Maritan.

The ambience of the restuarant is, frankly, nothing special; it had the expected four-person tables, that we squeezed 5 around. Drink ordering was a challenge for the non-Katakana readers, but we realized they had a selection of 3-4 French wines, one of which Damien knew the Chateau for. This led to our first disappointment: high-class yakiniku or no, they refrigerate their red wines, like most restaurants in Japan. It took plenty of persuasion to convince Damien not to try and instruct the proprietress in the error of her way (refrigerated red wine is what the Japanese customers will expect).

As we went through trying to order our meat, the proprietress wasn't looking any too happy at having a table full of gaijin in her restaurant. While I can read the names in the menu (most names are written in katakana), that doesn't help much unless you know what the words actually mean (anybody: what is horumon?), so we were asking lots of questions in Japanese, then struggling with food-word-vocabulary to understand the answers. At one point she asked, "Have you ever eaten Yakiniku before?"

We got through ordering various courses of meat and went on to the daily-special appetizer (always order the daily special in a Japanese restaurant): Yukke / ユッケ. Yukke is a lot like Steak Tartare, it's raw beef minced with various spices. However, the big difference is that Yukke is better! It was absolutely delicious. We all uttered appropriate exclamations of happiness, mostly in Japanese, which warmed up the proprietress' attitude a bit.

They started bringing our plates of meat, and the proprietress had decided that as soulless barbarians we would ruin the meat if she let us cook it ourselves. Since that absolutely would not do, she took over and started cooking the meat for us, which she continued to do for pretty much the entire meal.

We got into the main part of the meal: sliced pieces of various parts of a cow. Omigod. It. Was. Good. We actually didn't realize there could be this much variation among yakiniku places, but everything we tried was good: rohsu / ロース, which is basically short for roast beef; horumon / ホルモン, which we think is intestine although we're not sure; karupi / カルピ, etc. We exercised all of our complimentary vocabulary expressing our delight.

The highlight of the mail by universal acclamation was the hattsu / ハッつ, beef heart. It was delicious, tender, and totally came apart in your mouth. We were also pretty grateful for the lady's cooking assistance, since the heart only wanted to be cooked for a very short time; left to our own devices, we would indeed have overcooked it.

By the end of the mail, the now-friendly proprietress introduced herself as the restaurant's namesake: her name is Maritan, and she's been there since the place opened 15 years ago. They're clearly learned how to run a superior yakiniku operation in that time and we'll be back! Big thanks to Kikuchi-san!

After we left Damien went back to causing trouble with the cute barkers upstairs, but that's a story for another post ;-).

Note: The only warning I would have about Maritan is that it's really not practical to go unless you either have some Japanese speakers in your party, or know at least know the various dishes you're likely to encounter at a yakiniku restaurant by heart. You're not in Roppongi anymore.

The Oliveto's of Japan

Name: Ristorante la Bisboccia
Neighborhood: Hiro-o/Ebisu 広尾／恵比寿
Style: Italian
Phone: 03-3449-1470
Website: http://www.labisboccia.com/

This is a very overdue review of a very deserving restaurant!

Last November I was leaving work on a rainy Thursday and happened to mention to Yoichi that it was my birthday. He immediately rounded me and Matt up and got us a table at La Bisboccia, which is actually just around the corner from Polygon's offices. It's just south of the Tengenjibashi 天元寺橋　intersection near Hiro-o.

It's decorated in the very conventional bistro style adopted by a lot of Japanese restaurants serving European food. However, unlike the typical overcooked pasta places found around Tokyo, La Bisboccia is a superb grill-oriented Italian restaurant. The specialties are various grilled meats -- between the three of us we tried the steak and the lamb and both were delicious, grilled darkly on the outside but still medium-rare to rare on the inside.

Even the pasta side dishes were excellent, it being almost the only time in Japan that I've actually had al dente pasta (I find restaurant pasta here typically overcooked). If that's not good enough, there was a great wine list as well, which typically for Japan focused on European wines.

Of course, this being Tokyo, that excellence didn't come cheap. We had a good quantity of wine and I believe the bill was around 12,000yen per person, and accordingly, Wiktionary translates "la bisboccia" as "the spree". Nevertheless, for a great meal on a special occasion La Bisboccia is definitely on the list!

Delightful Japan-made IPA

Name: Baird Beer
Style: Beer
Neighborhood: n/a
Website: www.bairdbeer.com

OK, so this isn't exactly a restarant review, but I ended up sampling some Baird Beer due to a wonderful specialty liquor store in my neighborhood. This stuff is awesome!

As you can see at their homepage, Baird Beer is a western-style microbrewery and associated brew pub in Shizuoka. However, they also have retail distribution and best of all, will ship anywhere in Japan. Unfortunately for you California readers, they can't ship overseas (though admittedley, you have other beers to console yourselves with!).

Mexican Party Place

Name: Zona Rosa
Neighborhood: Ebisu
Style: Mexican
Website: http://www.mic21.co.jp/

We had a party for all the foreign staff at work last Wednesday to celebrate the arrival of our two newest members, Ilija and Aasa. After trying unsuccessfully to arrange a trip to Ushi-tora,
we got a recommendation for this Mexican-style izakaya in Ebisu. It's very close to the East exit from Ebisu station.

While I can't say that their Mexican food will have any North American restaurants worried, Zona Rosa is a pretty good choice for an evening of fun. We got the nomihoudai / のみほうだい / 飲み放題 / all-you-can-drink along with a pre-set course for 4000円, which pretty much kept the drinks and food coming for a good two hours. Unlike a lot of places, there's actually a good selection of cocktails among the nomihoudai list so peoplel were trying all sort of Campari and Cassis options.

Nabe + Sashimi in Ebisu

Name: kotoshinonushi / ことしろぬし
Style: Japanese (stew / 鍋物)
Neighborhood: Ebisu
Website: http://r.gnavi.co.jp/a718300/ but that's the website for the original shop a few blocks away; for the particular location we went to see http://www.hotpepper.jp/A_20700/strJ000003134.html

My friend Jill Smolin was in town for Interbee, the huge Japanese video equipment show that's the Japanese equivalent of NAB. She had a... difficult... eating situation with her group because doesn't eat red meat, and one of the other members of her group eats almost nothing else. One night she and her daughter Phoebe broke away so I suggested they come down to Ebisu.

Despite being a Thursday, it was a holiday evening in Tokyo since Friday was a national holiday. I was actually planning to go to Umu but when we got there it was (inexplicably) closed! And here I had been worrying we wouldn't get a seat...

We wandered around a bit and chose Kotoshironushi. They had nabe and oden, both popular foods among Japanese in winter, as well as sashimi courses (Jill had a jones for raw fish after the various group arrangements). We didn't get any oden (I don't really like Oden, which is various things cooked in hot water for a long time). However, the nabe at this place was awesome. We got a big pot of various vegetables and seafood which was cooked at the table. Just before it's ready, you take a trencher of minced chicken and throw it into the pot. It cooks almost instantly and makes the whole thing into an approximation of chicken soup. It was awesome.

The sashimi course we got was also delicious, saba (mackeral) was a standout. We got a few things to add on to that (the house salad is very recommended) but the nabe fills you up pretty well.

I'm glad Jill got a chance to experience a full-on Japanese meal, and that I got to find another good place in Ebisu!