Palate Pleasers N Tummy Teasers

Obolo - Gourmet Cheesecakes, Pâtisseries, Desserts

This is a backdated post of a place we checked out sometime in the past year, long before we had any ideas of setting up a blog. I happened to remember that X took some pictures of what we had then and since Obolo left us happy and satisfied, I shall venture to recall those very sensations that gave rise to such feelings.

First, a glimpse of what we ordered:

(Left to right: Verrine Foret Noire, Verrine Summer Berries, Mango Passion Cheesecake, Chocolat-Menthe Macaron)

Before I can even begin to comment on taste, these pictures are evidence of the importance of aesthetics, even in food. Food is an art in itself. Contrary to what most some may think, presentation is important. How food is garnished, arranged and served affects what one is gonna think of it even before it comes close to any tastebud. Food that looks like what you see above preempts the mind to expect something good. Nevermind if it doesn’t taste fantastic, it has already scored brownie points from presentation. It’s kinda like internet dating - flattering pictures garner more clicks. Few will be interested to “get to know you better” if you post a picture of yourself looking aesthetically-challenged. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got the character of Mother Theresa, it won’t be known cos’ no one has gone beyond the first step of asking for an introduction. I know this sounds shallow but reality is harsh and pragmatic; the anonymous nature of the internet only serves to magnify the foibles of mankind. That is why first impressions are so important. They open up the question of “Do I want to get to know this person better?” The same goes for food. “Do I really want to eat that mish-mash of goodnessknowswhat?” I think not. Psychology has even offered an explanation for this intuitive “phenomenon” attributed simply to the common belief amongst all of us that “what is beautiful is good”. So now you know why having celebs/models endorse products is a particularly effective sales strategy. But I digress; this is a food blog afterall.

Shall start with the Mango Passion cheesecake ($6.60) and Chocolat-Menthe Macaron ($1.80) since those were what we ate first. Obolo has a variety of other cheesecakes as well, such as the classic New York, Cookies n’ Cream, Blueberry and Guanaja (dark chocolate), but as these were the more common flavours that one can find elsewhere, we decided to try Mango Passion - mango and passionfruit baked cheesecake. We liked that the cheesecake wasn’t too sweet and held the fragrance of both mango and passionfruit. Tastewise, the hint of mango was a l’il too subtle for my liking; I would’ve preferred a stronger and more distinct mango taste in my cheesecake. X thought it was pretty good. The macaron (a cookie-like pastry of French origin, made of almond powder, sugar and egg whites) I had was flavoured with mint and chocolate cream sandwiched between 2 green pastry shells. Macarons tend to be expensive due to the intense amount of effort and skill needed to make a good one. My Chocolat-Menthe one was very good by my standards but I’ve discovered I’m not big on macarons as I don’t like the denseness of the pastry (a result of having almond powder as an ingredient). It’s good for those with a sweet tooth and I would recommend trying Obolo’s as their macarons come in 14 interesting flavours. If you know me, you would know I’m a sucker for variety

Next up would be the stars of that day - Verrines, or layered mousse in pretty little glasses. Not so pretty little prices though; each verrine is priced at $7.20 which is quite expensive considering the glasses are about no more than 10cm in height. If anything, you get what you pay for and the best way to sum up my thoughts about them is that I would go back to get more verrines.

This is what X had (Verrine Summer Berries):

And this is what I had (Verrine Foret Noire):

A brief description of each - Summer Berries: Layers of mascarpone mousse, red berries gelee, kirsch-berries compote and vanilla genoise soaked in kirsch-berry syrup. Foret Noire: Dark chocolate ganache mousse, kirsch-soaked dark cherries, dark cherry compote and ivoire mousse with vanilla beans.

Summer Berries tasted tart which paired nicely with the midly sweet layers of vanilla genoise. X loved it. I was too busy indulging in chocolate delirium to remember what else he said about it Foret Noire is W.O.W. Not very informative I know, but you really have to try it for yourself! Dark chocolate ganache, kirsch-soaked cherries and vanilla beans?! What more can I say? “Intense. rich. sinful.” were about the 3 words that danced around in my head whilst the medley of flavours swirled in my mouth. The alcohol packed more punch in this than in Summer Berries, or maybe that’s just cos’ I had too few spoonfuls of it and it doesn’t help that I’m biased toward dark chocolate If chocolate were to be better than sex, this is it.

I succeeded in reviving my memory of our experience at Obolo cos’ I’m craving a verrine now! X, where are you?? Haha. The only gripe I have about Obolo is that it’s not exactly the most accessible place. Located somewhere in the line of shophouses of the Joo Chiat food-stretch, it’ll be best if you drive. Even then, finding a place to park can be difficult. This pastry boutique is also very small; the last we were there, there were only 2 small tables and a bigger table which could probably seat about no more than 15 people in total. I guess they don’t expect that much of a crowd considering their prices, which is also why they may not have all items available on any one day. You’ll probably have to make a few return trips in order to try everything you want. To ensure the best dining experience, head down during odd hours or simply have your pastries to-go Enjoy and do return to share your experience with us! 

Miss Clarity Cafe - 25th May 2008

Dinner was at Miss Clarity Cafe @ Thomson today, with a group of close friends. That makes for 2 visits in a week; the last I was there was on a Wednesday. Didn’t blog about that visit as X and I forgot to take pictures of what we ate Still novice bloggers, we are.

Wasn’t feeling particularly hungry and so I settled for a Baked Salmon Pasta ($11) since it looked considerably smaller then their “offerings for carnivores” - basically meaty stuff, and sounded like a semi-healthy choice (I love my Omega-3 fatty acids!). For those who are interested, by pasta they meant fusilli (corkscrew-shaped). When it arrived, the serving size was as I expected but what I didn’t expect was having deep-fried salmon atop my baked pasta (pictured below).

Bye-bye healthy choice. It looked like a strange combination to me - Fried salmon and green peppers…I’ve had salmon and spinach and it’s a fantastic combi, but green peppers? Oh well, since I’ve ordered it guess it’s time to pique my pallate with something new then. I don’t usually prefer having my salmon deep-fried cos’ it tends to turn out dry and hard; salmon is best baked or grilled to retain its juiciness…add a splash of herbs, lemon juice and a side of greens and it’s yumminess at its au naturel best. I was in for a surprise - the salmon although having a crisp outer layer from the batter, was moist and juicy. It tasted better than what it looked although I still think the green peppers don’t do anything to enhance the flavour of this dish. Overall, I would say it was pretty mediocre; I’ve had better baked pasta so I doubt I’d order this dish again.

What IS blogworthy is this:

        (pardon the blurriness of the photo)

A choco-block full of rich, smooth, dark chocolate goodness aka Digestive Bar ($4.60). The name came about from the digestive biscuit base of this cake, which has a top layer made up of dense Valhrona chocolate, topped with cocoa powder. For dark chocolate lovers, this is a must-try! Think chilled bittersweet chocolate coupled with subtle sweetness of a crumbly digestive biscuit - a combination that makes one willingly succumb to this sin of a dessert. All that chocolate richness can get a bit cloying after awhile so I would recommend sharing this with 1 other person. Any more people and there wouldn’t be enough to go around

A final note on the ambience: the cafe is targeted at youth of school-going age so you’ll be seeing brightly coloured walls decorated with cartoon girls (check out their website to get a better feel of what I mean). It can get quite noisy in the evenings when the place fills up as it isn’t very big and the set-up of the cafe doesn’t help filter/divert the murmurs of conversations going on at the tables surrounding yours. A huge draw of Miss Clarity is also the fact that there is no GST and service charge; in effect, the prices stated on the menu is what you pay. I also like that they showcase their full menu on their website so you can plan what you wanna eat in advance.

If you’re still at a loss as to what to order, here are some of papille’s tried-and-tested recommendations (not in order of merit):

1. Roasted Chix Leg

2. Lamb Ratatouille

3. Garlic-crusted Dory

4. Beef Vol-au-vont

5. Mud Oooz (dessert)

Hope this helps! P.S. They are closed on Mondays.

Ministry Of Food - 24th May 2008

Visited Ministry Of Food or M.O.F at Marina Square yesterday evening and boy was it a let-down. I was gonna say “F for Failure” but decided that was a bit harsh and so I’m gonna settle for Ministry of Flaws. Why? Cos’ everything was below par starting from their hot green tea (pictured below).

Tea here is served pretty much like how they do it at Din Tai Fung - Everyone gets tea if they don’t order any beverage. Unfortunately, the standard of tea is where the difference starts. As X aptly remarked, this tea is really green…”greenhorn kinda green”. It was bland and had neither taste nor fragrance of what one would expect from a cup of steaming hot green tea. Even a tea-bag would fare better than their version which was a concoction of 1/5 powder and 4/5 hot water. It could just be that we were really fussy from having tried a variety of green tea at the various Japanese restaurants around; then again, that would also put us in a better position to gauge the standard of M.O.F’s green tea in comparison to the ones out there. If my memory’s got it right, Sushi Tei at Thomson Plaza is one of the places that serves good green tea (hot).

So our first visit at M.O.F and the green tea’s bad. That’s alright, it’s Ministry Of Food (not drinks) so maybe they decided to focus their efforts on the food. We were drawn to this place owing to their colourful menu-signboard which was strategically placed along the escalator landings as well as at the entrance to their cafe. “The stone-pot rice looks good yeah?” And so we joined the queue. 10 minutes of menu-flipping later, we exchanged puzzled glances. “Where’s the stone-pot thing?” “I dunno. It says here if you order a set meal, you can top-up $5 and upgrade your white rice to stone-pot rice (usual $6.80)…How come I don’t see it as an a-la-carte item?” I had no interest in any other item on the menu, which went something like this:

Udon

1. Plain Udon

2. Plain Udon + Vegetable Tempura

3. Plain Udon + Seafood Tempura

4. Udon & Wakame (seaweed)

5. Udon & egg

Wow. What variety! It’s so convenient for them cos’ all they have to do is cook a whole bucket of udon and just scoop it into bowls since that’s about all the variation they have. It was the same for their soba (buckwheat noodles). Their rice bentos too didn’t appeal which left consumers with the remaining category of Set Meals. No wonder almost 85% of the people there were having set meals of sorts. That’s not very consumer friendly - subtly forcing people to order their set meals which are a total turn-off when you’re not feeling that hungry and just want something simple yet satisfying. I was so ready to just stand up and leave then but they’d already served the green tea, and we thought it’d be quite stupid to go somewhere else and pay 17% worth of GST and service charge again. Good strategy on their part, serving green tea before a consumer makes an order.

And so we stayed, grudgingly ordering a bowl of ramen each, against what we really wanted to have - stone-pot rice. “Maybe it’s fate’s way of making me try something new that will turn out to be really nice…” As you can see, I’m not very good at self-consolation haha. 10 minutes later, a thought struck me. “Wait a minute. They stated that the stone-pot rice is usually $6.80; doesn’t that mean that it can be ordered a-la-carte?” Crap. A check with a waiter confirmed my thought; alas it was too late to change our orders as our ramen had been prepared. And so I was left to grumble about what a misleading and uninformative menu they have.

Our orders arrived soon after. We both had Charsiew Ramen ($8.80) just with different broth bases; mine was miso while X’s was tonkotsu (pork-based) broth.

 (Miso Charsiew Ramen)

 (Tonkotsu Charsiew Ramen)

As can be seen from the pictures, each bowl of ramen consisted of charsiew slices, bamboo shoot strips, half a hard-boiled egg, beansprouts and a garnish of spring onions. Nothing out of the ordinary, what we’d get at any other Japanese restaurant as well. A sip of my miso broth - it tasted ok; slightly salty but that’s the characteristic of miso. X sipped his tonkotsu broth - bland. What about the main component - ramen?

The colour was odd; it was a really dark yellow unlike most other ramen I’ve tried, and each strand was really thick. It reminded us of the yellow noodles one finds in prawn noodle soup. It fared slightly better taste-wise, with a firm bite and a chewy texture. The egg yolk from the hard-boiled egg was also a little more mushy and runny than what one would normally expect.

X also ordered their Chawanmushi at a promotional price of $2.80. This was probably the best item of our meal - the egg custard was smooth and silky, with bits of chicken, crab-stick and fishcake embedded within. It was served with a tiny jar of soya sauce so one could decide how salty you want your chawanmushi to be. X didn’t add any, finding it salty enough.

That completes our meal at M.O.F and most probably our experience with them as well. I wanted to have a matcha soft-serve ice-cream for dessert but they didn’t have it. What they did have was a vanilla soft-serve with matcha sauce, mango sauce, etc. Sounds familiar? This, in my opinion, is their biggest flaw - serving food made for the convenience of the establishment and not the consumers. In doing so, they limit the variety they can offer and unfortunately do not make up for it with quality. What is left is essentially nothing. Even their desserts fail to entice (you may beg to differ if you’re a fan of red bean or sweet potato). In all fairness, their service was commendable, being prompt at taking orders and attending to customers despite the crowd. I ended the meal remarking to X -”If I wanted Japanese dessert, I’ll head to Azabu Sabo instead”. I guess that sums everything up.

*As a side note, just in case anyone still wishes to head down to M.O.F, you can order their stone-pot rice a-la-carte though it’s not stated in the menu. It comes in either salmon or unagi (eel).