[Food Tasting] Hotpot Buffet at iSteamboat, Marina Square

Catching up with friends over a good steamboat buffet dinner on a Friday night is the most ideal plan to welcome the weekend together. Our dinning venue tonight is at iSteamboat, which is a central location at Marina Square Shopping Mall #04-102A. Go up all the way to level 4 you will find the restaurant on the right.

First, we need to choose from the 7 different soup bases: Chicken Soup, Hot & Spicy Soup, Fish Soup, Kimchi Soup, Vegetarian Soup, Herbal Soup and Ma La Soup. As each of us have our own individual hotpot, we are able to taste a few different flavours. After trying the Chicken, Fish, Kimchi and Herbal, I concluded that Kimchi and Herbal is the most flavourful. The chicken and fish soup will takes a while for the flavour to come out. Thanks Meryl for the group photo.

While waiting for the soup to boil and the hotpot food to be cooked, we also had some cooked food which can be ordered from the menu. We had samosa, crispy bacan prawn, prawn paste chicken, spring roll, gong bao ji ding and calamari rings.

All were nice except the gong bao ji ding, which is quite tasteless. We had one piece to try and left the whole plate almost untouched. I think their fried items like samosa and spring roll is nice.

The curry fried rice is also a highly recommended dish to order but usually when I eat steamboat, I would skip the rice as it makes me feel full. This small bowl of rice was shared between 7 of us and we are still not able to finish it. Each of us only take one mouthful to try.

The steamboat spread. So nice and so colourful.

Dessert was chocolate fondue. It would be great if they have marshmallow to dip with the chocolate too. The serving of the chocolate seems a bit too little too.

The restaurant also offers ice-crea and porridge lunch buffet. For pricing and more information, please check out their Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/isteamboatsg/. Thanks Tracy for asking us along.

XOXO

[CLOSED] Fatty Choo International Steamboat 肥厨火锅 at West Coast Plaza

What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than to have a steamboat lunch with great friends? With a great variety of food, we were spoilt for choices at... 

Fatty Choo International Steamboat

Opened on 2nd June 2014 by Singapore's very own celebrity chef, Chef Choo Kok Seng, Fatty Choo International Steamboat is one of the rare eat-all-you-can steamboat buffet restaurant you can find in the west. The restaurant is located at West Coast Plaza which is just a few minute bus ride away from Clementi MRT Station.

Image Source : Google

Chef Choo definitely deserved the celebrity chef title as he used to be an Executive Chef in Rendezvous Hotel Singapore. He left Rendevous to realize his dreams of opening his own steamboat restaurant to continue sharing his passion of food and cooking with everyone. He has been featured in many publications of i-Weekly and newspapers as well.

Soup Broths

We were served the 4 different types of soup broths available in a Yuan Yang option. The four different soup broths to choose from are, (from left to right) Tom Yum Soup, Chicken Soup, Bak Kut Teh and Japanese Bonito. One look at where most of the ingredients are and you would have guess which soup broths are the more popular ones. For me, I will go for the Tom Yum and Japanese Bonito combination. Chicken soup is quite a safe option too. Their Bak Kut Teh is a bit blend probably so as not to cover up the taste of the ingredients.

Katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes) were added into the Japanese Bonito Soup broth to create the taste. I think this is really unique. I can't find this soup broth at any other steamboat restaurant.

Steamboat Ingredients

The steamboat ingredients are really fresh! Their prawn, beef and pork meat balls are all freshly handmade from the kitchen! 

Just be careful with their cheesy meatballs as hot and melty cheese will ooze out if not careful.   

Special selection includes the Salmon Sashimi, Tiger Prawns and *Snow Crab! All these are cleared from the buffet trays at a very fast rate until the kitchen have to keep replenishing them.

*Note: Snow Crabs are only available for dinner buffet, so even we didn't get a chance to try it. Have to go back again to try them. It's so good that there's one couple who went there just for these.

Like all steamboats, there's plenty of sauces for you to choice from too! 

Local Delights

Other than just the usual steamboat dishes, Fatty Choo International Steamboat also provides many local delights such as Laksa as seen in my photo above. Our laksa looks pro as it was especially cooked for us. Hehe.

Another local delights is rojak. This self-service station is also free and easy for you to mix and come up with your own signature rojak. Quite fun experience. It's a bit like be your own chef cause you are free to choose what you like more.

Cooked Dishes

Cooked dishes includes BBQ fish with sambal chili, the meat of the fish is so tender, fried Japanese Tempura and pork belly. All very nice!  

Ready-to-eat Dim Sum such as Char Siew Bao. Very full also must sample it, so the four of us spilt the two baos into half.

 Fruits and Desserts

Freshly cut fruits. 

Hotel style and standard desserts! I have two of this wonderful Durian Pengat! This is a must-try for durian lovers. 

There's even free flow ice-cream! The six different flavours includes Tutti Fruity, Chocolate, Tropicana, Lemon Sherbet, Green Tea and Vanilla with Hersheys Chocolate/Strawberry Syrup.

Overall, I really enjoyed this meal with my friends. The presentation and quality of the food are very hotel style. The display of the steamboat ingredients is neat and proper, so that at a glance you would know what you want to pick. A highly recommended place. 

Thank you Chef Choo for having us!

This is their usual buffet pricing but good news is that they are on Deal.com.sg. 

Check out their exclusive deal by clicking on the link below: 

http://www.deal.com.sg/deals/singapore/deal-exclusive-celebrity-chef-fatty-choo-s-snow-crab-steamboat-or-salmon-sashimi

Free shuttle bus service available at Clementi, Science Park, NUS, West Coast. Check out the route and timing here. 

Dinner at Jpot Vivo City - Hotpot Singapore Style

Had dinner at Jpot Vivo City with my colleagues.

JPOT makes me associate it with Japanese pot but I was wrong.

It was actually just steamboat and in Singapore style.

We were allowed to choose for round table, booth or small group sitting in the air-conditioned restaurant or enjoy the alfresco dining with a serene view of the harbour.

We choose the air-over the natural breeze. I felt the table was quite squeezy for the 5 of us though.

Only the sauces are buffet style. This is the row of different sauces. Really cool. There's peanut sauce, sesame sauce, spring onions etc.

We choose the herbal and bak kut teh broth.

Haha. This is not a dish by itself. It's the result of different sauces mixed together. Looks yummy?!

This meat ball is bigger than my fist.

So bloated after eating. Thanks cl, yt, viv, lor for the treats. Overall, I felt that it's quite expansive to eat here for steamboat as it's not buffet style. Every item we ordered will be charged. Didn't really get the satisfied fulling effect. The round table space is not big enough either. The only wow factor would be the way they present the food like on a nice plate decorated with some lettuce. Somehow I would say this is a high class steamboat but not quite my style.   

Steamboat at Hong Hu Restaurant

Was supposed to go for movie but ended work late so we decided to go scout for better food instead of eating at Clement Hawker Centre. Went to Bukit Timah area, opposite Beauty World Shopping Centre. Initially wanted to eat the frog leg porridge, but I wanted to walk down the whole row to see what other food they have. In the end we both picked on this steamboat restaurant. I wanted to try steamboats at other outlets other then the usual ones at Bugis.

This restaurant offers steamboats or even ready to eat ramen. There's 5 different soup base to choose from namely brewed soup, Sichuan spicy, Thai style Tom Yam, Korean Kim Chi and Singapore satay. We choose brewed soup and Korean Kim Chi.  

There's a lot of variation of food and cooked dumplings, chili crabs and fried buns. Ate until even bf said he felt super bloated and would like to skip breakfast and lunch tomorrow. 

Total cost: $35.80

Satisfaction: 4.5/5

Variety of food: 4.5/5

Location: 3/5 (not really accessible currently unless owns vehicle)

天天火锅 @ Bugis

Didn't realised that there's two 天天火锅 in Bugis. Got confused and went to the one with the red signboard but couldn't find bf who said he was already outside eating. The assistant who saw us looking so lost told us the way and so we found the one that bf went. Hah. We have to sit outside and can't enjoy the air-con since we choose the one that can have BBQ food also. Overall quite nice but stomach not feeling well so never really eat much.