mindless ramblings

It’s been a while since I wrote anything, but a lot of food has been eaten since then and I’ve finally found some time to write about it! There is a new Singaporean restaurant in town, and it sure sounds promising. It is a franchise from Singapore opened by the Prima group, who make those ready-to-eat packaged Singapore foods you see at T&T. Esther and I made our way downtown on a wet Friday evening to check it out. The location (Google Map) is pretty good, next to H Mart on Robson and Seymour.

It’s a pretty swanky looking place, lots of dark wood and fancy recessed lighting. It wasn’t too busy for a Friday night and we got a nice table for ourselves. The menu has the usual suspects you’d expect from a Singaporean restaurant. Chicken rice, laksa, various fried noodles and roti prata. The noodle dishes are pretty reasonably priced at around $8-$9, while they have meat dishes such as curry for around $12-$13. We got some green beans in sambal belachan and roti prata to share, while Esther chose the prawn laksa and I got the prawn noodles.

Green Beans in Sambal Belachan
This was the first dish to arrive, it was pretty cold by the time anything else arrived. It smelt really really good when it arrived though. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good at all. The beans were undercooked, the sauce was fragrant yet tasteless and it was overly oily. A definite no-no, especially at $12! It tasted slightly better when we packed the remainder home and reheated it the next day, but still not very good.

Roti Prata
This was inexplicably served with sliced carrots on top of the prata. After scooping off the carrots, it was surprisingly good. The prata was light, fluffy and pretty tasty overall. The curry was not spicy enough for me, but Esther found it to be just nice. I’d think this is one of the better pratas in Vancouver, but it doesn’t come cheap at $4 for 2 smallish pieces.

Laksa
This looked great when it arrived, and the taste was equally good. The tau pok (tofu puff) soaked up a huge amount of soup and it was just heavenly on a wet and cold autumn evening. The prawns were of a decent size too. My only complaint (a minor one at that) would be that the noodles were a little bit overcooked, but still a very nice dish.

Prawn Noodles
I haven’t eaten a good prawn noodle since I was in Singapore in 2004, and although this was not bad, it wasn’t good enough. The soup needed more prawn flavour to really taste good, although the basic taste was there. The noodles were cooked right, and they served cut red chillis with soya sauce! Too bad the chilli weren’t spicy at all. A decent dish but I’d try something else next time.

Besides all the stuff that we had, they do have some other dishes that look good. I’m pretty sure this is the first restaurant here to serve the roasted style of chicken rice. All the other places here focus on the steamed chicken version, which is good in its own right but the roasted one is really tasty too. That would be what I’d get next time. They also have 6 sticks of satay for $7.25, which is not a bad deal I suppose. They also have a whole range of Singaporean desserts like cheng tng, chendol and gula melaka. I’m not a fan of those desserts though, so I’ll give those a skip.

Our bill for the night came up to just over $40, including 2 very fragrant green teas by this company called Mighty Leaf. It sounds fairly expensive, but we’ll definitely skip the green beans the next time (or any vegetable for that matter) and stick to ordering more entrees. The bill can get high pretty quickly though, there was a couple to our right that spent over $60, while a table of 4 Singaporeans to our left ordered a huge amount of food so it couldn’t have been cheap too.

Prima Taste is a welcome addition to the Singapore/Malaysian food scene in Vancouver. I think it’s probably able to give Tropika and Banana Leaf some healthy competition. Go try it out and let me know what you think!