Greenwood Fish Market & Bistro

Often when the words "seafood" and "Singapore" are mentioned in the same sentence (or within reasonable proximity), several things quickly spring to mind - chilli crab, pepper crab and tiger prawns; Jumbo, No Signboard and Long Beach. Well, the Greenwood Fish Market & Bistro doesn't serve chilli crab, nor does it do pepper crab. But what it does offer on Tuesdays (and Wednesdays for UOB cardholders) are fresh oysters at a dollar a pop.



The Greenwood Fish Market & Bistro is tucked away in a quiet neighbourhood, just a couple of doors up the street from Shiro. (Not that it's easy to find Shiro, so maybe that's not such a great landmark to go by.) The area is accessible from Bukit Timah Road via Hillcrest Road.

As its name implies, the place consists of a seafood shop storefront with restaurant-style tables and lighting deeper inside. The few al fresco tables also seem to be popular with diners. The types of fish on sale depend on the day's stock, but often include Yellowfin Tuna, Mahi-mahi, Monkfish and John Dory, just to name a few.

The restaurant looks bigger than it feels, thanks to a strategically-placed strip of mirror lining the length of the dining hall. There aren't many tables but they've been fully packed both times that we've been there. Service was slow - we had to prompt for water and bread, ask after the soup of the day, and hijack a waitress to place our orders.

I was a little amused when my Warm Mushroom Salad With Boiled Egg came sans Boiled Egg. We poked at the veggie pile for the egg and confirmed it was missing, so they replaced it with a freshly-assembled bowl, adorned on the side with Two Boiled Egg Quarters, which Dad found even more amusing. Personally, I'd have settled for them just adding the missing egg pieces to my old salad bowl. Shrug, OK.

A batter-fried tusk fish, grilled red snapper, grilled pink snapper and some four dozen oysters later, the four of us just sat there reeling. I'm kinda glad that my fish came with even more greens, else I'd feel really guilty about downing so many yummy oysters. The pink snapper was excellent, the red snapper pretty good, and the batter-fried tusk fish wasn't bad (but I'd advise passing it over in favour a good John Dory fillet). I really liked their french fries - If you love Long John Silver's batter-dipped fries, you'll love the chips from the fish 'n chips.

Quick damage assessment:
- 48 oysters: $48 (whee!)
- mushroom salad: $13.95
- tusk fish and red snapper: $19.95 each
- pink snapper: $24.95
- bottle of white wine: $63
Nett after service/tax - $221.25

It's a nice place with great food, but the service tends to be hit-and-miss. Overall I'd still recommend this place for the fresh fish and quality food preparation, a refreshing departure from Chinese-style seafood.

Greenwood Fish Market & Bistro
34 Greenwood Avenue
Singapore 289236
Tel: 6467.4950
Hours:
Fish Market 11am - 10pm
Lunch 12pm - 2.30pm
Dinner 6.30pm - 10pm
Closed on Mondays and PH

Iro^H^H^HKorean Chef

My mother has always been a huge fan of drama serials, usually from Hong Kong. Her latest craze is this DVD set from Hong Kong that she picked up recently, a Korean period drama titled 大長今, or Dae Jang-geum/대장금 (thanks, Yahoo! Search and wikipedia!), dubbed in Cantonese and subtitled in Mandarin.

J and I caught segments of it over several dinner visits. The subtitles don't always agree with the dubbing, which we kind of expected, but the show holds its own on the plot. Having watched in bits and pieces up to episode 20, several major plot arcs involve some serious dicing and slicing - of fish, meat, spices and vegetables, somewhat reminiscent of Iron Chef battles. Not particularly surprising since a large part of the story revolves around the imperial kitchen, but I still chuckle quietly when the camera zooms in to detail the food preparation. (There's also a bit of slicing and dicing of the non-culinary sort, but that hasn't happened much so far. Which is a probably a good thing.)

I've always been a bit of a purist (fascist?) about watching undubbed, original-voice anime, so imagine my surprise to find myself enjoying the Canto-dubbed, Mandarin-subbed Korean show. Who would've guessed? But I'll still take my anime undubbed, thanks.

Adapted from wikipedia: Dae Jang-geum has experienced massive success in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and [even] Chicago, further continuing the South Korean cultural fever that has gripped Asia since the early 2000s.

Dae Jang-geum is set to air on Starhub Cable's channel 55 sometime soon, and Crystal Jade Ginseng Chicken And BBQ is looking to cash in on the Korean food wave that they hope the show will generate. Which it probably will, seeing as how the Winter Sonata fever launched the massively popular Korean Winter Holiday craze here and elsewhere.

Color woes

I didn't realize how odd the Clarke Quay photo looked until I loaded the image in Firefox and put it side-by-side with the Photoshop image. The browser's image had a noticeable variance from the photo that I remembered editing - the natural deep blue sky took on a strong cyan tint, sunlight on the buildings had a warmer cast, reds became less saturated, and some subtle shadow details in the boats had gone almost completely dark.

A web search turned up several explanations but no real solutions. Apparently, the web browser (and many other programs) ignores the embedded color profile information, and displays the image in the default colorspace. Which unfortunately wasn't the colorspace that I performed the edits in. And so the resulting image looks different (at least to me) from the Photoshop image.

So far I've been unable to find a way to make the photo in the web browser match what I originally envisaged the picture to be. Search results seem to indicate that I need to do more research into color profiles and management.

Clarke Quay

Taken with an Olympus IR-300 that happened to be handy.

More baby snaps

Baby Z, younger brother to K, is just over a month old now. Z's birth was atypically risky due to several compounding factors, but the gynae's quick thinking saw him delivered safely. We stopped by over the weekend to see how Z, K and parents were doing.



Between drifting from sleep to feed to sleep again, Z does a fine job of drooling, stretching and turning all red in the face when flustered. His eyes flitted open occasionally, but stayed mostly closed under the drone of adult conversation.

K, on the other hand, is active, attention-sensitive, and happy to show it. At first she couldn't quite figure out where she'd seen me before, but she definitely recognized that big glassy round thing pointing at her face after a couple of snapshots!



K is starting to mimic the more flamboyant actions and sounds coming from her mother. Every now and then, K throws up an "uh-oh!" with a wide-eyed look that's just sooo cute. I'm glad she likes the toy we bought for her from Japan (she's fiddling with one of the pieces in the photo above).

Sex sells

Sex sells; you know it's true. With a restaurant name like "Korean BBQ Sex Machine", how could you possibly go wrong?

Funky paint job

When I read about some cross-processing actions from this thread, I just knew I had to give it a go with the photo above. Didn't turn out too bad, did it?

I've seen a pink flower-power-painted convertible going around downtown Singapore before, but this car that we saw in Namba, Osaka gets my vote for the coolest car paint job ever.

Warabimochi

Still sorting through trip photos. I'm barely done processing shots from the first day, but I've uploaded some more to the Japan trip gallery.

This is one from the first day in Osaka, in a tea house called Bashouan where we stopped for some snacks at Takimikoji Village, a streets-of-old-Osaka recreation in the basement of the Shin Umeda City Building (Umeda Sky Building):



The stone mortar is used for grinding kinako powder from black soybeans, which is then sprinkled over the jelly-like warabimochi before eating. We were apprehensive at first, but the whole self-grinding thing turned out to be pretty fun.

The downside is that the menu didn't have any descriptions in English, so we had to fumble through the ordering by looking at the pictures and guessing. But the end result was quite satisfying! :)

Menotti

Had lunch today at Menotti, Raffles City, run by the folks from Garibaldi at Purvis Street.

That seafood risotto in the picture looks great, but I didn't have it - I ordered the tagliatelle with scallops and pesto instead. Plus two scoops of delicious homemade gelato, and a hot Vittoria cappuccino.

Set lunch for $19.90 includes choice of pasta, choice of dessert and a hot beverage makes for a nice meal at a great price. What's there not to like?

Sorting trip photos

... is a slow process. Even my mom has been harassing me about wanting to see the photos.

I guess it doesn't help that I shot a whole crapload (lit: load of crap) during the trip. Showing all of the photos would more or less guarantee glossy-eyed brain freeze after a minute, so I need to pick the best of the lot - which shouldn't really be that difficult since most of it isn't all that fantastic to begin with. And maybe do some tweaking while I'm at it.



Uploaded a few more here, but there's lots to go.

Shinsaibashi reflections

Reflections of neon signs at the entrance to the Shinsaibashi Shopping Street and backlit fish motifs intermingle on this partition, a part of a long fence that separates the pedestrian walkway from the construction site beyond.

Owzers

I seem to have strained (or sprained) my back. Went through the whole day with a knot in the left side near the bottom of the ribcage, gripping hard like a cramp every time my weight shifted slightly to the front, back, or either side. Or as I move to lay down.

Not fun.

I've also been trying to cut some backups to DVD-Rs, to make space for the trip photos. Three good discs and four DVD-R coasters - not a great record. Wonder if there's a compatibility problem with my iMac's Superdrive and TDK/Fujifilm media? Too bad my PC is down as well, else I'd have put the Plextor writer to good use.

There are just so many things to fix! Where has all the time gone? :(