Manna Story @ Plaza Singapura

After celebrating D's birthday at Botanical Gardens with a picnic, Miss Soprano, Miss Alto and I decide to head to P.S. to have Korean food to satisfy Miss Alto's craving. It's a new Korean eatery that I didn't even know opened in PS.

The decor was cottage-style, which sat very well with me. It's somewhat like one of the styles I would love to decorate my room with sometime in the future. 

The prices are surprisingly affordable for a Korean restaurant + a Korean restaurant in town. For drinks, we ordered rice barley drink, pear juice and pomelo drink. I love the mini cans that the drinks come in! Stout and cute. Only applies to cans though.

Kimchi soup

I love my Korean banchan - I can get full just feasting on them!

Ginseng chicken soup. The cheapest I've come across ($16?) and they don't stinge on the ingredients for the price as well. Verdict for all dishes: They are certainly not the most fantastic but definitely value-for-money and good if you want a quick Korean fix somewhere in town!

Amount spent per pax: less than $20

Address: 68 Orchard Road, #B2-22 Plaza Singapura

Tel: +65 6238 1245

Opening Hours

Daily: 10am – 9pm

Tea Cosy @ Plaza Singapura

Came to this tea place twice in the month of December, once with Miss MB and once with the sister. Have always passed by this place at P.S. with nary a glance (as I do with most shops in P.S.) until Miss Doraemon recommended this place to us for a gathering. It was a pity she couldn't join us that day though. 

Anyway, if you like angels, like to have tea (though they serve main courses as well), like a central location like Dhoby Ghaut, this is the place for you. Tea Cosy is made up of the cafe, a furniture shop as well as selling ornaments of angels. I like the ambience here, it's not too noisy even when it's filled with people, and the service staff are polite.

Ordered their Flower Power ($6.90 for a pot), a caffeine-free tea that claims to "relax the mind and bring comfort to the stomach". I wondered if it was a placebo effect, but my tummy did feel more settled down after drinking the tea. Miss MB ordered Sakura ($6.90), and we both agreed that Flower Power was the better choice.

Tea Cosy Decadent salad $16.95 -  A really decadent salad judging by its hefty price tag. Besides the herbivorous food there were also grilled prawns, and foie gras cubes. Of course, the foie gras cubes were minute but it was good to satisfy the palate. After all, we don't get to foie gras very often, do we?

English Scones ($6.95 for 3), with a choice of blueberry, strawberry jam or maple syrup. Blueberry jam is their recommendation. I loved the scones! Perhaps I was still longing for it after my Cameron Highlands trip where we had the loveliest strawberry scones, these tasted really good as well.

Lychee Breeze ($5.95) -  An average lychee drink, tasted like what you could make at home with canned lychees or get it at coffee shops.

Turkish Apple  $4.50 - Caffeine-free as well, tastes like apple tea. The flavour ran out after the first pour, whereas for Flower Power, it lasted quite a few rounds of refill. Perhaps that's also one of the differences between premium and non-premium teas; the premium ones are stronger to taste, and thicker.

Ebony & Ivory ($8.95) - Such pretty names, though some would say it's gimmicky, and I don't deny, but girls/ladies usually fall for this, isn't it? Chocolate fudge brownies with vanilla ice cream. Their vanilla ice cream tastes different from the usual ones we eat, I don't know what exactly is the taste, but it was good.

A nice place to chill and chit-chat with your friends, spend a quiet afternoon in town. They offer a fair selection of appetizers, salads, soups, main courses, teas, desserts and other drinks. I'll be back next time to try their mains!

How much was spent per pax: On average $20 per pax each time
Would I go back again? Yes!

Address: 68 Orchard Road #05-10 Plaza Singapura

Tel: +65 6341 9318

Strictly Pancakes @ Prinsep Street

Met up with the ex-hall neighbours for brunch on Deepavali, decided to try out this newly opened pancake place at Prinsep Street. As you can tell from the name, this place sells strictly pancakes. And drinks as well. And sandwiches and some finger food. I came to know of its existence through Yogi Bear, whose BF's friend is the owner, who is also coincidentally Pineapple's friend's sister's friend. I think. Singapore is so small that everyone is a friend of your friend.

Anyway, I love trying out new places! So we met at Dhoby Ghaut at around 11+am, early because I heard it gets full house easily!

 

Looks yummy doesn't it! Read on! 

A very cozy little cafe. We wanted to sit upstairs because I heard there were couches there which sounded more comfy, but they told us it was full there already, so we sat on the first storey instead. Though during our meal, we saw new customers kept entering and walking up the stairs...


I didn't know maple had so much goodness! It's probably still too sweet to be taken on a regular basis though.

Nutella shake - $5. I liked it, 'cos it wasn't too sweet and too "gelad", though there wasn't really any hint of nutella haha! 
 

For the butter, you can have a choice of salted/unsalted butter, garlic and herbs, or rum and raisin. The maple syrup comes in a strange tilted glass.

I heard that the Garlic Butter Prawns ($14) pancake was really good, so we ordered this. Can't say no to prawns in garlic and butter sauce! And you probably can't go wrong with them either! Came with 3 pancakes and 5 prawns. The prawns were really crunchy and the sauce was yummy too!

Chicken A La King ($13) - It comes with some cream sauce that went well with the chicken. The chicken was tender in that it was chewy but then again, it was tough 'cos after chewing it it takes a long time to be chewed into smaller pieces!

Our interest got piqued by the mushrooms and scrambled eggs which are almost always the perfect brunch selection. So we ordered the short stack (2 pancakes) with these two toppings. ($10.50) This one was really worth the money. Not that it wasn't good, but just that it could easily be done.

 For our dessert, we chose the apple and cinnamon pancakes ($10). Caramelized apples in cinnamon sauce and vanilla ice cream. By this time we were already so full by the 8 pancakes we had earlier! Our appetites had clearly shrunk. Somehow the vanilla ice cream was a bit "sticky" but nevertheless good. Tasted a bit different from the usual vanilla ice cream that I eat. This was good. Other choices include really sinful ones like chocolate pancakes with chocolate sauce and peanut butter and whatnot. Would love to try that someday (though not anytime soon haha!) along with the salmon pancake.

5 of us girls shared 3 mains and 1 dessert and we were super full from them. I think it's quite a cool concept. Business seems to be booming during these first few months of opening. It's worth a try, I feel :)

How much was spent: Around $12 per person. 

Would I go back again? Not sure, maybe once in a while.

Address: 44A Prinsep Street Singapore

Tel: +65 6333 4202

Opening Hours

Mon–Thu: 11.30am – 11pm
Fri: 11.30am – 1am
Sat: 9am – 1am
Sun: 9am – 11pm

Giraffe Restaurant and Bar @ Istana Park

 This place always catches my attention when I walk down Orchard Road to Dhoby Ghaut. It looks chic, modern and a cool place to hang out at with a bunch of friends, or with your partner. We were deciding a place to celebrate Yogi Bear's birthday last month, and Miss Sunshine did a little research, we were choosing among OverEasy, Helipad, Loof etc but settled on this 'cos none of us had tried it before, and there was 1-for-1 Ladies Night on Tuesday! Reviews online were bad, but we still decided to take the risk.

 You can choose to sit indoors or have al fresco dining, which overlooks the Orchard Road/Dhoby Ghaut stretch and has quite a good view at night. We decided indoors as it was just too humid outside, and thought maybe we could move outside when we're having drinks later after dinner. It's a double story building, and if you're only having drinks, you can choose to sit downstairs where it's an outdoor pub/lounge area which looks quite nice to chill out at as well.

 Miss Sunshine was late, so Yogi Bear, Miss Splendid and I went in first and we were famished so we ordered the Giraffe House Salad with Soft Shell Crab to share first. It's quite nice, though nothing fantastic.

Soft, warm, moist bread on the house. These were good. We wanted to have more but we were paiseh (embarrassed) to ask for a second serving.

We decided all the dishes we wanted to share  before Miss Sunshine arrived but when she arrived, we still asked her to choose a dish, in the end, she still went along with our decisions because she's nice like that. Or maybe we just have the same tastes!


There was 1-for-1 for main courses, so we ordered 4 main courses altogether to share. The first up is White Fish with Thyme ($14++) and something else (I can't remember, sorry!) One of my favourite dishes of the night, partly by virtue of the fact that I like white fish, but also because it's fresh and I like the way it's done and the sauce as well. Everything goes well together.

This one was not so fantastic. Crabfish Pizza with Wasabi Mayonnaise. We liked the crust because it's crispy and fragrant, but other than that, the toppings are nothing to be raved about.

This was unanimously the best dish out of all. Ribeye with Blue Cheese Sauce ($24/$26) (as you can see prices are quite reasonable, especially after 1-for-1!) All 4 of us answered in unison, "Medium rare". It was really tender and the sauce goes very well with the meat as well. Couldn't really taste the blue cheese (don't know whether that's good or bad haha!) but it tasted yummy all the same. Wish I could've more of this. 
 

King Prawn and Chicken Combo ($19/$22) (All prices are estimated given my bad memory) When it came we were slightly disappointed because there was only ONE king prawn. So we cut into 4 small pieces and shared... Maybe because it was such a small piece I couldn't really taste the freshness/sweetness of it. But because I'm such a sucker for seafood, I think it's not bad too! Chicken was well done too. At that point of time, we couldn't understand what was so bad about Giraffe that other reviews complained about their food. It's not that our taste buds are deficient, we can differentiate good and bad food fairly well, tyvm (thank you very much). Maybe they changed chefs?

After the main courses, we ordered more drinks. Before this we ordered fruit juices to go with our dinner. At this point we got confused by their promotion.We thought it was 1-for-1 for EVERYTHING we ordered, but no, it was only 1-for-1 for the first set of 1-for-1 items we order, if you get what I mean. So we thought the fruit juices were 1-for-1, and our 2nd round of drinks would also be 1-for-1, but we were wrong. Anyway, after the big hoo-ha about the confusing promotions they have (so confusing that the management agreed as well and were going to change the promotions already, so there may be different promotions now), Miss Splendid ordered the Snowball Cocktail. What a cute name for an alcoholic drink. Sounds like a name for your pet.

Tasted like yakult, which I liked. Alcohol taste is very slight as well, which I liked even more, haha! The rest ordered martinis, which they said were too bitter.

The portions of the main dishes were quite small, but somehow the 4 of us were still very full after the food. Yet we couldn't let off the desserts, because they looked and sounded so good on the menu, and we were lazy to move out of Giraffe to another place. We were even too lazy to move outdoors, haha!

Prices for cakes are very reasonable, around $6 per slice. They're all airflown from America, which sounds impressive, but throws doubts on the freshness of these cakes.  

Chocolate cake.

 Cheesecake.

Coffee-flavoured.

 We thought too highly of ourselves. In the end we only managed to finish half of each cake, what a waste, because we were simply too full. Despite the bad reviews on service, the service staff that night were attentive and helpful and patient in explaining to us the confusing promotions. Food was good. We'll probably come back again some time or another, especially if there's still 1-for-1. Good place for couples or girls' night out. Guys' night out maybe, haha!


How much was spent: Around $35 per pax 
Would I come back? Probably. Just to eat the rib eye and enjoy the ambience!

Address: Istana Park
Orchard Road
Singapore 238823

Tel: +65 6334 4653