Rating: ★★★★
Average price: $15
Address: 30 Tanjong Pagar Road S088453 Website: https://www.facebook.com/ObeanOrganicSoyaStore
Type: Vegetarian
They have quite a wide menu and I love that they offer the choice of brown rice, white rice or any kind of noodles you prefer! O'bean is a vegetarian place, but the menu clearly indicates what contains egg and dairy. Here are some of the dishes I've tried!
The korean seafoodless pancake ($21.80) was massive! I honestly would prefer it to be smaller and less expensive. Came with vinegar and a sauce that I think its gochujang (korean red pepper paste). It's crispy and quite nice taste wise, but it's too oily for my liking and I wouldn't order it again haha.
The braised dumpling soup ($11.80) with brown rice was sooooo good. The dumplings were really big and flavourful! In my opinion they are the best vegan dumplings I've tried. They beat the dumplings served at genesis, real food, and xuan miao. I really love the broth that they are served in as well. You can tell its homemade with all those chinese herbs and stuff!
The Teochew braised platter for one with soya kway chap was fantastic! My parents said it tastes really authentic. I've not had kway chap before because even as a meat eater I felt really uncomfortable eating offal.
The braised platter usually comes with egg but if you're vegan they replace the egg with green veggies yay. There's taukwa, taupok, peanuts, "pork", mushroom and pickled veggies. I'm not a fan of the pickled veggies cos they were so sour (though I like kimchi and pickles usually). The rest of the platter was really yum tho. Really reminded me of the braised pork and taukwa dish I used to eat in when I was in primary school :')
The pork tastes so real omg they even put the fatty layer.
The kway chap soup is the same as the dumpling soup from earlier so I loved it! The kway texture was great too. Highly recommend trying this :)
My parents ordered a ginkgo nut dessert and the signature dry pepper mee sua that I didn't try but they want to go back again so I'm pretty sure they liked the food!
Rating: ★★★★★
Average price: $15
Address: 190 Middle Road Fortune Centre Website: http://www.herbivore.sg
Type: Vegetarian
From the outside, Herbivore seemed to be closed.... fortunately, it was not :-) The glass is the one way sort, so from the outside you can't see through to the interior of the restaurant! Inside, the atmosphere was really really nice. The restaurant was dimly lit with jazz playing in the background, and flickering "candles" on each table. #vibes
Herbivore Vegetarian Restaurant is located at Fortune Centre which is right next to Sunshine Plaza where Teng Bespoke Vegetarian Dining, another Japanese vegetarian restaurant is located. In my opinion they both serve delicious food, but I prefer Herbivore as the menu seems to be wider! My only complaint is that the lighting makes it impossible to take good food photos lol.
Their menu is ridiculously extensive and we had an awful tough time deciding what to order. They even have a section for western dishes! Although orders are placed through an iPad, we were still given wonderful customer service and our waitress was really attentive. When she saw I indicated no mayo on the sushi order she immediately asked if I was vegan because some other components apart from the mayo (such as sesame sauce and dessert) also contain dairy. I said yes and she helped us edit our order. In addition, without us asking, one of the staff took the initiative to provide us with 3 small plates for us to share the food!
The katsu curry set ($18) seems to be one of their more popular items and I'm not surprised at all. It was to die for. The mock tonkatsu pork tasted exactly like its non vegan counter part and my friends couldn't believe it wasn't actually meat. The curry isn't spicy and the potatoes and carrots were well cooked too. I HATE when restaurants serve only partly cooked root vegetables >:( Anyway, I highly recommend ordering this when you visit. If you're vegan be sure to ask for a vegan version! If not, you'll get a dairy dessert instead of the yuzu jelly we got.
We also ordered some unagi maki which contained avocado and cucumber! Sadly, like the unagi maki served at Teng Bespoke, the unagi fell off the rice easily... which shouldn't happen for good sushi. As with the tonkatsu pork, the unagi was perfectly crisp. I've never tried non-vegan unagi, but my friend said it tasted exactly like the real deal!
The miso ramen was nice but it wasn't my favourite of the three dishes we ordered. I personally found it too salty. I think that tends to happen when cooking with miso paste because it's rather concentrated in sodium, so its easy to over do it. I was very impressed with how much detail went into the ramen though. There was corn, beansprouts, mock char siew, fishcake, mushroom and another type of "meat" that even had pieces of fake "fat" inside it :O When I wasn't vegan, I was never a fan of the fat layered inside meat, but this just shows how legit the food is!
Overall we all thought the food was on point! The bill ended up being $45 in total for 3 persons excluding GST and service charge. Although the meal was on the slightly more expensive side, I think the prices are reasonable given the ambience, generous portion sizes, excellent food and service, and the novelty of being able to eat classic Japanese dishes as a vegan :D I wish they had omurice (never tried it) and healthier options on the menu though! (and better lighting... or maybe I should sit at the outdoor seating area in future)
Rating: ★★★
Average price: $10
Address: 190 Middle Road Fortune Centre
#01-33, Singapore 188979
#01-33, Singapore 188979
I've been meaning to try hotcakes for the longest time and finally did the other day with my family! Hotcakes started off selling western dishes and cakes but have recently introduced some local dishes to their menu. Apart from the chicken rice, nasi briyani, and nasi lemak featured in this post, they have also just added mee siam and rojak!
The first dish we ordered was the Vegan Chicken Rice. They used pandan chicken and beancurd drumstick instead of trying to mimic the steamed chicken that comes with your usual chicken rice. As you can see the serving size of the "chicken" is really small :( Judging from their instagram photos, hotcakes has since increased the serving size, and also changed the "chicken" to something more like the traditional version so it should be much better now.
I wasn't a fan of the mock chicken drumstick as it was honestly quite difficult to cut into. It was made of layers of beancurd skin and the texture was sort of tough. The pandan chicken was better but equally oily.
Next we tried the Vegan Nasi Briyani which was served with mutton curry and achar. The mutton curry was amazing but be warned, it is rather spicy! We were extremely impressed with the texture and how similar the dish tasted to actual mutton. My parents said they wouldn't suspect this was vegan if they weren't told! I highly recommend this dish :-)
We also ordered the Nasi Lemak Ikan Bakar which was came with grilled sambal "fish" made of soy beans, wrapped in banana leaf. Overall a pretty tasty dish. Good job hotcakes!
This is the hawaiian pizza. There was pineapple, but no mock ham like the typical Hawaiian pizza. I realised that the pizza we got wasn't vegan only after trying it because you need to REQUEST FOR VEGAN CHEESE (they use follow your heart cheese if I'm not wrong) if not they will use normal dairy cheese! Sigh. But I really like the crust they use for the pizza :)
We were really disappointed to find that they only had the peanut butter fudge and black forest cake left that night! I guess you have to visit earlier so you get a better selection of cakes. We decided to get the last slice of peanut butter fudge cake. Taste wise the cake was good but texture was a bit too dense? My brother felt the cake was too dry and needed some ice cream :( However, I think this was an anomaly and their cakes are usually much better. We ordered a tiramisu cake for my dad's birthday in February earlier this year and it was absolutely perfect.
I've heard great reviews of their pandan kaya cake and meatball spaghetti so I really want to try those two dishes next time I visit :)
