I had been planning to write of this our meal here at BBQ Box a while ago.
But things caught up, I got busy with other stuff, and so only is it now- weeks later- that I get the chance to look at these pictures and write.
We've been to BBQ Box before.
This outlet, in particular.
And from what I sense, it looks like we are going to be coming here again.
One thing good is that they've not lost their standards, which is, if you ask me, very different from others, like this place at Chinatown that we'd gone to a while back.
Being located in a heritage shop house along a once-popular food street, we'd come with high expectations, only to have everything fall short with anyhow-fried, anyhow-grilled skewers, and watered down drinks in the supposed free-flow dispenser.
So we told ourselves we were not going to go to random places anymore.
Just stick to the familiar.
Coming to places like BBQ Box, I don't expect freebie snacks or freebie ice cream.
But still it makes for a pleasant surprise when I get one.
BBQ Box didn't use to offer small little bags of snacks.
Now they do, and like some of the Mainland restaurants, customers here too can take as much as they like.
So we took two.
But the food came before we could open up a packet, so (quietly) we dabaoed home the snack instead.
It's always a delight to see the wide variety of skewers they have on menu.
Their grilled meats come with the choice of lamb, mutton, beef, chicken and pork. There're sausages, as well as pork intestines, pork skin, chicken gizzards, chicken cartilage, quail eggs, and something called grilled Japanese rice balls.
Besides the meat there's also seafood, which we don't normally take (too fascinated by the meats we are) but there're scallops and prawns and oysters and squid.
This is a place for starters, so on the menu there're foods like Si Chuan Style Pickled Chili Chicken Feet, Spicy Dry Soya Bean Cake Floss, Vinegar Jellyfish Head, Pig Ear With Cucumber, and Cold Beef Tendon and Tripe.
Perhaps I ought to pay more attention to the menu next time I go and see what else they have.
I mean, it's not possible for a place as good as this to not have grilled vegetables of any sort, so I'm pretty sure they will have veggies like mushrooms and sweet corn and eggplant and potatoes.
One of our favorite orders are the premium meats, and even though I don't ask my friend what it is we order, what we have normally includes the Cumin Beef, the Cumin Lamb, maybe the Middle Loin Pork and Chicken, and this time i think we ordered the Mala Pork Si Chuan style.
Their Cumin meats are really good.
Don't ask me which meat is on which skewer- most of the time I just munch it off the stick and don't bother with which meat on which stick is what- but whether it be the lamb or the beef (which is what we mostly order), one certainly can taste the spiced herb all over the meat skillfully dusted, evenly marinated.
There is no overwhelming taste.
There is no thing where I get a burst of rich spiced cumin on one side but no taste of the spice on the other.
It's all there, all spread around.
What I like best about the premium meats are the tender bits.
The skewered meats might look skinny, really, like small pieces stuck on a stick, but between one piece and the other often you can't tell what's what, so you just bite into the piping hot smoky grilled meat, and lo and behold, surprise, a tender- sometimes fatty- piece amongst the bits.
It makes for a good chew.
It is also moreish, and always I find myself reaching out for more.
There were a couple more of these skewers, I should think, but I don't have a picture.
What I do have, however, is this dish bowl of what I think is some sort of a pumpkin soup but might well have been Golden Fish Fillet Soup.
I can't really recall just what ingredients there were inside, but there was a lot.
Bobbing under the surface of the soup there were plenty of vegetables- carrots, leeks, lettuce, then there were slices of beef all slowly simmering in the dish, and finally, at the bottom, a whole heap of vermicelli tung hoon which I absolutely loved.
We ended the meal with cute looking little dumplings that my friend specially ordered.
There're a few kinds on their menu, like those with Shrimp, Leek and Egg filling, Pork with Leek, and and Pork with Cabbage.
I think ours was Pork with Leek.
So easy it was to pop the round little dumpling inside my mouth and chew.
I loved the texture of the skin.
I loved the rounded, pleasant marination of the meat.
And it is for this reason that I never have any dumplings at random food courts anymore. The skin they use is way thinner from the handmade ones in authentic Dongbei Northeast places, plus I like mine that offers me the soft of meat with a whole lot of pleasant, tasty chew.