Hey Hive!
Now that a lot of people here have already gotten vaccinated, I'm very happy to hear that Singapore is now allowing in-house dining again, but up to 5 people and obviously you have to be vaccinated. But at least this allows us to try out different restaurants again!
So if you weren't aware, I've been a streamer on Twitch.tv for more than a year now, and it's been really fun playing a bunch of different games and making friends with my chat. And most of my moderators and community are from the Philippines and we were chatting about different Filipino dishes one stream. And it gave me the idea to try out an IRL stream where I stream us trying out different Filipino dishes for dinner!
Sean and I have never tried Filipino food before so it was going to be a new experience, and what better way to honour my community by partaking in their favourite dishes? It was also to celebrate us reaching 1700 followers on Twitch which was fun! We celebrate every increment of a hundred followers with a special celebration stream and it was also our first time doing an IRL stream outside our house.
So Sean did some research and found out about this restaurant called Don Lechon, which is a pretty popular Filipino restaurant in the East side of Singapore. We've never been there before but he found out about it from a local content creator who did an interview here recently where they also showcased the food.
The restaurant itself is located in quite an unusual place. It was in an old building called Grandlink Squre at 511 Guillemard Road, and seemed like a very old shopping centre with all these old shophouses around.
But the building itself looked quite nice from the outside. It reminded me of older hotels that are still here in Singapore that have architecture reminiscent of the days when we were still under British rule.
We actually had to walk around to find the entrance since it was blocked off due to covid restrictions. But luckily we found it in the end.
The mall itself looked pretty old and had some old abandoned shops. But it did look pretty bright and clean at least.
And in the corner of the first floor, we found the restaurant!
It didn't really look like a restaurant tbh, but it's all good. This was the counter to order from and the menu was on the screen, which made things easy for covid with less human contact I suppose.
And this was the main dining area of the restaurant with pretty simple chairs and tables that kinda looked like my grandmother's furniture ngl.
Here's the closeup of the menu! Unfortunately there were no descriptions but my chat did tell me about some dishes to try and I did google a couple that looked pretty good!
They even had a birthday promotion for a free meal! Cool!
But anyway, this was what we ordered! The total came up to $25. But we ordered 2 entrees and 2 desserts.
We went there a little earlier to avoid the dinner rush since we were going to be filming. There were some other patrons in there at the time but not too many at least so we chose a table near the back where we wouldn't bother anyone.
While waiting for our food to arrive, we setup my phone and a tripod for streaming and went live! After a couple of minutes of chatting with our viewers, our lechon sisig arrived! If you're unfamiliar, sisig is a popular dish in the Philippines made with fatty pork finely chopped and seasoned with ginger, onions, chillies, salt and pepper. While lechon is made from leftover sisig.
Shortly after that, our other dish, bicol express arrived! This dish was also recommended by my viewers and I read that it's pork cubes cooked in coconut milk and chili peppers.
We also ordered 2 plates of rice to accompany our dishes. There was quite a strong aroma from both dishes and they smelled unlike anything we've ever tried before. It did look really good though! The lechon sisig in particular, kinda reminded me eggs and bacon!
Also because the sisig tasted like bacon too! It wasn't very crispy but tasted really good with egg! And it was also quite salty so it paired nicely with the rice.
The bicol express had a very interesting flavour though; I think it's the mix of coconut milk and pork that gave it a strong smell but it also looked pretty oily so I'm not sure how healthy it was. The pork was very tender though and the sauce was also quite nice. But it got a little too strong for me after a while.
Sean liked the bicol express better while I liked the lechon sisig better. But we both agreed that the taste and smell was really strong compared to what we normally eat. It wasn't spicy, but the salty taste was quite strong in both dishes even though they tasted so different.
After we finished our main courses, we went to take dessert from the fridge! We ordered an ube and a buko pandan.
Thankfully both servings were quite small because I was actually quite full from the main courses.
Buko Pandan is made with gulaman cubes, tropical palm fruits, shredded young coconut in sweetened cream. But this one also had a peach slice and some cheese on top for some reason. I wasn't sure if that was a normal topping but according to my Filipino viewers I guess some places do that.
I wasn't really a fan though. The coconut itself was quite refreshing, but the mix of the cheese was quite odd and I ended up picking it out but some of it did end up mixing with the cream anyway.
Ube is a Philippine dessert made from boiled and mashed purple yam and it was finely mashed into a paste. The texture was definitely like yam though and was quite thick. It wasn't too sweet at least, but it was quite a thick paste and after eating a couple of spoons I got really full real quick.
I tried mixing the ube with the coconut cream of the buko pandan and it actually tasted quite good! Because the ube itself was quite dry the cream helped. Overall, the meal was very satisfactory and delicious and I was soo stuffed after that!
I don't know if it suits our taste though so I'm not sure if we'll eat it again but it was still a very interesting first experience trying a new cuisine, especially while streaming! After that we went to take a walk and brought chat along to go explore the nearby mall before making our way home!
If you're interested, here's the footage from that stream! Unfortunately I didn't have my chat on-screen since I was still new to mobile streaming but you can still view it at least!
Overall, it was super cool and I'm glad my chat enjoyed it as well! And more importantly, no one came up to us while we were streaming and disturbed us so yay! Maybe I'll do more IRL streams in the future, who knows!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
Posted via foodiesunite.net