QBab Handmade Kebabs, Raffles City

Kebab joints only seem to have taken off in Singapore within the last five years or so. They are excellent to have when drunk or suffering from hangover, and since they are a form of street food, they are usually priced cheaply. Neither of those advantages seems to have worked in its favour here though, a haven of hawker fare which discourages the regular drinker through heavy taxation.

With prices around $10 for a kebab and drink, it places itself in competition with more familiar offerings from the Soup Spoon Union and Nam Nam, both within walking distance. It had to take a voucher from Sugar to get me to try this out. It turned out to be worth the money spent: with about $5 I bought a Create Your Own QBab voucher, and chose to have their signature chicken with chilli sesame and tzatziki, and the standard salad fillings in a spinach wrap. The chicken was succulent and well-flavoured, having been marinated in Mediterranean spices and slow grilled on a rotary shawarma grill, and the salad that went with it was fresh.

Perhaps the only gripe I would have other than the pricing is that this is not something that can be easily had every day: the rich flavours that are characteristic of the cuisine can be quite rich and jelat, or stodgy. They do have lighter options like the standard chicken, which is more lightly marinated with herbs. Still, with the Sugar deal and eaten on occasion, it's certainly another useful lunch option to know about.

Verdict
3/4 - That one oso can

Location:
QBab Kebabs
#B1-72 Raffles City

Sanyou Fishball Noodles, Kopitiam Food Court, Singapore Post Centre

Singapore Post Centre serves as the headquarters of the postal service, and also hosts a small cluster of shops and eateries, the latter presumably for those working in the centre itself. The food court at the centre is operated by Kopitiam, and, as one might expect with places with a steady flow of business from a regular lunchtime crowd, has the stalls to offer a wide enough variety of food to attract people to come, in the absence of highly reputable hawkers with a dedicated following. This is further compounded by the general lack of eating places within a 200m radius.

On a routine lunch outing, I noticed that amongst the stalls that are there, aside from the Astons Express, one of them - Sanyou Fishball Noodles - consistently had a queue of about 2-3 queue, each queue lasting about 5 minutes or so before clearing. Drawn by the prospect of eating something with a spicy sambal kick that I might find hard to get from the other stalls, I joined the queue.

You can't go wrong with mini-wok noodles, really. It's fairly routine to have a bowl of mee kia or mee pok drenched in the sambal and vinegar that's common with most fishball noodle establishments, accompanied with a pot of egg wash soup with fish/pork balls, Chinese cabbage, a crabstick or two, and whatever else deemed suitable. Sanyou has a small container of sambal that you can help yourself to, on top of the usual soya sauce and chilli condiments, which is a nice touch. Other than that however, today's lunch is a pretty uneventful affair.

Curiously, the food court is open on weekends, despite the general lack of crowds, although that might change, along with the fortunes of the retail outlets there. Paya Lebar Square is due to open next to the MRT station in due course, and given its focus as a shopping centre, and I cannot imagine that those working at SingPost would choose to keep going to the Kopitiam once the Square opens, especially if it has more and better food to offer.

Verdict:
2/4 - Liddat lor

Location:
Kopitiam Foodcourt, Basement Level 2, Singapore Post Centre
Nearest MRT station: Paya Lebar