I am not familiar with the local pub scene and my sentiments are similar the previous 2 reviews. I organized a dinner for 13 pax there one Thursday evening and here what I have to say.

Location & Setting - Toucan is literally an oasis nested between Chinatown and Tanjong Pagar, I was at the alfresco area between 6.30pm - 7.30pm seated at the barrel table. Enjoying the multi hue transition of the evening sky and indulge in the serendipity that while the city is rapidly discharging humans back to their suburban dwellings, I am completely at ease with a cool Guinness in my hand. Toucan is also as the nexus between the tranquil and pristine Duxton Hill stretch blocked off from traffic that houses architecture firms, restaurants with white table cloth and the Duxton Road filled with pubs.

Food - Nothing much. My lamb shoulder tasted pretty good but the burger, fish and chips my friends ordered looked ... quite ordinary.

Service - Not bad, but the greatest disappointment is that they loaded another table items onto our bill and almost overcharged us by 25%. Luckily I tallied the # of drinks and entrees with the # in my party and pointed to them that the bill don\'t look right.

My otherwise pleasant experience was marred by their tardiness in billing.

 

I was wandering around 313 with my wife looking for a nice place to have our anniversary dinner but nothing caught our eyes. So we turned out from Marche and I saw Oriole cafe and remembered the good reviews they had. The ambience is quite nice and the u shaped seat's quite comfy though the seat is a bit short for me. The beef cheek tagliatelle was recommended by a friend a few weeks back. I found the beef to be tender but the egg pasta is a bit too al dente for me and the sauce didn't really stick to the pasta. I was expecting something similar to the tagliatelle served by Casa Verde. The winner is the humbly named chicken casserole which has large tender pieces of chicken breast, chorizo sausage, olives, green peppers in a tasty tomato sauce that is not salty + 3 pieces of toast. The handcut fries with aioli sauce is superb also. I also ordered a $6.50++ happy hour heineken beer. Overall, a very satisfying meal for both of us.

After my visit, I wikied to learn that gelato (compared to regular ice-cream) contains less cream but more milk and sugar and is more dense. Ice Indulgence is tucked deep in the AMK heartland along AMK Ave 10, north of AMK Ave 3. It is: - beside a bridal studio - 20m Tung Shan hawker wholesale supply - 80m Pine Garden cake shop famous for their Lychee Martini cake - 100m to a Botak Jones outlet - 130m to an excellent and not so expensive Teochew porridge stall at the hawker center - 150m to a bakery that serves really soft and delicious bun. OK, enough of promoting AMK makan places, back to ice-cream, ops I mean gelato. I tried the durian flavour in the evening and compared to the durian ice-cream I tried at Icekimo in the afternoon, it is not so creamy by the fragrant durian taste emerges after a while. Pretty good value for a large scope that cost only $2.80 (thanks to the heartland location). The place seats about 12-15 and has a really nice toilet (don't enter the shop just to use the toilet OK) and is helmed by Terence, the owner & gelato maker who moved his shop from another location (I forgot). I also tasted the Yuzu flavour and it is awesome! I can't wait to return and try the other flavours.

This is mt 3rd review, reflecting my 3rd visit to Casa Verde. I read the past few reviews and seems that the food falls short of people's expectations.

I learned that Casa Verde operates in 2 mode.
Before 6pm, you order and pay for the food at the counter (looks like a fast food restaurant with the menu above the counter), you have to find your own seating and get your cutlery but they will serve you the food. Today's my first visit before 6pm, for a Sat lunch at 1pm. The place is packed but using my finely hones skills of sensing who is almost done so that I can ready myself to approach the table once they butts leave the chair. I managed to find a table for 4 within minutes. Some less skilled angmohs quite lost as they hold their tray while trying to look for seats.
After 6pm, the menu is changes (more expensive items), reservations are taken and it functions like a regular full service restaurant.

I walked with my family from the Bukit Timah entrance and along the way we spotted 2 squirrels, a few small white and yellow butterflies, fed some pigeons, sparrows, tortoise, fishes with bread crumbs and after 1.5 hrs, we reached Case Verde

 For it's excellent location and prices without service charge, I find their food of good quality and value.
Classical Bacon Burger ($15) - great taste, medium well as requested with slight pinkish in the middle, great thick fries, nice portions of premium leafy salad
Tagliatelle Bolognese ($15) - The bolognese sauce is not gelak and complements the egg pasta Tagliatelle well (not the durum wheat pasta)
Tuna Mayo on Foccacia ($12) - big sandwich with fresh tomato, lettuce,  nice portions of premium leafy salad

I think the service is excellent, they clear up the tables fast and I asked for 2 ice and 2 room temp water and within minutes we were served exactly that, though in plastic cups. The tables are quite large so though it is crowded, I don't feel squeezed.

Will walk from the Holland Rd entrance for my next visit!

 

Had lunch with 2 other friends and we ordered wantan mee soup, dry and beef brisket noodles. The beef brisket noodles are quite OK but the wantan mee soup is disappointing. The waitress forgot to bring us one set of cutlery. They charge 20 cents for water! The aircon is very noisy.

Overall $19 for 3 average plates of noodles, disappointing.

Wonder if the other Wan Chai branches are better.

My family's quite delighted that Popeyes decided to open their 2nd suburb branch at my estate, just 15min walk from my house! I ordered the 3 piece chicken to bring home for dinner yesterday. They will normally serve 1 big piece (breast, thigh) and 2 small piece (wings, drumstick) and you can upgrade from small to big piece at 50cents per piece. So I paid $8.80 instead of $7.80.

My advice, upgrade to big piece and choose the breast which is the most flavorful and juicy piece of fried chicken breast I have ever eaten + it comes with the biggest surface area of crispy bits.

The fried chicken was very well received by my family and my 3.5 yrs old daughter finished her dinner by herself and licked the bowl clean!

The $2.50 per scoop D24 ice-cream really taste like durian! This is the first time I tried premium durian ice-cream (compared to the supermarket durian flavored variety) and I am completely bowled over!

I went around noon & the cafe interior air-con is quite weak and has a greasy smell but luckily there is a breeze going and I sat at the al fresco area which allows smoking but fortunately no smokers were around to spoil by D24 ice-cream experience.

Cantonese food tends to be salty  and heavy to a Teochew like me, my meal at Golden Peony proved otherwise. Probably because we ordered 2 seafood, 1 veg and 1 duck dish.

One of the fish dish has red snapper? with ratatouille-like diced vege like green & red pepper, pine nuts etc. Delicious! The other seafood had green coloured toufu, green vege, crab and prawn pieces covered with stock with egg white, equally delicious. The stir fried veg dish has the most tender dou miao I tasted and even my 3.5 yrd old daughter had heaps of vege.

We were seated in a private room which is nice as the kids can roam around and play but the service is a bit slow because the waitresses can't see us.

I had dinner with a few friends there and I tried Nasi Bukhari. It came with an excellently deep fried chicken thigh/drumstick, some delicious rendang and some sambal prawn. The beer promo is still on, so I had a half pint Tiger for only $3. My friends had the char kuay tiao and laksa and they liked the food also. The restaurant adopted a strange practice of getting all the staff say welcome loudly when you enter (like some Japanese restaurant). Because the restaurant has 3 hard walls, the shouts echoes through the place and can be quite frightening. Furthermore, the welcome shouts sounded perfunctory, without any sincerity. A very distracting irritant to the restaurant are the kiddy rides/ games machine a few meters away from the entrance. When they are activated, the loud music will enter the restaurant and bounce off the hard wall. The magnified noise destroyed the ambiance of dining there and makes conversation so difficult. I sat near the entrance to disastrous effect during the last visit and this time I opted for the interior seating to not much improvement. Luckily, the kiddy rides were only used in the first 15 min of my visit and they were silent during the rest of the dinner. The restaurant can close the large panel windows which is what they did when the restaurant just opened a year ago but it means that passerby will not be able to see that there are people in the restaurant. Hope they solve the noise problem, else I will have to find a less noisey meeting place the next time.

i visited this outlet in Dec 09 when I just opened a week ago. It is located among the seafood outlets at East Coast (beside no signboard restaurant). We went in the afternoon and we were the 2nd table in the air con area (no one was seating in the hot open air area) so several waiting staff hovered over us constantly but they disperse after we took our orders. This Crystal Jade outlet method of differentiating from the competition is to offer BBQ items like meat, seafood and vegetable on top of the usual stir fry and also some dim sum, so a rather wide range of items. We had the usual chili crab, steam fish, tofu , vege etc. The chili crab sauce is not bad but too sweet.