Old Singapore Quiz (7) - Answers

Thanks for your guesses. All of you who attempted Old Singapore Quiz (7) got the answers correct. It must have been an easy one, eh?

Answers to Old Singapore Quiz (7):

1. What is the name of this place in Singapore?

A: Toa Payoh Town Park


2. What was its old name?

A: Toa Payoh Town Garden


3. What was it popularly used for in the 1970s?

A: Outdoor wedding photography


4. What is the name of the eatery located there?

A: The Oasis


5. Where was the eatery formerly located?

A: Kallang Basin


The following paragraph was extracted from Wikipedia:

"Toa Payoh Town Garden was partially closed in 1999 to make way for a temporary bus interchange. After the new Toa Payoh Bus Interchange at the HDB Hub was completed in June 2002, the temporary bus interchange was converted to a landscaped park. Toa Payoh Town Garden was subsequently renamed as Toa Payoh Town Park."

So it looks like the garden had been rebuilt.

Toa Payoh Town Garden was one of the earliest public parks to be built in an HDB new town. According to this blog, the beautifully landscaped Toa Payoh Town Garden was completed in September 1973 for the SEAP Games. (In comparison, the Chinese Garden was completed in 1975.)

Toa Payoh Town Garden was a very popular venue for outdoor photography shoots with wedding couples at that time. My brother did just that in 1976:


The photos are a bit faded. My brother's suit was maroon, a favourite colour of choice for bridegrooms at that time. (The masks are not part of the wedding attire though. They are something I made my brother and sister-in-law wear to protect their identities. But frankly, I doubt anyone can recognise them 33 years later even if they are unmasked. :p)

Note: You can see the restaurant building in the background in the right photo above. The building has been renovated and it is now occupied by The Oasis restaurant which serves Taiwanese porridge:


Previously (before May 2008), the restaurant was at Kallang Basin (in the round structures in the photo below). As correctly pointed out by Polestar, the left portion of the restaurant in the photo below was also a popular place to hold Chinese wedding dinners in the 1970/80s:


Here are more photos of Toa Payoh Town Park:

The distinctive hexagonal guardrails

The 27-m viewing tower

The 3 arch bridges

Each watching you like an unblinking eye

You can read more about Toa Payoh here and here.

A Cheap And Good Restaurant

Singaporeans just love to queue. In particular, they like to queue before a store opens its doors. I am not talking about the first day of operation of a newly opened store like Ikea Tampines which saw people queueing overnight for the store to open the next day. I am talking about queueing before an established store opens its doors for the day. You see it at Hello Shops:

You see it when they give away free digital cameras:


You also see it at restaurants:


It was the long snaking queue outside this restaurant I saw 2 Saturdays ago which made me vow to try its food some day. When there is a queue at a restaurant, there can only be 2 reasons:

1. The food is good; and

2. The food is cheap.

In the case of Aston Specialties, it is both good and cheap. And since I didn't make a killing from the stock market recently unlike some people, I can only afford cheap food, never mind if it is good or not.

Today, my family arrived at the restaurant at 11.45 am. Its shutters were not opened yet and there were already 3 persons standing ahead of us in the queue. One was an elderly lady aged about 70 who said that she grew old while waiting she had been waiting there since 11.15 am. When the small restaurant finally opened its doors at 12.10 pm, the 10 tables or so within it were filled very quickly. Tea and coffee ($1.20 each) were served quite quickly:


I should mention that there is a 30-cent charge for a glass of 'sky juice' (plain water) but there is no service charge or GST levied at this restaurant. You get to choose 2 side dishes to go with your main course.

The grilled fish ($5.90) was served in 10 mins:

Grilled fish with onion rings and mashed potato

About another 10 mins later, the other 3 main courses were served:

Barbeque chicken with sausages, seasonal vegetables and baked potato

Black pepper chicken with sausages, seasonal vegetables and mashed potato

Black pepper sirloin steak with seasonal vegetables and baked potato

There are plenty of mushroom bits in the mushroom soup ($2.20). It's so tasty that I couldn't resist finishing half the soup before taking a picture:

The mushroom soup came with 2 small pieces of garlic bread

Overall, we found the restaurant's food very good and its prices very reasonable. The most expensive main course we ordered was my sirloin steak ($10.90).

So how about buying me lunch at this restaurant, Jayne? It is near your residence as it is located at 119 East Coast Rd. It is a cheap treat as lunch for our family of 4 only cost us a little over $44, about the price of a meal for one at Cafe De Amigo. I am sure that it won't make a noticeable dent in your share earnings. Maybe you should also invite Chris Sim as well. Don't let us grow old waiting for your treat.

Nihon Mura

I must confess that I'm not as domesticated as Chris. I don't know how to make popiah or cook glutinous rice. I only know how to eat. But even so, Chris always says that I am a poor food-taster because I have proven to be unable to tell good food from bad. Unlike Chris, I am certainly no foodie because I eat to live and not live to eat.

I also don't help out much with the house work (my in-laws do most of that). Neither do I tutor my kids much as I can afford to pay for tuition.

It is an irony that while I can bring home the bacon, I can't cook it. Neither can my wife. However, I can always bring my family out to eat cooked bacon and all kinds of other food.

Last Saturday, my wife asked me to try out this new Japanese restaurant at Revenue House.




I don't like to visit the Revenue House where the Inland Revenue is located. I believe a lot people share my sentiment because visiting the Inland Revenue is like visiting the Integrated Resort - you will lose a lot of money. (No wonder both share the same initials IR, haha.) So I used to visit Inland Revenue only once a year, very close to 15 April each year, the traditional deadline for submitting my tax returns. Ever since on-line submission of tax returns was implemented several years ago, I have been submitting my tax returns on-line.

Usually, the Revenue House is desserted after office hours. But since the restaurant opened its doors last month, diners have been steadily streaming into the restaurant even after office hours. The restaurant can seat about 200 diners. When I was there last Saturday, the restaurant was about three-quarter full which is quite an impressive feat. In fact, we met one of my wife's colleague at the restaurant. (She lives in Tampines where there is another branch of the same restaurant.) She told us that she made her way to the Revenue House branch because the Tampines branch had a very long queue of customers waiting outside it.

The restaurant is called Nihon Mura. (The name sounds like a Japanese ship, doesn't it?) It belongs to the Suki group of restaurants. All types of Japanese foods are served - tempura, udon, ramen, sushi, sashimi, charcoal grilled food, nabe yaki, donburi, etc. Worth highlighting is the sushi - all of them are selling at only 99 cents per plate.


They are displayed on moving conveyor belts just like in Sakae Sushi. You just pick what you fancy off the conveyor belts.


For other types of food, you just need to pick up 'ice-cream sticks' from the food display and hand them to the waitresses. Food is served quickly enough to justify the 10% service charge.

Our family of four ordered:

Yasai Miso Soup - $3.90
Fried Tofu - $1.50
Enoki Bacon - $4.90 (told you there was cooked bacon)
Nabeyaki Udon - $9.90
17 plates of sushi - $16.83

Together with service charge and 5% GST, the bill came up to $42.75, very attractive pricing by all standards. So I didn't lose a lot of money for this visit to Inland Revenue, hehe. Ah... the 'Mura' in the restaurant's name could well have been 'Murah' which means 'cheap' in Malay.

As for the quality of the food, I would not say that it is out of this world. But for the price that you are paying, the food is good enough. Especially to Elaine who loves Japanese food, go try out the restaurant for yourself and prove Chris either right or wrong that I am no foodie.

Nihon Mura

55 Newton Road #02-02 Revenue House
Tel 62532469
Operating
hours: 11.30 am - 9.30 pm

505 Tampines Ave 5 #01-03/04 Tampines Swimming
Complex
Tel 62608197
Operating hours: 12.00 noon - 9.30 pm