Carving Board Grill and Tiong Bahru Pau in Sam Yat Eating House, Jurong East

Carving Board Grill and Tiong Bahru Pau are occupants of Sam Yat Eating House, a coffee shop in Jurong East Singapore. We had an unusual lunch of ribeye steak and dim sum in an HDB coffee shop.

Sam Yat Eating House

Unlike the usual coffee shops in Singapore, there is no stall selling the usual hawker fare such as chicken rice or wanton mee. Instead, the large coffee shop opposite MacDonald’s Yuhua Jurong East (Blk 256) has only two food options – Western food or Dim Sum.

The Carving Board Grill (TCB GRILL)

Quite unusually for a coffee shop, The Carving Board Grill seems like a full-fledged Western cuisine cafe. But as in the case with the regular coffee shops in Singapore. There is free seating at the tables. Just find a table and you can order from either or both eateries and enjoy your food.

Carving Board Grill Menu

Here is a picture of the Carving Board menu. You can find staple items of a cafe here. Salads, pasta, burgers, fish & chips can be found on the menu. But as the name of the restaurant suggests, steak of various kinds take centrestage. We saw several tables enjoying their selection and so we decided on a salad and a ribeye steak.

Salad

We would never have thought of having salad in a coffee shop. But there we were. Our mixed green salad costs $8 and was quite basic. Considering that a bag of pre-washed salad from Cold Storage costs around $6, we thought that it was fair value considering that everything was prepared and served to us, including some croutons.

The Carving Board Grill – Ribeye Steak

Our steak was served in a predictable fashion. A decent sized steak with criss-cross char marks on a plate with fries, black pepper sauce and some token salad. The steak costs $26 which is slightly more expensive compared to steaks at Western food stalls at hawker centres. But within the range of budget steak restaurants such as iSteaks.

Tastewise, we found it to be a good steak. It does not have the intense flavour at specialist restaurants, but good enough. A selection of wines is also available at TCB Grill. This will be a convenient place for steak if we are in this area. But if the occasion requires aircon and a restaurant atmosphere, this may not be our first choice.

Tiong Bahru Pau @ Jurong East

Sharing the coffeeshop at Sam Yat Eating House with TCB is Tiong Bahru Pau & Snack. This is a very popular stall. By the start of lunchtime, many of the popular dim sum items like char siew bao and carrot cake were sold out. Most of the remaining items were deep-fried items. People must be getting more healthy conscious these days.

Next to Tiong Bahru Pau @ Jurong East is the drinks stall. This is one of the few places where we can find kopi-o, dim sum and restaurant quality steak in a Singapore coffeeshop.

Here is a picture of the dim sum menu. It is easier to just point and choose from the display case.

Here are the items that we ate that day. Other than the siew mai and spring roll, I cannot remember exactly what the other items were. The one thing I can remember is that the best dim sum item was the fried spring roll. That was comparable to those served at Orchard Road Chinese restaurants.

Ratings:
Food: 3
Service: 3
Value: 3
Atmosphere: 3
Overall Rating: 3 TOPs

The Carving Board Grill
Tiong Bahru Pau @ Jurong East
Sam Yat Eating House
252 Jurong East St 24, #01-107
Singapore 600252

TCB Grill Facebook

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The Ordinary Patrons | Real Dining Experience of Ordinary People
an independent Singapore food blog