Eatzi at East Point

Eatzi is a Halal restaurant chain opened by the same management as Jack's Place. I've been eating there occasionally when I'm in the Far East (much more than I would have liked), as it's located at East Point. The main draw here is the Student's set meal (though I've never tried it) - which is a budget friendly option (comes to slightly more than $8 after taxes). It starts at 1.30pm (this is pretty inconsistent - managed to get it at 1something on one occasion, and on the next, we were told that the computer was programmed so we can't order it till 130). For the meal, there's 4 different choices for main course, and it's served with a soft drink or ice lemon tea, as well as a scoop of ice cream.

There's chicken cutlet, which imoh, is the safest bet out of the four options. I haven't tried it myself, but it's quite a nice portion and looks crispy. And how wrong can you get with chicken cutlet anyway?

The baked rice has a nice brown layer of cheese on top, not too sure if it came with sauce.

The Fish Fingers and Chips (note, not Fish and chips) is exactly what it says, and it's not too bad (fried food usually isn't).

The last choice is the Spaghetti Carbonara, which I think is the riskiest dish to try, since badly done spaghetti carbonaras are really painful to eat.

They also have daily set lunches, including 2 'permanent' mains, as well as an additional 2 mains, for each day of the week. The Set Lunch includes a soup of the day, main course, daily dessert and coffee/tea. Like all set lunches, changing any component of the set begets unecessarily high additional charges. For example, if you want to change coffee/tea to iced tea or a soft drink, you'll have to pay an additional $1++.

Currently, the 'permanent' dishes are Roast Chicken Leg and Crumbed Fillet of Fish ($8-$8.80++)

Soups - Not very spectacular, just tastes like the normal low-ish quality kind with not much taste and thickend with lots of flour. It's the kind of soup where if you close your eyes, it's hard to tell if you're having chicken or mushroom soup, because the taste is just so subtle (to put it in a nice way). I like the garlic bread that's served with the soup cos it's usually a pretty big piece and crispy cos it's usually nicely toasted.

The Roast Chicken Leg with mashed potatoes ($8 something++ for set lunch,) exceeded our expectations. The portion was more than generous, and there was a mega drumstick Check out how big it is - not like those measly chicken thigh + drumstick size. That day's lunch was extra good because the vegetables were really fresh, and there were a few types of vegetables including sweet corn, cucumber, carrots and cabbage. The mashed potato was also pretty good - creamy and smooth, and I was suprised that they included olives (extra costs!) in the meal.

Another chicken I tried - this one was the daily set lunch, and was described as Grilled Boneless Chicken with Oyster sauce ($9.80++).

It's usually served with fries (I think?) but I always pay an additional $2++ to change it to baked potato cos I really love the sour cream and bacon bits.

The alarm bells in my head should have gone off and I should have avoided this like plague (chicken with oyster sauce!?), but I ordered it. It was horrible. Not only was my chicken over cooked, dry and hard, the oyster sauce tasted horrendous. And that day, they were somehow so slow, my sour cream and bacon bits for my baked potato took uber long to come. The vegetables were limp cabbage, which had slightly brown edges, and chicken with oyster sauce tastes really gross with cabbage.
The first lunch I tried at Eatzi - Crumbed Fillet of Fish with Lychee sauce ($8.80++), served with olive rice and seasonal vegetables.
The portion fish was suprisingly generous (2 pieces of fish) and although the vegetables were the usual tastless boiled carrot/cauliflower, the olive rice was pretty tasty. The lychee sauce is rather thin, tastes sweetish more than it tastes of lychee. The grilled fish portion is much smaller than the Crumbed fish, but since I'm clogging my arteries with all the sour cream on my baked potato, I usually try to give my arteries a rest and take the grilled option instead.

After the chicken incident, I've stuck to Fish. I particularly like their fish because it's usually quite consistent. This is the Grilled Fish with Cheese sauce ($9.80++), which wasn't very cheesey, but passable. As usuall, changed my fries/mashed potato to baked potato.

This is my most recent meal at Eatzi - Grilled Fish with Thai Sweet Chilli Sauce ($10.80?++ hmm I think they recently increased their prices!!), which I had on the same day as the spectacular (for Eatzi standards) chicken leg. Look at how nice my baked potato is - they usually don't serve my sour cream until I'm halfway done with my meal cos they're ineficient/overwhelmed/disorganized/slow.Of course, being Jack's Place, they serve a budget friendly steak for a mere $9.80. They've recently changed their menu - they used to have this on Monday, Tues, Thurs and Friday lunches, but now, it's only on Mondays. Monday's daily main course was N.Z. Sirloin steak with mustard seed sauce ($9.80++) Very basic steak. I didn't think it looked fantastic, but for a $9.80++ set meal, it's the kind of quality you'll get? Baked Beef Lagsana ($9.80++ I think it's $10.80 now? need to check this)

Desserts vary - I think that they should just stick to ice cream because some of their daily desserts are totally unpalatable. The mango ice cream (left) was pretty good and came with mango jelly. The fruit cocktail pie wasn't very nice (to me) but my friends liked it, possibly because the pastry base was crumbly). The creme brulee (at least, that's what the waiter called it) tasted like cough syrup. Ice cream is ALWAYS a safe choice, and I think that they shouldn't spend so much time and effort trying to make desserts, since everyone loves ice cream.

The Student's Meal comes with ice cream, and it's not just a plain scoop of ice cream, but it's dressed up with chocolate rice/ jelly etc.

Ok strange - as I was blogging, because the meals I had at Eatzi was over a few months, and I think they very recently changed their menu and increased their prices D:< id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423631128238894258" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 59px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho-vGe1cYun93HVWfMo4E5oJaXK4hWDGRZuOCpNQaYsXlP7mKvR1d9d5GWUadlL31KpFb-O4ukDLhSsWqkWVP2DDsgXe9Zkds8-pN9mgSzV0Dp9Wji0MN9036B9DXB-OVRxa9aIvlLlw/s200/3+stars.jpg" border="0">Food aside, the service here leaves much to be desired. They're really disorganized, slow and without fail, forget to bring or are really sloooooow in bringing certain things. There's quite alot of staff, but the always look so harrassed. We are ignored most of the time, even though we were trying to call for the many waiters and waitresses attention. In fact, we can sometimes stand outside waiting for a table for around 5 minutes, even though there are many empty tables inside.

Thankfully, they serve ice water (though they take really long to do this, and never do refills unless you ask them).
Their food standard also fluctuates by quite a bit, so certain dishes are cringe worth, while others range from acceptable to good. For the price, the food is average or better, though you shouldn't come here looking for a fancy steak/lunch.

Looks like I should have bought their JP Pepper Dine Card for $25, since it gives a 10% off (not sure if it includes set lunches?) and $35 food credit. But I don't intend to go back to the Far East in the near future (though I could use it at any Eatzi or Jack's Place outlets, so maybe it's worth it in the end?)

Eatzi
EastPoint Mall

3 Simei St 6 #03-14

Singapore 528833

Tel: 6786 6388