Tsukada Nojo (Westgate)

Our first trip down to Tsukada Nojo for their famed beauty pot or bijin nabe! By stewing Jidori chicken (Japanese kampung chicken) bones for more than eight hours until the bones completely dissolve, Tsukada Nojo creates these tofu-like collagen blobs which forms the base of your hotpot. The benefits of collagen are supposedly to firm up your skin and reduce wrinkles hence the 'beauty' pot name. More importantly, we heard that the broth at Tsukada Nojo was incredibly tasty and we simply had to try it. But the queue at Plaza Singapura was always daunting. So, when we found out that Westgate had an outlet, and the queue was a lot shorter, we had no reason not to drop by! We reached there slightly before 12pm on a Saturday and we were one of the 1st few customers. 

While waiting for our collagen blob to melt, we went ahead to order one of their onigiri (rice balls, $3.80). This one was wrapped in bacon, drizzled with yuzu mayo and served with a lettuce leaf to appease the vegematics. Be warned, the bijin nabe portion is quite substantial, and you absolutely must slurp up every last drop of soup, so we advise not to order too many onigiris -- delicious as they may be.

To go with your hotpot, you are served a wide variety of organic produce, such as red radishes, yellow zucchini, ladies finger/okra, enoki mushrooms, taupok, baby corn and some leafy vegetables that were very tender and fresh (we were instructed to quickly blanch it because it overcooks rapidly). Which brings us to the service at Tsukada Nojo -- it was impeccable. Each table is assigned a waitress, and ours was patiently explaining the origin of ingredients and how to cook them in great detail. However, we were kind of busy taking photos and not paying much attention to her.. oops.

Before we could start dunking our ingredients in, we were made to try the unadulterated version of the soup, and try a portion of the Jidori chicken, which surfaced after the collagen pudding had melted. The soup was pure and very flavorful, although quite oily to the point of being sticky. The ingredients were nicely arranged in the pot for us (we declared ourselves first timers!) so we could get this lovely shot.

Looks good enough to eat already! Btw our steamboat picture is featured on EatBook's list of 10 steamboat restaurants! Head over to check out other steamboat restaurants that will keep your belly nice and warm;)

We chose the thin egg noodles to accompany our meal (you can choose from three kinds -- thick mochi, thin egg noodle and rice noodle). That is really one huge plate of noodles. We had a hard time trying to polish off everything but we always finish ALL of our food!

Half way through the meal, we were brought some seaweed paste (aww hearts), if we wanted to alter the flavor of our soup. Don't put too much, its quite salty, and besides, the soup is already good enough as it is!

To wrap up our meal, we were each served a stick of konjac jelly on a plate hand-drawn by the waitress using sauces. So cute right hehe. Can't bear to destroy the pretty family portrait:/