Seoul Yummy is extremely popular for its stews and the unmistakable black pan was present on almost every table when we were there. We opted for the Signatures Combo ($48.70 for 1 appetizer, 1 main and 1 dessert). Army Stew (Budae Jjigae) is supposedly one of their must-orders, and we chose the meat (as opposed to the seafood) version. Our Army stew came with a hunk of frozen chicken, pork and beef, assorted vegetables and ... wait for it... sausages, luncheon meat, baked beans and maggi mee -- all of it dumped unceremoniously into a huge pan and left to simmer. Note that the maggi noodles are actually concealed underneath the meat.

The next step is simple, just chop everything up and wait for the meat to cook through. For the steep price, not only are the ingredients cheap and poor in quality,  they don't even give you a lot of meat. We struggle to see how this pot of Army Stew should even cost more than $10. Many fans have raved about the broth, which we found to be quite tasty and not very spicy, albeit a little on the salty side.

For appetizers, we had the potato pancake. This was pretty decent and we could feel the strips of potato in the pancake. And like most Korean restaurants, you get free flow banchan! Always a small plus.

We chose the chocolate and banana bingsu for dessert. The chocolate ice cream was nice and creamy, the bananas were coated in caramel and sprinkled with crunchy bits. Well in fact everything was yummy except for the bingsu, which was coarser than what it should be. Sigh, what a let down!

The Koreans certainly have a penchant for misspelling English words (ironically, misspelling is often misspelled by everyone) and for bad usage of loanwords. Mangled English can be rather amusing, but in some cases it is just annoying. In the case of Churro 101, 'churro' is rightly singular. This is because unlike other churros stalls, where you get a cupful of 3 inch morsels, over here what you get is one long churro.

Because Sher had an ice cream craving, we went for the Ice Cream & Churro Set. We were contemplating between a filled churro vs a coated churro. In the end, we decided to go for the signature chocolate-filled churro ($5.90+$0.50 for the filling).

Visually, the popcorn ice cream is without a doubt, a head turner. Taste-wise, the ice cream was rather sweet but creamy. With the caramel popcorn, what we got was sweet on sweet, almost to the verge of being cloying. Thankfully, the cheese popcorn lent a much needed saltiness to the whole affair. 

Sher has been dying to try the newly opened Hvala outlet ever since she saw photos of it flooding Instagram. The shop was hidden between Tsujiri and Churros 101. We almost missed it and had to comb the basement twice before locating it!

We went for the most popular one ($7.90) -- vanilla bean soft serve plus your choice of 2 fruit/topping plus one sauce and the puffle (egg shell waffles) wtith another sauce. You can choose between maple syrup or chocolate sauce for the puffle. They had more variety for the ice cream sauce - maple, chocolate, speculoos and black sesame! The black sesame sauce was worth a try, since its the only unique one as compared to the other yogurt/soft serve outlets but too bad Sher doesnt eat that:/

We choose kiwi and speculoos sauce for the ice cream and froot loops and chocolate sauce for the puffle.  The ice cream was average at best, but we could see the vanilla bean seeds inside, which was a nice touch. Should ask the server to put less sauce on the ice cream though, it was quite overpowering. The fluffy puffle looked daunting to eat at first, but we realized we could easily peel it a circle at a time! Eating it was a messy affair though, once we got to the chocolate sauce bits.

With so many competitors around, Hvala doesn't really stand out with its puffle soft serve. But okay la, good effort.

Hvala Waffle Bar
Address: 313 @ Somerset, #B3-50, 313 Orchard Road, 238895
Opening Hours: Mon-Sun, 11:00-22:00
Website: https://www.facebook.com/HvalaWaffleBar
Damage: $7.90

Milkcow, a Korean soft serve ice-cream chain, prides itself in its use of 100% organic natural milk honeycomb. All superfluousness aside, Milkcow does serve up an extremely milky and creamy ice-cream. The ice-cream is milk-flavored, without a trace of vanilla. As the relatively new kid on the block, Milkcow has to compete against the likes of Honey Creme, llaollao, and umm Thai Ice Cream Rolls just to name a few. 

As you can see, you're pretty much spoilt for choice over here. Well, we're going to run through a few items on their menu, so hopefully you will be able to make a more informed decision when you get there. Lets begin!  

Snow Drop ($5.90) -- Candy floss on top, organic salt ice cream, jelly beans and M&Ms. What could possibly go wrong with this beauty? Almost everything actually. Unlike salted caramel or salted chocolate, where there's a balance between sweetness and saltiness, salt and milk seems to be pushing it a little. It tasted pretty weird too in our opinion. But of course, opinions are subjective. The nail in the coffin was, however, the jelly beans. Word of advice: stay far far far away from those, lest you want a broken tooth. Loved the candy floss by the way.

Milky Cube ($5.90) -- This is the poster girl/boy of Milkcow. Soft serve ice-cream with a slab of organic, unadulterated honeycomb. No bees included. The honeycomb was kind of hard to enjoy though as it was waxy, cloyingly sweet and stuck to the roof of our mouth.  

Milky Honey ($5.50) -- This was probably the best of the lot. Plain and simple, just the ice-cream with a drizzle of the organic honey. We loved how the sweetness of the honey contrasted nicely with the savory ice-cream.