3

its really been 3 years! 5 of knowing her, 3 of love, and many more to come. despite all the difficulties i have grown to love her more and more, her little idiosyncrasies and peculiarities adding charm and humanity to a wonderful person.

and with that background, here's a food review for the anniversary dinner!

Dozo is located in Valley Point Shopping Centre, away from the orchard crowd somewhere in the River Valley area. i got to know about it from the ever-useful hungrygowhere.com portal, where it had garnered 16 straight positive reviews on the strength of its service.

they really weren't kidding. my reservation was for 6.30 but by 5.30 me and PJ were already starving, so we toddled down from Orchard after doing some essential shopping. arriving 15min early, we inquired as to whether we could occupy early. the staffer immediately ushered us in. the restaurant's culture is one whereby all the waiters and waitresses are warm, friendly and joke with the guests, be in when introducing menu items or serving the food. they also aim to give best service. when i made the booking, the person taking the call asked if it was a special occasion. the resulting exchange of information yielded a little cake with a candle on the house. high marks for service, these guys are deliberately aiming to deliver.

the dinner (which is after all the point of the whole exercise, ja?) is organised as a set menu costing $58+++ for a dinner or $38+++ for lunch, sans the starter. diners get to choose the appetiser (starter is fixed), soup, entree, main, dessert and drink. the menu choices are also rotated every 3 months to keep things new and exciting.

the starter dish was 3 very small, chic-looking bite-sized things which were honestly very tasty but i'm not quite sure what they were. i do recall a grilled scallop with a sprig of asparagus and what seemed to be foie gras on a piece of toast.

for appetisers, i had escargot and PJ had her a foie gras chawanmushi. the escargot was acceptable, i guess. the concept was to subvert the usual garlic butter paradigm by making it a teensy bit like an oyster mornay, ie drowning it in cheese. i like cheese more than i like oysters, to be honest. more cheese for the escargots would have been nice. PJ's chawanmushi was a source of unexpected amusement. it actually, in all honesty, smelled like wet dog. not unpleasantly so, it was more like a small happy dog which had been caught in the rain while on walkies rather than a Hound of the Baskervilles type of smell, but still wet dog. and it tasted like... chawanmushi with bird liver in it. tasty, but nothing to make faces like a japanese food vlog.

soup was a cream of mushroom with black truffles and a seafood bisque. i dont know whether its my philistine tastes, but the seafood didnt quite agree with me. too much of the crustacean-type umami, and perhaps a little too much grog thrown into the soup stock. more cream might have modulated the flavour well. the mushroom was however good. coarse-blend mushroom bits for extra goodness. not quite sure why truffles are so hyped tho...

next up was a beef carpaccio for me and a crab salad for PJ. the carpaccio was a bigger hit with me than it was for her. the external surface of the beef appeared to have been lightly cooked before being thinly sliced and went well with the flaked parmesan and crepe. i think i would actually have been pretty happy to eat something like that (in 3x the quantity) for a light lunch. the crab salad was however a bit of a hassle; while the claw had been cracked and a section removed for access, it still required some dissection.

i had the beef steak for a main. consisting of medium-rare sliced beef on a very very hot granite stone, this seemed to be the best item of the night. one could cook each individual slice to preference on the hot stone, protected by a leaf, and few things make me happier than beef. Peijun's cod was decent enough, but by this time she was beginning to feel stuffed, and eating the cod became a bit more of an exercise. the pairing of cod with some filo pastry did assist in lightening the usually heavy flavour of the fish.

dessert was a hot chocolate cake with ice cream, and a green tea creme brulee. both competent, but nothing to write home about. and of course, the surprise little cake to end the evening!

so to sum up, excellent service, okay food. nice ambience, although going early means its quite quiet. it seems more like a girls night out kind of place, where the waiters can be cheeky and the small serves will fill up petite young ladies...

Lion - May'n, Megumi Nakajima

The Fine Art Of Annoying Your Dental Practitioner

or: how to piss me off.

its actually quite strange how patients can find new and inventive ways to piss off the dentist. its not the cleverest thing to do really, to antagonise the person who will be placing sharp objects into your head in an effort to fix things gone wrong in your mouth.

1) say the word 'cheap' more than 2 times in 20min
-yes, i really do like being reminded of how amazingly low i charge in the government service, and how good that makes me feel about the quality of work vs its monetary value
1a) say the word 'expensive' more than 2 times in 20min when i try to refer you, or in reference to the last dentist you saw
-see above

2) address your dentist as 'Mr' instead of 'Dr'
-especially when i specifically introduce myself as Dr Ee. are you deaf, rude or inattentive? we've been 'Dr' since the 1980s in these parts, mind...

3) inordinate squeamishness towards dental treatment
-grow up. please. the days of low-TLC dentistry ended with the last generation. we treat patients well... until they anger us.

4) strange noises during treatment
-some describe the noises as sounding constipated. some describe them as tortured. i really don't want to hear things when im trying to deliver an injection, clear your decay or clean the crud out of your gums.

5) keeping quiet during treatment and then filing complaints with the Clinic Exec after
-why not just tell me before i do things and save us the trouble? if you don't want something, opening your mouth and keeping still is in fact implied consent. so yes, please... don't be an idiot.

6) show a lack of attentiveness when the dentist explains treatment/brushing technique
-these days we work on a basis of information and trust. you must must must must understand what it is that we do. we are only legally empowered to advise, not to dictate. for goodness sake, pay bloody attention when i talk to you. and 'you decide lah' is not an acceptable answer, it reeks of a lack of responsibility.

7) knock on the dentist's door or barge in demanding to be seen when it isn't your turn
-if you can't do this in an ATM queue when drawing money or at HDB HQ when applying for a flat, what makes you think it's acceptable here? and do you really want to piss off the person who will be putting sharp objects into your mouth?

8) act as if subsidised dental treatment is a birthright and not a privilege
-really, if you can wear good clothes, nice shoes and a decent watch and carry a leather wallet with money in it and a credit card and yet complain that $60 2 times a year for scaling in the private is too expensive, what are you actually telling me? thats less than 50 cents a day across the year, for your information...
8a) act as if getting fast appointments is a birthright and not a privelege
-yes, we really are booked up for 3 months solid. welcome to government service! no amount of whining or threatening the Clinic Exec will change this fact, or our desire to honour the appointments of those who came before you.

so yes, 8 ways to piss of your dentist. this is of course not exhaustive. feel free to drop me suggestions so that i may add to this list.

Dental Reflections 009

so heres one which is a teensy bit off the clinical and more into the philosophical.

what exactly is the relationship of the practitioner to the patient? what is it that patients expect from us, and we from them?

this was sparked after lunchtime discussions with Boss K about our ever-beloved FON patients and their weird ways. the main point here being, why in the world would a patient want to kick up a big fuss and aggravate the very people who they expect to treat their illnesses? we've all seen them in various forms wherever we practise... the Geylang Door-Knockers, the people who get the NDC patient-service 'bomb-squad' down on practically every visit, the nasty parents at HPB. and yet, these people come back again and again and again to our clinics despite having made their unhappiness very unclear. lets be honest; we're not the only dental practice in town. there is an abundance of dental treatment available to the population, from the back-lorongs of Geylang to the high towers of Orchard Road. some even go across the causeway on occasion. but yet the problematic people still return like homing pigeons. is it the excellent (for its cost) service we provide? the ability to break a young ego and spoil his day? or is it the fact that we're inexpensive?

i think that something should be done about this. we should be able to perform our services, get thanked for it at the end of the day and not have to worry about verbal abuse or getting stalked or complaints being forwarded to the boss for doing treatment in a manner consistent with modern standard of care. we should not have to have patients complain about rising costs of dental work when they live in condominiums and have nice watches and gold jewellery. we should not have people barge into our rooms demanding to be seen as walk-ins for loose teeth when the periodontal damage was already done 10 years ago. and we most certainly should be appreciated for heroically scaling the severe periodontitis cases instead of getting scolded or complained about because they feel sensitive when their great walls are being broken down. we should be allowed to blacklist nasty patients from our clinics, and to share this information with the other polyclinics if necessary. people who abuse us and want to play the system for all its worth do not deserve to benefit from healthcare in the public sector; their selfish interference in fact decreases efficiency and drives up running costs. i already suspect that healthcare bleeds a huge chunk out of the government budget. people should pay for their dental work so that more money can be turned to education and general medicine for the terminally ill.

and as an aside, i hate it when people call my treatment cheap. it makes me feel cheap. i do the best work humanly possible under the conditions. but the public thinks dental work is like buying refrigerators or cars; compare the price tag and buy something cheap. how clean they end up after a scaling is not important so long as it's 'gentle'. they'll never see the subgingival wall, anyway, and all that matters to them is that the black spots have been removed...