Best Ways To Spend Your Last $50

It is the last day of the month, isn’t it?

1. Starters and Desserts.. Together
So you’re caught in a conundrum. You have a weakness for the foie gras. And the heavenly desserts. But you only have S$50 to your name, and you won’t renounce your hedonistic, epicurean leanings, even if you were flogged to death. What do you do? Skip the main course, of course. They say we usually focus on the beginning, trail off the middle, and pick up again, anyway.. so why not apply this to your culinary endeavours too?

The best place to do this is at Restaurant Ember, one of Popagandhi’s all time favourite restaurants. While we’re a huge fan of the mains at Ember, we understand S$50 may be a tight squeeze for a complete meal.

So the getaround to living it up on as little as possible, while garnering the same amount of utility: have dinner nearby (excellent Chinatown porridge just a few blocks out), then indulge in Ember’s heavenly foie gras (S$16), and end on a good note for the night with their warm banana tart with homemade lavender ice cream (S$9) and warm valrhona chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream (S$9), and have just enough leftover for the bus fare home. The desserts are up there with Marmalade’s sticky date toffee pudding in the triumvirate of orgasm-inducing desserts.

2. Insatiable Sweet Tooth
As many Marmalade Pantry sticky date toffee pudding as your money can buy you, and as you can eat, depending on what comes first. Enough said.

3. El Cheapo Drunkard
Drink cheaply. It’s easier if you’re a lady – don’t let your mind wander – bars simply seem to perpetuate the stereotype that women can’t and don’t drink as much. It’s stereotypes like these we ought to perpetuate further.

You’ll have no trouble finding free flow of house pours on Wednesday nights in most places, mid-week being apparently delegated as the best night for a girl to hunt out free drinks. Even if the alcoholic in you itches to drink on nights that are not Wednesday, it still can be done, if you brush up on your knowledge of good times and places to go to for drinks.

From Popagandhi’s little black book:

• Brewerkz Happy Hours – from 12-3pm, $10 per jug, $3 per pint or mug; 3-6pm, $15 per jug, $6 per pint or mug; 6-9pm with jugs at only $22, pints at $9 and mugs at $7.50.


• Next door at Cafe Iguana, draft beer, tequila drinks and house pour wines and spirits at half price every day from the moment it opens until 9pm, when happy hour ends. This puts a jug of margarita at approx. S$15 per jug. It helps that Cafe Iguana makes some of the best margaritas around. What else does a cheapo alcoholic-in-training need?


• Union Square bar at Amara shopping centre (next to The Amara), a salsa bar, goes even outrageously cheaper. If you have a stomach for couples attempting to salsa, where “attempt” is the operative word, push your way through to the cheap drinks here. Happy hour (before 9pm) prices are far out cheap (at least without having to resort to a sleazy Chinatown bar) – S$4 for most spirits and liquers, approx. S$5 for cocktails, S$10 for shooters (ever heard of a Flaming Lamborghini pushing the single digit boundary so closely, in this land where alcohol and fags have forsaken us?). You’ll be salsa-ing away in a completely different way. And if it’s a Friday night, and you’re still not wasted by 9.30pm (if you have friends like mine who order everything they want at a go before happy hour ends, you’re likely to be, too), free flow for ladies begin thereon. Now you know why I love being a woman this much.

4. Feast!
Gather your trusty eating companions (where the only prerequisite is to be a foodie, ‘friend’ being unnecessary but an incentive), and stuff yourselves silly at a place of your choice where good food and choice abounds and your wallet will rejoice. A suggestion: Tiong Bahru Market, that venerable eating establishment. Eastsiders may have their own favourites. Old Airport Road is worth a mention, too. S$5.30 buys you 20 pieces of chwee kueh, S$1 buys you excellent BBQ chicken wing, S$3 buys fairly decent orh luak (fried oyster omelette) and kway teow, among other notable local favourites. This should be a feast that will take several days to detox from.

5. Buffets and Set Lunches
Foodies here know how to have the best for less. Most of the time, the secret lies in the twin pleasures of ‘buffets and set lunches’ (though not always at the same time, or even the same week). In buffet mad Singapore, there is an insane number of buffets to choose from, whatever your bent.

• Dimsum buffet – Orient Ocean restaurant at the Miramar Hotel. While not necessarily the best, and certainly not on par with Crystal Jade or Din Tai Fung, what more than all-you-can-eat can you ask for, at S$12 per person?


• Indian vegetarian buffets – S$10 buys you a all-you-can-eat buffet, free flow of soft drinks, free flow of naan, and free flow of pappadum! (This is worth is for me simply because I can eat a hell lot of pappadum, and have chalked up about $20 worth of them at more high brow eating establishments before..) Food is generally excellent, don’t be put off by the “vegetarian” label – I’m not much into vegetables typically, but I love it. Then again I’m also often called a wannabe Indian and hence likely to be biased. Before I digress further, you can find these at Upper Dickson Road, either at The Gangez (run by the Komala Vilas group) and Woodlands Madras restaurant. There are more along the stretch but these are the big names to look out for.


• Sushi buffet. Enough said.


• Pasta buffet: Pete’s Place at the Hyatt Hotel offers a tempting buffet at S$26++. Meats, seafood, desserts, among other things. You can die a happy camper.


• Set lunches pack serious value for money, often costing the median of S$20 for a satisfying three course meal. Chez La Mamy (14 Ann Siang Road, Tel: 6438-1998) and Aioli (5 Boon Tat Street, Tel: 6423-9076) are good bets. The set lunches are generally not as spectacular as their dinners, but never quite run of the mill either.

6. Chocolates, Cigarettes and Coffee
The best things in life begin with the letter ‘C’, and guess which three in particular I have a weakness for? Buy, for S$50, either 4 boxes of Royce Nama chocolates (Takashimaya and Suntec), or several pieces of Godiva truffles. Your call. Add in a few packs of Sampoerna Menthol or Dunhill. Or shisha at Cafe Le Caire (a.k.a. Al-Majlis, at Arab St). But I’ve yet to find good coffee outside the premises of my home (with an espresso machine and an aspiring barista for a dad).

7. North of the Border, South of The Sun
Go to Johor Bahru. Let’s face it, your dollar does go a longgerrr way when everything is calculated at a rate of 2.30. There’s far more to see and do there than we often give our northern neighbours credit for.

$50 buys you about RM115. That breaks down to:

• 20 DVDs (incl. delivery)


• 20 packs of cigarettes


• 4 hours at a hair salon (remember my red hair?)


• 50 rotiboys


• 15 bowls of the best bak kut teh in the world (near Tebrau, at Taman Sentosa)

Or any combination thereof.

(Bus fare is just S$0.80 from Kranji MRT to JB, RM0.80 back – cheaper than going to Pasir Ris!)

8. Rent Books
Rather than spend in the excess of S$25 per book, as you usually do, you can read up to 10 books with S$50 by renting from BookCraves. They have some gems in there, you just have to dig hard enough. They deliver the books to anywhere you wish, and pick it up from anywhere you want.

9. Chill By The Beach
Coastes has to be the single reason for anyone above the age of 12 and under 40 to visit Sentosa (and not be part of inane school orientations slash team-building slash time-wasting programs or similar).

10. Living History
Visit the living museum they never told you about – for free, too, unless you want to take home a piece of two. Grandfather’s Collections at Bussorah Street (just outside the Sultan Mosque) should be made a national treasure – every snippet of this country’s past is contained here in this 2 storey shophouse, and scenes have been lovingly created. All the Coke cans and bottles you’ve ever seen in your life; vintage McDonald’s Happy Meal toys from your childhood,; stationery items your father would tell you he owned. Banana notes from the Japanese Occupation, movie ‘posters’ (oil paintings, rather) from the heyday of Shaw Brothers cinema. A pinhole cinema our parents paid two cents to peek through, a barber scene, cigarette boxes from the past, a 60s “roadside drinks stall” and kopitiam with ancient cups and saucers, signs, bottles of Fanta – and even the rusty green ice shaving machines we thought we’d never see again.

I never stop being fascinated each time I’m in here. The collection of records is fairly decent, you could pick up some gems if you roll up your sleeves and dig through the stash. Make it a point to visit the toilet (in the ‘garden’), and look out for the lovely Vespa on display by the courtyard.