Cuisine: Mexican
Address:
Nearest MRT: Holland Village (Circle Line)

Chimichanga is a Mexican restaurant and bar. Featuring authentic Mexican cuisine, this is the place to go if you want to chow down on familiar favourites such as tacos, quesadillas and burritos. While the original outlet has been in Little India since 2016, the newest and third outlet would be opening at Holland Village. At the time of visit, it was a soft launch and only for invited guests, so the menu was also a provisional one.

For starters, we ordered potato croquettes ($9.80). They are made up of golden fried rolls of mashed potatoes, with sweet corn and served with tofu aioli. I thought that the dip was just mayonnaise so I did not bother with it. The potato croquettes were a pleasant snack without leaving an oily feeling in your mouth.

The other appetizer is Ground beef stew quesadillas ($17). At this price, I would expect it to be a main course and not like a light bite, but the portion is too small. With 2 people eating it, it was devoured within minutes as the tortilla is really thin. The filling was not a lot, but I did enjoy the tomato salsa and a hint of the tomato hot sauce.

Since my friend was celebrating his birthday on that day, it was a drinks galore kind of night. We had two bottles of Jack Daniel’s and the blue liquid in the Tequila bottle is “Sarong Fly”, a special drink concocted by the bartender. It had gin, lime juice and some other ingredients, making it sweet and easy to drink.

For more light bites, here is the Chicken loaded nachos ($14). It is served with tortilla chips with a choice of topping and melted cheese. At other Mexican places, a complimentary plate of nachos without sauce would be served while waiting for the rest of the food to arrive. For this dish, the amount of chicken was very little, but otherwise eating the chips was quite addictive.

Final dish of the day is the beef steak ($22) as I had wanted something more filling. It was served with tomato salsa and guacamole by the side. The sauces could have been removed from their plastic containers to make this dish more presentable. The steak was horrible because it was juicy but lacked the taste of a charred steak. Some parts were chewy and the colour of the steak did not look appetising.

Anyway, all these dishes are still being refined at the moment as the restaurant is not officially open. The chef needs to maintain quality in its dishes, to be on par with the other 2 Chimis outlets, at Marina Bay and Dunlop Street.

Despite the less-than-satisfactory food, I still had a fun time hanging out with friends. The bummer is that by 10.30pm, we were all chased out of the restaurant, and all the alcoholic drinks were kept, due to the strict laws implemented in Singapore during Phase 2.