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STORY YIP JIEYING & KI’ERN TAN PHOTOS AIK CHEN, EALBERT HO, KELVIN CHIA & CHEE YAN

how do they taste? Read on. The latest food fad from in Brunei, Cambodia, Laos and Korea. The social media
Bangkok hits our shores fast and furious. The cross darling comes piping hot in a cutesy yellow jacket and is
border partnership has sprouted four brand new stores ridiculously Instagrammable. The signature oozy filling
at VivoCity, The Clementi Mall, 313@Somerset and is made from mozzarella and an undisclosed blend of
White Sands within the same week. (Actor Nat Ho is a other cheeses in a plant in Thailand and imported over.
shareholder and creative director in this partnership.) The palm-sized Hokkaido milk toast, oven toasted then
And there are another 10 more in the pipeline, griddled with butter on a hot pan a la minute, is baked
including a self-service café next month. Ambitious, locally using an in-house recipe.
much? And they’re already attracting long queues of up For now, there are only three flavours available:
to 30 minutes. The, um, pull factor? All that stretchy original, chocolate and charcoal. The full menu, which
cheese, of course. will include cheese fries, will only be available when the
Created by a Thai duo in 2015, the Hokkaido-style sit-down café opens in Bugis next month.
thick toast, a Thai creation that uses Hokkaido milk in THE LOOK: Just follow the waft of freshly toasted
its milk and cheese, made its debut at night markets in bread to the cheery takeaway yellow outdoor kiosk with
Thailand before graduating to malls like Siam Paragon. a bear mascot, apparently modelled after one of the
There are presently four outlets back home, and more co-founders’ whose nickname is ‘Bear’.

Original, $3.80
Happily stretch yourself thin here. The 4cm-thick toast,
imbued with the richness of butter, is fluffy, fragrant
and comforting, if a little on the sweet side. Apart from
the cheese, you’ll get a mouthful of “cheese sauce”,
THE FOOD which is a strange but tasty mix of condensed milk
and mayo, similar to the sauce on BreadTalk’s pork
floss bun. The generously portioned cheese is, expectedly, delightfully stringy
(someone managed to stretch it out to two metres), but not particularly
fragrant — it’s almost like a blander mozzarella. It also has an odd, almost
unpleasant mouth-feel, like chewing gum that’s lost its flavour. Best eaten
hot on the spot.

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