"The horror...the horror..."…read more
That's what I thought as soon as the roast chicken arrived. The chicken was on top of a metallic basin with a rod stand attached vertically in the middle. Said poor bird was forcefully put through the rod, so that the end of the rod protruded out of the breast area. It looked like something out of a bad scary movie...or Doom.
While there were some good aspects of the dinner I had here, plenty of it left much to be desired, and hence the lower grade. The theme of most of the food involved that night was this: tasteless. Everything surprisingly tasted bland. I expected spice. I expected umami tastes. I definitely expected "wok hei". I expected flavor.
The roasted pork was absolutely disappointing. There was barely any meat, barely any layer of fat, and the skin was rubbery, not crispy. Oh and I did mention it was tasteless?
Oh and back to the chicken. I ended up doing the carving and did a decent job, grace of God. They gave me one plastic glove to aid me in getting the job done. I could've moon-walked after that. While the chicken was tender as all get-out, it was, get this...BLAND. There was a flavored salt that accompanied the chicken and you needed to apply copious of that stuff to make seem somewhat tasty.
The clay pot rice with Chinese sausage was decent but not amazing. Again, it lacked flavor. The sizzling pork knuckle in black pepper sauce could have used more flavor as well but it was passable. At least it was warm. There were raw oysters ordered but...raw shellfish at a dai pai dong??? Ummm...hepatitis, much?
For me, the highlight of the entire dinner was the garlic shrimp, but because it was one of the only dishes that actually had flavor (albeit it was overwhelming garlic). The shrimp were cut symmetrically and cooked with a crapload of garlic. Yeah, I wasn't expecting to kiss anyone that night, so I just ate quite a few of those tender crustaceans.
We were given a variety of desserts and they were a mixed bag. The fried taro/egg balls were amazing and almost single-handedly brought this restaurant up from 2-stars. Yeah, anything fried is good but these were brilliant. They came really hot and the outer fried section was crispy. Inside was half taro paste and half egg-milk custard. Both flavors were excellent.
We also had a variety of herbal jellies and dessert rolls. The durian cream roll stood out the most, as you could imagine. I guess if you wanted to try durian, but were scary crapless to try the raw, unadulterated version of the sometimes reviled fruit, the roll would be a good idea.
My relatives had reserved a VIP room, which was creepy-looking going up. I was concerned I would need to bring out my non-existent "particular set of skills" to protect myself from the nefarious. Maybe because we were given a VIP section (table, real chairs, in a room, tablecloth), the price didn't seem quite as impressive as I was led to believe. And I still needed to bring tissues too! (oh and bring hand sanitizer)
