Mouth Restaurant

It's somewhere near Mother's Day and I brought my mama to Plaza Singapura to try out Bijin nabe and the queue was too long to wait so I had to find another place to feed my hungry mama. Mama then chose this Mouth Restaurant seeing that they offer dim sum buffet for less than $30/pax, the receptionist uncle was quite friendly so we thought we can give this place a try.

After being seated, and we were given a order chit for ordering and I later saw the most ridiculous thing on earth, each person will be limited to 2 orders of Har gow (Prawn Dumplings)! I thought I read wrongly and double confirmed with the waitress, who sloppily reaffirmed it. We then decided that we'll just order ala carte, who will want a dim sum buffet that only let u order 2 har gows?! 

We then proceed to order spinach with salted egg, Squid ink Rice roll with Trio sauce, Salted yolk prawns and Steamed Glutinous rice in Lotus Leaf wrap

Spinach

Spinach tastes insincere, it tastes like they just cooked and threw the spinach in the metal pot and pour some egg sauce into it and heat up, if i need to say anything about it, the spinach is well cooked.

Squid ink rice roll with trio sauce

Squid ink rice roll tastes not bad, but it's drenched in sauce so its more like eating the sauce rather than rice roll. Sounds special but tastes mediocre.

Salted yolk prawn

Salted yolk prawn was nice, the crust is quite crispy and rich but we both grew sick of it from eating just one prawn.

Glutinous rice in lotus leaf wrap

That's just your regular glutinous rice in lotus leaf wrap, after the prawn we cannot down the glutinous rice anymore and we did not finish it.

Overall dining experience was just bad, it's not just the food, its the service crew there as well, they seem like they are on auto-zombie mode and the waitress in charge of our table, her sloppy attitude is worse than the food there.

Mouth Restaurant

Plaza Singapura
#02-01
Tel: 63377446

Grand Shanghai 大上海

I had actually visited this restaurant many many years ago in my late teens, when my dad signed up for Copthorne's hotel membership. He had many complimentary food vouchers from the package, and Lynn and me were tasked with utilizing most of them. Yes, we go that far back, the two of us eating together. Back then we thought that the food was pretty good, but seemed pricey. We didn't pay a single cent of course, using the voucher, but didn't look at the menu either. Anyhow, we never returned.

My return this year was on CM's request. She wanted to go and check out that place as a potential wedding venue. So we lumped it together with her birthday dinner and went there for dinner. This restaurant really takes their Shanghai theme seriously. The decor is old school Shanghai with gold chandeliers and red table clothes and carpet. The food is predominantly Shanghainese. The most Shanghai aspect of the restaurant? It's life band. The band plus the Chinese girl decked out in Cheongsam were belting out old Shanghai classics such as 夜来香，忘不了，上海滩 etc. It does bring you to the old school glamour of the old Shanghai era. At least how it is usually portrayed in movies.

W, G and me arrived first. So while waiting, us hungry trio ordered starters to fill our tummies. We ordered Shanghai 小龙包 (steamed pork dumplings). Their version is a pretty big, soup filled one. However, out of the 4 dumplings in the basket, we managed to break the skin of 3 of them, causing the soup to leak out before we can savor them. I don't think it's our poor skills. Maybe the skin just isn't strong enough for the size of the filling. But the flavor was yummy. We subsequently learnt (with CM's arrival and the 2nd basket) that if we roll the dumpling onto our spoon instead of picking them up, we were safe.

小龙包 － Steamed pork dumplings

We also ordered 锅贴 (pan-fried pork dumplings). Also much larger than the usual bite sized ones, these ones took me about 3-4 bites to finish. It was juicy, and flavorful. And I like. We also liked their appetizer - some marinated tofu which was a little spicy and salty. They even have vegetarian 锅贴 and 蒸饺 for my hubby!

锅贴 - pan fried pork dumpling

Appetizer

素锅贴 - Vegetarian pan fried dumplings

素蒸饺 - Vegetarian steamed dumpling

By the time we went through all the gigantic dumplings, we were not that hungry anymore. So for the dinner proper, we only ordered Peking duck, Prawn with salted egg yolk, and braised tofu made vegetarian. The Peking duck skin carved at our table side and served wrapped in egg crepes and sweet sauce, with prawn crackers on the side. The duck meat was subsequently brought back to the kitchen, chopped, and stir fried with some veggies and pine nuts. It was then served in individual portions on a bed of lettuce. I actually liked both variations of the duck and finished all my servings. I do think, however, that the duck skin could have been crispier. However, G barely touched his stir fried meat, and we had an extra serving anyway thanks to hubby. These were cleared away by the waiters because we really couldn't eat more food.

Peking Duck skin

The prawns were succulent, coated with a generous amount of salted egg yolk. Something we all love, and it went so well with rice. The tofu was so-so, and mainly ordered so that hubby had something to go with rice. The rest of us barely touched it, so as to give him more to eat.

Prawn with salted egg yoke

红烧豆腐 - Braised tofu in Brown sauce

I found the food pretty good, and the ambience nice. The service was ok too. And I liked that they have several vegetarian options, although they didn't really a vegetarian main dish. The dim sum prices are actually reasonable ($6++ for 4 gigantic dumplings). The others are not overly pricey. I think it's a nice place to bring parents for a treat once in the while. But make sure they enjoy Shanghai music. The music does tend to be a little loud and occasionally conversations may be a little difficult.


Grand Shanghai
390 Havelock Road
Level 1 King's Centre
Singapore 169662
Tel no: 68366866

Jpot @ Vivo

It's one of those days that Gracie and I have cravings for steamboat and decided to just meet for lunch. Vivo is our regular lunch meeting place as it's nicely located just in between our workplace. I have been to Jpot a couple of times and I enjoy it so I decided to drag Gracie there. In fact, this is our 2nd visit there. =)

We ordered one lunch set to share and some other ala carte dishes. Lunch set consist of soup base, 1 meat (pork loin/ marinated beef), 1 vegetable, 1 rice/pho/bee hoon, handmade fishball (2), handmade prawnball (2), prawns (2), clams (2). On top of that, fatty beef, Tang O, fried prawn dumplings.

Pork, Fatty Beef

Fried Prawn Dumpling

Tang O and fried beancurd skin

Superior soup base

Pho

Reason why we both adore this place, is their fresh ingredients and customizable sauces. With a good soup base and fresh ingredients, what could go wrong?

Pork loin, being the loin, is not the melt in your mouth kind. It's more inclined to the leaner kind of meat and has a nice flavour to it. It's actually our 2nd time ordering the fatty beef, the 1st time was heavenly but 2nd time the meat seem to be lacking in flavour and abit tough. It might be due to the different parts of the meat. Because of our happy 1st time there, they are forgiven for that.

Fried beancurd skin is a MUST ORDER item there, it will soak up the soup nicely and when you bite it will fill your mouth with the heavenly juices. Word of caution, let it cool awhile before you bite else you will end up with a burnt tongue just like Gracie. Hahaha!

Just in case you're wondering, the seafood items don't come immerse in the soup, as you might have realised, we tend to act faster than our cameras, so they landed in the soup once they hit our table. Seafood tastes fresh and our 2nd time there, they replaced the clams with sotongs maybe because they run of clams.

Overall experience there is enjoyable, service are prompt with little hiccups, total spending per person for lunch is about $20 after member discount. It's under the Jumbo group and maybe that's why they emphasize on freshness and quality of ingredients. There's once my mum commented that the vegetables are abit rotten at the edges and they immediately replaced a fresh set. That's what I call good and prompt service. One thing to add is that they offer vegetarian options. Only complain, the place is always crowded during meal times so do remember to reserve early.

Canton Paradise @ Jcube

I heard some good reviews about Canton Paradise and decided to go there for late lunch with B one day. (usually there will be a long Q during lunch/dinner time). My experience there made me feel like I have to blog this first before my other outstanding entries.  The reason being... I FOUND A MAGGOT ON MY SPOON! I wished I took a photo of that but I was too disgusted and immediately requested for a new spoon. The waitress attitude was like "What's the big deal?" My whole dining experience greatly discounted, even so, I will try to give a fair description of their food. Pardon me as I don't have the exact names for the dishes and after my experience there, I am not really interested in finding out too.

Congee with Pig liver, intestines and meatballs

Roast pork, Roast duck and Roast char siew



Char siew bao

Char siew bao interior

Siew Mai

Prawn dumplings

Mango Prawns

Congee is nice, the pig part are fresh without any funny taste and I quite like them. Prawn dumplings are good, skin is thin and prawns used are fresh too with a nice crunch to it. Siew Mai is nicely done too, unlike other places that have siew mais that are too porky, this one is well balanced with their pork and fish portions.

Roast pork, I felt that the crispy skin is abit too thin and not "Shiok" enough, taste wise is just average. I like the roast duck that has a nice crisp skin but meat feels abit bland. Char siew was below average, B feels that the taste of it is abit bland with no depth, the honey coating was just on the surface, some might feel that meat texture might be abit tough but I am alright with it cos I like my char siew lean. Overall the platter is abit disappointing with it's average roast pork and roast duck and its superficial char siew.

Their char siew bao is very much raved about, as it is pan fried at the bottom and the skin is different from regular char siew bao. It came jus slight warm, not our usual steaming hot Baos. My opinion, it's a nice change from regular char siew baos but they used the same superficial char siew so its just passable for me.

Reason why there're 3 photos of Mango roll prawns, is that B says there's a hell lot of mayo in the roll. The oil was not well drained and made the rolls slightly too oily and yes I agree that the mayo was really too overpowering. I guess I will stay off mayo for the rest of the month.

Till this point, you might have realised my lack of excitement blogging about this place, I am really NOT excited at all. Service here does not suck but surely has lots of room for improvements, they should teach their staffs how to react when customer finds a maggot/ worm/ whatever on their plate. Good thing is, I am still well and does not have any diarrhea after dining there.

Red Star Restaurant 红星酒家

W and G asked me whether we wanted to join them for Dim Sum with aunt and uncle. Turned out here wasn't anything vegetarian food, so hubby passed and only I joined them. They came and fetch me bright and early at 8.30am on a Sunday morning, and then went to fetch aunt and uncle, and reached the restaurant at around 10am. Because we were relatively early, there wasn't any queue and we were seated in no time. Unfortunately, we were given a seat towards the back of the restaurant where trolley traffic wasn't high.

Red Star is a typical dim sum restaurant where you look out for trolleys carrying various items. We have a menu card on the table, and for each item we get off a trolley, the server will stamp a mark right beside the item. Final bill will be tabulated based on the number of marks. Most items comes in three pieces per serving. If you ask for double servings, two stamps will be issued. The problem with this system is: because you aren't sure when the next trolley is coming by and what's on it, you have the tendency to just get things off the first trolley. With this occurring multiple times before the food you really want make its way to your table, the likelihood of getting too much food becomes very high.

That was what exactly happened to us. Although we knew that having deep fried food at the start will make for a very limited stomach for everything else, the first trolley that stopped by served exactly that. We ended up with a plate of Onde Onde (what's that doing in a dim sum restaurant anyway??) and a fried dumpling. The dumpling turned out to have a banana filling, much to G's disgust. He hates bananas. This was also when I discovered I was in some kind of trouble. When there are three pieces of food, and you're dining with two couples, the result is each couple will share one piece, while I have to eat the third piece all by myself. So you can imagine that I was filling up a lot faster than they were.

Onde Onde

Next trolley gave us fried prawn dumplings and fish paste stuffed chillis. The dumpling were nice and crispy. The fish paste were of good texture (meaning no overuse of flour), and the sauce aptly flavored. These were followed by the trolley carrying steamed goodies, but of all, we were only interested in the siew mai and steamed glutinous rice. The siew mai were decent, but not amazing. The glutinous rice were pretty yummy. Then another trolley came by with deep fried battered tofu. They must have been mediocre, because it had escaped my memory so much that I had to text W the picture to ask her what it was just a moment ago... =P

Fish paste stuffed chillis

Deep fried prawn dumplings

Siew mai

Deep fried battered tofu

Glutinous rice

After these 'unintentional' orders, we finally got the trolley we wanted. Chee cheong fun!! Hot, nicely steamed chee cheong fun that had a great chewy:brittle ratio (if you know what I mean. If you don't, I'm really just trying to say that the texture is still resistant to the teeth, but you don't have to struggle like a mad cow to bite it off) wrapped around delicious char siew. But somehow, I still prefer NUH kopitiam's steam-on-the-spot-with-fillings-of-your-choice chee cheong fun. It had become some kind of a gold standard for my chee cheong fun.

Char siew chee cheong fun

By then we finally went off to the counters to get the other two favorites (which aunt had already decided on the ride there that she wanted those) - roasted suckling pig and century egg congee. The pig skin is nice and crunchy, and the flesh not overly oily. It was pretty good suckling pig, at a comfortable quantity. I did refrain myself because I knew I was going to have a lot more suckling pig for dinner that night (next post). The congee was fragrant, with a generous heap of fried wan ton skin added for texture and flavor. Luckily W and G only got 2 bowls to share among the 5 of us. I didn't want to be stuck in the scenario of finishing one whole bowl by myself. Another steam trolley came by and we got prawn dumplings and yam cake. I really liked the yam cake drenched in sauce. It had a good amount of yam in it, not just flour like many other places.

Roasted suckling pig

Century egg congee

Prawn dumplings and yam cake

We waited a long long while before the dessert trolleys came around. We had the so-call signature durian pancakes - crepes filled with pure durian. It was pretty good, but nothing out of this world. Finally finished our meal with honeydew sago cream and gui lin gao. By then, I was so so stuffed. I did enjoy the meal, probably more because of the company. Food wise, they were pretty good but nothing much jumped out and impressed me. I did like the suckling pig, congee and yam cake. Given this is only the second time I'm having yum cha style dim sum (timing around helping out at my mom's coffeeshop stall didn't allow for it since young), I don't think I'm in the position to critique too much. Although I'm sure I've eaten better dim sum before, and (oops) most of them were mom's...