Paradise Inn @ Thomson Plaza

Wanted to have Sakae Teppanyaki the other day, so headed to the nearest location at Thomson Plaza only to find out that the Sakae outlet there had already closed down. :( The storefront had been replaced by a Chinese restaurant - Paradise Inn. I dined at Paradise Inn @ West Coast Plaza before, but the food was not too impressive. Anyways, since we were already there, we thought we would give it a try.

Whenever we dine at a new place, we love to try the special and the new. So this was our first pick - Fragrance Tea with Lavender, Rosemary, Chrysanthemum and Dried Longan for a refreshful start!





Next, we went for a typical Chinese dinner setup - 1x vegetable, 1x meat, 1x tofu or egg, 1x soup.

For soup:




As you can see from the photo, soup at Paradise Inn looks professional - big pot, continues to be heated while you dine, plus lots of ingredients ("liao") in it!



The egg trio refers to: chicken egg, century egg, and salted (duck) egg. A usually very flavorful vegetable dish, but we find this one a bit too watery and bland. The Soup Restaurant serves the same dish and is a lot tastier.




Looks good, taste good - Soft and not too oily!



Here's a mistake we tend to make whenever we see Ma Po Tofu on the menu. Bottom-line: If you like your Ma Po Tofu to taste what the name suggests (ma po), then never order this dish in a non-Sichuan style restaurant! You will only be met with disappointment. To us, this was just a normal tofu with minced meat dish.

All in all...

• Old Cucumber with Pork Ribs Soup, Rating: ★★★★
• Chinese Spinach with Egg Trio, Rating: ★
• Dong Po Pork, Rating: ★★★
• Ma Po Tofu, Rating: ★★

A Hungry Night @ The Soup Restaurant

You know how hungry we were? Here's an idea.
We wanted to take photos first, but as soon as the food came we dived right into it. By the time I remembered that I forgot to take the photos, our table of dishes became like this:



wx was holding his chopsticks all ready to pounce on the food again when I managed to snap a shot of the mess.

Here's what we ate:

• Samsui Ginger Chicken, Rating: ★★★★★
• Hand Chopped Minced Pork with Salted Egg, Rating: ★★
• Claypot Tofu, Rating: ★★★/★
• Fried Noodle with Fish Slice, Rating: ★★★
• Lotus Roots with Pork Ribs Soup, Rating: ★★★★

Total was $60.50. A little pricey though. For about the same number of dishes, Din Tai Fung costs around $50 for two.

Well what is The Soup Restaurant without having their famous Samsui Ginger Chicken!? Their specialty lies in their ginger sauce. Even the sliced cucumbers goes well with it. They also sell this sauce in small bottles at $4.80 per bottle.

I would recommend the Claypot Tofu, though perhaps they could add couple of those big mushrooms to complete the taste. For one that doesn't like egg tofu, I actually ate quite a bit of this. So 3-4 stars for this!

I was quite disappointed with the meat loaf actually, especially when they were advertising it as "Painstakingly hand chopped...," so only 30 servings per day. Trying it for the second time, the first was with salted fish. They added water chestnut in the minced meat to make it crunchy. But I would suggest to dice up the water chestnut even more, so it would mix more evenly with the minced meat - I was tasting the water chestnut more than the meat in every bite.

NEW Cheap Eat near HDB Hub

Lunched out today with wx at Toa Payoh Central, and found a new Chinese food store called Origins (aka 元庄). It's right behind the row of shophouses facing the HDB Hub/SPH Buzz pod. Features Laksa, Curry/Vegetable Rice, soups and desserts! Not bad and is cheap.

We ordered:

Hainanese Curry Rice - curry chicken, cabbage, bean sprouts plus a sunny-side-up. This is so-so.

Katong Laksa - Tastes quite good, my favorite. :)

Watercress Soup - Okay. A good amount of ingredients used, but I would prefer using ribs than chicken feet as the soup base. :x

Beancurd with Ginko Nuts - The beancurd is not bad, but ginko nuts were a bit "old" (not soft enough) and not fresh.

Almond-flavored Soya Milk - Not too sweet, which is good. A little bit dilute, but still much better than what we can get at most hawker centers these days.

All for under $15!

Rating: ★★★ for the laksa!

Dining at Dian Xiao Er

Rating: ★★★★

Went for dinner with my family at Dian Xiao Er @AMK Hub yesterday, and it was packed with people. A rather ineffective queue system though. We started queuing for a table for 5+1, not knowing exactly how long it would take. "Not too long," was what I heard them tell everyone. There was no number, so we had to stand in the line at the exact same location throughout the wait. That's how they differentiate who came first. Finally, we got our seats after standing for 45 mins. We could however order first, so food actually arrived shortly after we'd taken our seats.

Overall, queuing up for seats was the bottleneck for me. I guess we were unlucky too because we had a large group right before us. 15 of them. Two groups of 3 who came after us were seated first. It appeared that they would give seats according to the party size whenever a table had cleared up, reasonably. It was very strange then, because when we saw traffic OUT, there was no guarantee of traffic IN. When we were finally seated after another 10-15 mins, the 15 sat down at a large rectangular table in the corner. We took a separate smaller rectangular table towards the middle of the space. The party of 7 behind us took a separate round table. ie. For the past 10-15 mins, at least, we can be sure that the smaller rectangular table and the round table were already empty, since we did not see any more traffic coming out of the restaurant during this period, and tables were separate so we need not depend on the 15 to get our seats, vice versa. Furthermore, we stood for 10-15 mins more, at least, because the waitresses were just trying to settle seats for the larger party, or so it seemed.

I'm not sure of the situation at other Dian Xiao Er branches. This was also my first time to one of them. But I did think that the food wasn't bad, ratings as follow.
Favorites: the wintermelon soup, which had a light and natural sweetness from scallops; Poached Spinach with Century and Salted Egg, quite a unique taste.
Quite good: Prawn Ball with Mayo Sauce; Duck Roasted with Ten Wonder Herb.
Not recommended: Mongolian Spare Ribs, I personally thought it had a weird taste.
Some pictures available on their web.

I might go there again for lunch. :) HUNNGRRRRYYY!