Saturday, October 1, 2011

River Palace Chinese Restaurant

Let me get the facts out first: 1) This place is decently priced ($28.80 for ala carte buffet). 2) There are more misses than hits. 3) I don't like the bitter gourd look on the sever's face (He incidentally recommended bittergourd.)

I know other reviews have stated that the service here is good. But on this day, I happen to get a very very bad server, who looked like we owed him $1000 for 10 years and snapped back "k" every time we told him something. Plus, he was very impatient.

Some of the dishes we ordered included (below): the seafood salad, salted prawns with garlic, chilli crab and you tiao with mayo. The seafood salad was simply CRABstick with cocktail fruits- I suppose this is their definition of seafood. The salt and garlic smelt aromatic when served, but the prawns were unfortunately rather disappointing because they weren't fresh. The crab sauce was spicy and dense, but the crabs had little meat in them. Lastly, the youtiao was not bad. Other dishes we ordered include spicy squid (which was more sweet than spicy) and the roast chicken which was not bad but a little bloody.
There are four particular dishes that can only be ordered once in your meal. The broccoli with Ihave no idea what, scallops, black chicken herbal soup and peking duck.

I almost had the wrong impression that this place had wonderful food when they first served the peking duck. Well, it was good! The roasted duck skin was crispy and there was a piece of vegetarian geese in it, a break from the norm.

I reckon the thing the thing that's on the broccoli is an abalone lookalike. Not sure what it really is though.

The scallop tastes like standard restaurant-fare scallop.

However, the desserts are totally not worth it. The chocolate cake was served in plastic plates, which totally dashed any chance of it being good quality chocolate cake. It was ordinary chocolate cake you can probably make yourself. The mango sago was diluted, with clumped up sago. That was about what I tried- I'm not sure if I wanted to waste my stomach space over bad dessert. But anyway, there was yam paste (which was apparently not bad), jelly, some ice jelly etc. Desserts is one of the restaurant's clear misses.

While I don't wish to be back again, I actually suppose that if you have big appetites and don't mind trying your luck at which are the good dishes and the bad ones, you might want to consider this place because it's really not bad priced for a buffet spread like this. But take heed, the last order is at 2 pm, so don't go too late! Maybe my experience has been smeared by a waiter with bad attitude. Better chance next time!

River Palace Chinese Restaurant
382 Havelock Road
2nd Floor River View Hotel
Tel: +65 6349 4865

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