Lingzhi Vegetarian Restaurant 灵芝

One fine day, I may become vegetarian. But not yet. In fact, the arrival of that day is still very far away. As much as I enjoy eating vegetables, I can't let go of all that meat either. 

We decided to visit Lingzhi 灵芝 for some vegetarian fare today. 

We opted for the hotpot buffet ($22.80++) which is probably the least money savvy option you can ever go for. For your hotpot, you get to choose 2 out of 3 soup bases which includes tom yum, clear soup and herbal soup. 

I suppose they found that deep frying everything was the best way to make vegetarian food taste good. The labels were placed wrongly but all you needed was a little common sense to figure out what the food really was. In other trays (not in photograph), there were fried noodles, rojak and curry vegetables. In these trays, there are yam croquette, spring roll, curry puff, carrot cake, vegetarian pork pastry etc.

In my memory, the mock meat that I tasted at the Liat Towers branch tasted a lot like the real thing. Here, it tasted simply like... mock meat. Which isn't really a bad thing, just that people might be more attracted to eat vegetarian food if you could cook something that tasted like the real thing.

There was also an assortment of dimsum, including steamed siew mai, steamed char siew bun, steamed beancurd vegetable roll, steamed vegetable bun etc. You play a game of "Guess the Dim Sum". Winners get to eat their favourite dim sum and losers, well, don't get to eat their dim sum unless they open every single bamboo container! 

On a more serious note, i would have preferred if the dim sum were categorised instead of having to open every single cover. The dim sum was quite good on the whole, except that the beancurd vegetable roll tasted a little too oily. 

This is what we ate for the bulk of the meal- mushrooms, corns, noodles, vegetables, seaweed. I hope you're not expecting me to say anything about these ingredients because I'm sure you eat them on a daily basis as well anyway.

Desserts include almond longan, green bean soup, white fungus and some red bean/custard longish shape dessert (which tastes like mochi). The items were not too sweet.

For $22.80, I would say don't bother coming here. All the ingredients are really cheap and as my economist friend puts it, "You're simply paying a premium for the fact that it is vegetarian." Do yourself a favour, buy these ingredients from the market and throw it into boiling water or some other stock. If you're craving the deep fried items, feel free to join the rather long queue at the Lingzhi counter and buy some dim sum back.

Lingzhi Vegetarian Restaurant 

Velocity @ Novena Square
238 Thomson Road
#03-09
Tel: +65 6538 2992