Manhill Restaurant
99 Pasir Panjang Road
Tel: 64746835

Pictures of food after the jump

First dish to arrive was pig liver cooked in claypot. I’m not a big liver fan but nor do I hate it. It just tasted like liver to me.

We ordered the fu rong dan again. We tried to get Si Hamil to cut the egg like she would a birthday cake but this time she refused to do it. She claimed once was enough.

The beef claypot was quite nice as the beef was juicy and tender.

The tofu claypot was okay. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about it because there were so many vegetables. But I know that the others liked it as it’s one of the dishes that we usually order. The gravy in the claypot contained the sweetness of the vegetables and some people drink it as if it is a soup.

A dish of kangkong because people need their greens.

The pork ribs were tender but certain pieces might contain more bone than meat. They were covered with a sticky dry sauce.

The paper wrapped chicken is my favourite dish. It is oily, juicy, tender and flavourful. It might be a little difficult to tear open the paper with chopsticks and the chicken skin sometimes stuck to the paper. But the effort was worth it. I always try to open it on top of the rice so that the delicious juices would not go to waste.

After hearing so much about it, I finally made went down to Fullerton Hotel this year and bought their famous baileys mooncakes. Needless to say I was looking forward to eating it.

It was a full size snowskin mooncake. Because it is quite big, the snowskin is also thicker than in mini snowskin mooncakes. Inside was chocolate lotus paste and a chocolate ball in the middle. I’m not sure whether it was because my expectations were quite high but I was a little disappointed after eating it. I can’t taste any baileys at all. I might not mind so much about not tasting the baileys if it was a cheap mooncake. But at $50+ for 4 mooncakes, I would expect to be able to taste the alcohol.

This year, my favourite snowskin mooncakes are still the mini champagne mooncakes from Raffles Hotel.

Mao Mao, Pooh Bear, Spider and I took half-day leave and met One Red for buffet lunch at AquaMarine inside Marina Mandarin Hotel. Spider had eaten at Aquamarine before and she immediately led us to the sashimi counter. Each of us took a plate of salmon sashimi and went back to our table and gobbled them down. Then we went back for seconds and maybe thirds. Then we started on the cooked food. All of us had a bowl of the creamy mushroom soup which was thick and good. There was also quite a variety of salad, cooked food and desserts.

We had a lot of fun trying out all the different dishes. Some dishes were quite good while others were ordinary. The cold cuts section had 3 types of mustard and Pooh Bear and I took a bit of each to try. We concluded that the mustard we liked best was the innermost bottle but we forgot the name, so clever. Mao Mao enjoyed the caesar salad and took two helpings of that. She also found the raw oysters so tasty that she ate 3 of them even though she was allergic to shellfish. We all joked that she will be full of energy tonight. Pooh Bear liked the teriyaki chicken which was tender and juicy. I liked the beef stew for the tomatoy soup and the soft meat.

We enjoyed the desserts very much, especially the chocolate mousse cake, the bread and butter pudding and the mua chee. The chocolate mousse cake was very chocolatey and and soft because it was 90% mousse and 10% cake. The bread and butter was nice and warm and I poured a lot of the vanilla cream sauce on it. Yummy! We had some fun making the mua chee, snipping away and mixing it in the peanuts at the same time. However Aquamarine failed in the ice-cream section. Ice-cream was either sweet corn, yam or the potong ice-cream sticks. Not very appetizing. There was none of the all-time favourites, vanilla or chocolate ice-cream.

We ate until 3pm and had a good time. There was a 1-for-1 promotion for UOB card so in the end we paid $30 each.

AquaMarine
6 Raffles Boulevard
4F Marina Mandarin
Tel: 68451111

After almost 30 mins of waiting, the first dish arrived. It was xiao long bao. It looked pretty with the wolfberry at the top and there was a thin slice of carrot at the bottom to prevent it from sticking to the basket. When I bit into mine, I found it quite dry as all the juices had leaked out through a hole at the bottom. I didn’t puncture a hole in the skin of the dumpling so I was sure that it was already there when it was sent to the steamer. I felt that the xiao long bao was not as good as the ones from Din Tai Fung, because even though I had eaten at Din Tai Fung many times, I have yet to find a hole in their xiao long bao. As Spider said, xiao long bao was not this restaurant’s speciality. We were given 2 saucers of soya sauce with ginger strips to go with the xiao long bao. Tong Xiang asked a waiter for more ginger strips and got 2 saucers of soya sauce with 3-5 ginger strips each.

The char siew soh came at 1:07pm. I liked the light and flaky pastry and the char siew was not bad too. The porridge we ordered came around this time as well so we had a bit more to eat while we wait for the next dish.

The mini abalone dumplings arrived at 1:14pm. It was nice and there were a lot of ingredients in the dish.

The squid ink crystal dumplings came at 1:17pm. The outer skin was all black because of the squid ink and made a striking sight. There were some small strips of dried scallops on top. I tried eating the skin to see if it would taste different. It didn’t.

The deep fried beancurd with prawns and seaweed arrived at 1:22pm. The outer skin was crispy while the prawns were fresh and juicy.

The carrot cake was served at 1:25pm. It had xo sauce and beansprouts. Needless to say, I didn’t eat a lot for this dish.

The steam prawn dumplings came at 1:28pm. It was nice as the ingredients were fresh.

The rice rolls came at 1:32pm and the pastry came at 1:33pm. Sayang and I noticed that the intervals between the dishes were getting shorter so we were quite happy. The pastry contained lotus paste and was quite nice.

The steamed egg custard bao arrived at 1:34pm. The custard was mixed with a bit of salted egg yolk. Although it sounded strange, it was actually quite tasty as the saltiness of the egg yolk offset the sweetness of the custard. This was the first time that I was eating it, but Blackhole and Spider who had eaten it before, said that other places had more molten fillings.

The deep fried prawn fritters arrived at 1:37pm. It was tasty and the noodles surrounding the prawn was fried until crispy.

We had to wait for a long time for our last dish which arrived at 1:54pm. The staff had forgotten about it until we reminded them. The carrot cake while tasty, was pretty normal and not something that I would spend time waiting for.

All in all, the food at Peony Jade Restaurant was pretty good, the ingredients were fresh and the food came out hot from the kitchen. The service was lousy though. The food arrived really slowly and we had already finished the previous dish, wiped our mouths, drank a cup of tea and cleaned our chopsticks before the next dish arrived. There was no excuse as the restaurant wasn’t full and there were a few empty tables. Sometimes one waiter would bring the dishes out from the kitchen and left them untended at a nearby counter. As the tables next to us were empty, we were sure that the food was ours. Si Hamil got tired of waiting for them to serve us the food so she got up and collected the food from the counter herself. One of the dishes that we ordered was not available so the staff just replaced it with another dish without informing us. We were only informed when we asked the waitress about the missing dish. I thought it was quite bad service because what if we did not like the replacement dish? There was also some confusion over our orders and we were charged twice for the same dish.

We got back to office quite late and on our own initiative, we worked later to make up for the long lunch. I’m quite impatient when it comes to food so I won’t be going back to this restaurant again. I heard that service at the branch was better so I may eat there instead.

I was early. Bell arrived later as she overslept. I dragged Bell to a camera shop in the shopping centre to take a look at the Olympus SP-590uz. The staff told us that the normal price is $698 but as it was under promotion now, there was selling for $620. The camera wasn’t available but he showed us a Sony camera which he said was the same size. It was surprisingly small and could sit comfortably in the palm of my hand. The lens was humongous and took up about half of the camera. I was very tempted to get it but in the end I managed to control myself and did not buy it. A pat on the head for me.

Then we went to a games shop where Bell checked out a game she wanted to buy. She was tempted even though she read many reviews that the game was hard. It was still a bit pricey for her budget so she did not buy it in the end. A pat on the head for her too, ha ha!

We bought a bowl of strawberry snow ice from a small stall outside NTUC. I still preferred the one I had in Taiwan as the portion was bigger and had more fruits. There was no evaporated milk added to our strawberry snow ice which was a bummer. But beggars can’t be choosers.

Lunch was at a hawker centre. It’s been a while since I’ve been to that hawker centre and it looks so different now that it was renovated. Bell went off to get lunch while I guard the table. She had to queue for a long time for the chicken rice. It is a popular stall.

After lunch we went to Bell’s house to play games and watch TV. Bell’s dog, Hana, is much bigger and she was so excited at seeing a visitor that she peed. Twice. I had read about such a reaction from dogs but this is probably the first time I experienced it first hand. Good thing Hana didn’t spray her urine around or try to mark me. But just in case, I stood far away until Bell chased Hana back to her cage and then I quickly escaped indoors. Dinner was pepper crab and prawn paste chicken we bought from a zi char restaurant nearby. Then we sneaked the food up into Bell’s room to eat. We had a fun time and before we knew it, it was after 9pm.