Golden Peony, Conrad Centennial

Dinner with fatpig & friends. I enjoy Chinese food but am usually not a fan of big Chinese restaurants. Maybe I don't know where are the good places to go to. This leads to the impression that they're mostly unimaginative with their menu and exorbitant in prices with little to showcase of their food beyond Peking ducks, suckling pigs and their pricey treasures from the sea (read as abalone, lobsters and shark's fin soup) which apart from contributing to the slow but sure debilitating mercury poisoning, leaves a smouldering hole in my wallet as well. If you are deconstructing the last sentence still and trying to decipher the context in entirety, don't.

Golden Peony bore her badges of honour upon the walls featuring endorsements and awards from Wine & Dine Asia and some magazines listing various accolades the restaurant has received. While these aren't uncommon, the true gem is in finding one that provides the experience which makes me feel that the establishment is deserving of mentioned awards. This has led to the impression that many accolades of such nature are fundamentally unreliable because...well. That will be for another time.

peking duck

deep fried prawns in salted yolk batter

hand made tofu with stir fried mushroom and asparagus

tea smoked ribs

minced remnants of the peking duck

lobster noodle

tau huay

Here's what I thought of the food. There was little to fault with the Peking duck apart from the fact that there seemed to be a darn tiny amount of skin and meat for a whole duck. I have my suspicions which I will not go into here. The skin was crisp in a delicate manner. The salted egg battered prawns were disappointing. The prawns were okay but hardly brimming with freshness which I expect from a restaurant of this calibre.  Coupled that with a weakly flavoured batter that was more salty than salted egg in flavour. I suspect that not much of the actual salted egg went into the making it.

Tea smoked ribs were like any other regular barbecued ribs in Chinese restaurants. This one appeared to be larger than the usual but was totally devoid of smoke aroma. And I didn't think that the smoked flavour was suppose to be subtle for this dish because to plan so would be utter stupidity. There were already accompanying sweet sauces in there so subtle doesn't wiork. The lobster noodle if anyone was wondering, was uninspiring and apart from having some lobster meat, was unremarkable. Pretty damned unremarkable for $120 if you asked me. Tau huay was light and this was one of the instances deserving of the excessively whored "melt in your mouth" description. Texture was kinda rough though.

Another place where I can scratch off.