One last meal at Bottle Tree Village

Well, at least until they have moved over to their new location at Marina Barrage at the end of the year that is. According to what's being mentioned in the news, the lease has expired and there are new interests in their site that's bidding two and a half times the current lease. Can I say that the rental economy here is ousting small local businesses? I better not. Dangerous line I be threading.

Not much has changed with the restaurant. The service still looks semi-reluctant and the prices have never been under the economical range for zi char. But one can always argue that they're a proper restaurant since there's air conditioning. It's probably just that their food and ambiance looked like it came from a local restaurant 3 decades ago.

These are scallop and banana fritters. As you can see, there's not so much scallops in there, but I guess it made a rather tasty greasy dish that reminds of goreng pisang.

Their sweet and sour pork has changed. According to them, there were numerous feedback against the fruits that the restaurant had previously used. If that was true, I can only lament that there's too much boring people feeding back. One can eat regular sweet and sour pork anywhere. There goes the cool green maraschino cherries, dragonfruit and lychee.

Here's their steamed garoupa with chai por (preserved turnip). As sinister as the two ivory beady eyes looked, this tasted pretty good. For a freshly slain fish, I didn't expect any lesser. The flesh was firm and flaky.

And then, obligatory greens of kailan with garlic. Which was decently done if mundane in appearances. Presentation is not exactly a forte here.

Then came the butter sotong. I'm pretty sure these were cuttlefish and not squid. As aware of the fact that there are different renditions of butter sotongs around, these didn't quite fit into my imagery of any of them. These tasted like they had a light curry batter with sugar. Quite good until you've had enough of the batter to let them get to you as the grease builds up.

We dug their scallop fried rice. Well, just the rice. It was one of the boring looking fried rice which had left impressions crestfallen upon arrival, but it tasted pretty good. Wok hei present if you like that and not excessively greasy. The scallops were unfortunately not so good. Flavours of the shellfish was muted and the texture conveyed their quality.