London Fat Duck, Scotts Square

The name was a little misleading upfront. For a start, this fairly new restaurant (6 Scotts Road #B1-16/17 Scotts Square, tel : +65 6443 7866) was not from London, hadn’t anything to do with that Four Seasons (which has also opened here recently by the way) from London that is famed somewhat for their Cantonese styled roast duck and was certainly in no way associated with Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in Bray. What I read was that the ducks here were imported from Ireland. Otherwise, this place was local as local as can be - a joint venture by the Akashi Group and the Fei Siong Group.

Compared to the other Chinese restaurants of their market, food was passable and service was pretty atrocious. The wait staff looked like they were reluctant to serve and importantly, overwhelmed by a morning crowd that filled only half the restaurant. The crew looked like they didn't have experience running the shop and every request took a long time. I'm rather surprised at the management considering that the groups that collaborated have more than a fair bit of experience across the ranges in the F&B sector.

Obviously, what they are known for are their roast ducks amongst other things. Those weren't bad, but I honestly thought I had a better time eating ducks at Dian Xiao Er. Truly. I'm not even sure what getting ducks from Ireland had brought to the table here.

We tried egg tarts. Those were rather boring. The crust was neither fragrant nor buttery.

Har gow was decent but very small. Not something I can see myself looking forward to.

It sure took quite a long time, but I'm seeing local restaurants starting to up the ante for char siew in recent years. This was actually quite nice. But you do get better portions and equal if not more satisfaction for the same price at Grand Mandarina.

Pan fried carrot cake was passable.

This was their black pepper London duck bun. The other thing that was quite nice because it was different from the other crusty buns with sweet fillings. The strength of the black pepper was quite moderated for balance. Very present, but not overwhelming as many black pepper items can be.

We had originally though these "signature" rice rolls from London Fat Duck to be regular zha leong, which were steamed rice rolls wrapped around dough fritters. As it turned out, the dough fritters themselves were also stuffed with shrimps.

There was actually more food that we had ordered, but they never arrived and we decided that with the poor service and the generally average quality of food, it wasn't worth wasting our lives waiting further and shortening already shortened fuses by trying unsuccessfully to get the attention of the overwhelmed (and clumsy too if I might add) wait staff whom obviously didn't want anymore attention from the crowd.