Restaurant Manchurian (满族全羊铺), Smith Street

This space (18 Smith Street, tel : +65 6225 8663) was previously occupied by Yang Gui Fei, another Chinese restaurant that also served lamb. Now that Restaurant Manchurian has taken over, the decor of the interior seems to have been upgraded - albeit into something touristy tackier looking. But the menu still has a lot of lamb so giggity giggity goo! Manchuria if my interpretation holds, refers to a northern region that covers China and Russia. The part that falls under China is commonly referred to as Dong Bei (东北). And hence by association, I could assume there would be similarities between the food here and those from Dong Bei Ren Jia?

Anyway, here's a scratch on the surface of what they restaurant serves over two visits.

Here be lamb skewers. These here were more expensive than those skewers that can be found in the main road shops. But from the aroma that hit us when they arrived, we couldn't complain. 

They had stir fried long beans and eggplant which were really good. The flavours of both vegetables came through even with the seasoning. No mean feat since these vegetables were light on the palate in the first place. Those eggplants were also really tender.

Imagine xiao long bao with stuffings of minced lamb rather than pork; in flour wrappers that were thicker like mee hoon kuey. Wrappers that were filled with "juices" from the meat/fat stuffings. That was pretty much how their boiled lamb dumplings were like.

Something they described as dry pot cauliflower (干锅花菜) that came with little strips of pork belly. Another tasty vegetable dish.

We had a lamb hotpot somewhere along the way. Delicious spicy herbal broth filled with root vegetables, generous potion of meat and a flat noodle portion that was cut from a single strand.

The above lamb chops were a specialty of the restaurant. They were boiled lamb ribs served with two dips. A garlic infused soy sauce and a fragrant chilli oil. One was supposed to dip each rib of meat into the soy sauce and then the chilli oil for flavours. I thought that these were quite similar to the boiled pork ribs from bak kut teh minus the broth and using mutton instead of pork.

There was braised pulled lamb served in griddled bread. To be honest, this wasn't one of the dishes I had preferred, ironically because of the well done braising. The flavours had permeated the meat so much that I couldn't tell that it was lamb. But otherwise this was a pretty good Chinese "burger".

And there were crunchy vinegared strips of potato that the menu describes as potato silk. Vinegar that made us believe that we had cleansed ourselves of the grease and fat from all that mutton after a few chopsticks-ful of the potatoes. This stuff was good too.