Nanjing Impressions (南京大牌檔), Plaza Singapura

Here's something that's different from the usual Chinese eateries that have been opening up. Nanjing Impressions (#04-46-51, Plaza Singapura, 68 Orchard Road, tel : +65 6352 7877) is a chain of restaurants from China and they've apparently picked our sunny island for their first venture overseas. The food from what I gather is suppose to be a representation of what's heritage of the cuisine from Nanjing. Which while I know nothing about, was interesting to explore.

This was known as Madam Chiang's Nutritious Beauty Porridge. We ordered it because it sounded interesting and little did we realised that it might have been dessert. Anyways, we were informed by the wait staff that this need not be treated as a dessert. The porridge (millet maybe) is cooked in soy milk with lily bulbs and Chinese yam. It's a little sweet and the flavour was aromatically rice-y. It turned out to be one of those things which we told ourselves we'd order again if we came back.

I think this was called Chilled Drunken Virgin Crayfish. Not the crayfish that is known in this part of the world, but rather crawfish or yabbies. I don't know how the virgin part of their name came about them but these weren't too bad if one didn't minded those things that made you work for relatively little meat. The bugs have been marinated with Nu'er Hong - a Chinese wine. And plums were involved too I think because I could taste them both.

These are lotus roots stuffed with glutinous rice and slow cooked in pear honey. This was again something sweet. And chilled. What we liked was that the sweetness was manageable and not overbearing.

I ordered this because it said shrimp roe custard on the menu. Tasted like savoury steamed egg pudding flavoured with the head fat from prawns. Nice.

We decided on some salted duck (盐水鸭) because these are suppose to be a thing from Nanjing. If word were to be believed, this was prepared with a 400 year old recipe with an arduous 10 step process.  It's not bad. The meat had a hearty bite like meat should and was flavoured with some spices. But the complexities had eluded me at this point because we've been eating a bunch of prior stuff that were already pretty flavourful.

This was chilled julienned bean curd, not noodles. The menu mentioned that it was sesame scented but I wasn't getting any of it. There was a lot of flavour from the soy based sauce and dried shrimp. Refreshing and slurpy smooth would be the right words for them.

And some sweet spring plum yellow wine which tasted very much like that marinade of those crawfish that we had. I'll need to remember to pick something else the next time. The alcohol content in this drink was supposed to be very low. Lower than the usual lager kind of low but it warmed the body pretty fast.