The website at Crystal Cafe (Orchard Grand Court, 131 Killiney Road, tel : +65 6830 2020) mentions Taiwanese porridge buffet but I'm not sure what exactly makes this Taiwanese porridge. Food appears to be local to me. Anyways, the spread was not bad. That's specially so for the braised/stewed dishes.
We had a few rounds of the sweet potato porridge because of the food and the sodium spiking preserved/fermented accompaniments.
There's char siew bao and siew mai in the buffet. I kinda like the former and they're actually pretty good eating with those preserved olive leaves (橄榄菜). Didn't see that coming did you? Neither did I. Siew mai was not that great.
Stewed chicken claws were nice. I'd qualify it as slurp off the bone tender but they just about made it. What was impressive was the spice flavours that were infused in it. Tasted a lot of cinnamon. The other thing in the bowl were chopped pieces of pork knuckles. Those weren't as good.
Preserved and pickled mustard greens. Sweet, salty and delicious with the porridge.
Braised duck and some fried fish that looked like shishamo but wasn't. That fried fish had a light turmeric flavoured batter. Not bad.
Stewed eggs, tau kwa and pork belly. While the flavour from the stewing sauce didn't permeate deeply, I enjoyed them.
Curried vegetables were not bad as well.
Chicken was so so. Meat was dry-ish and not particularly well flavoured.
These things alone made me go through more porridge than I usually have in a week. That doesn't say very much because I don't have porridge often. 🤣
I was surprised they had char kuey teow. Not as good as those freshly fried from a competent hawker but coming from a buffet trough, it wasn't half bad.
What was unexpected was how much I liked that chocolate cake. Not excessively sweet and had crispy bits of stuff that reminded me of Chocolate of a Thousand Leaves from Coffee Bean. Remember that one? The mango mousse cake was soft and light. We had thirds.
There were fruits.
And a piping hot red bean soup with sago and dried orange peel. This was a lot nicer than I had imagined.
Yam ice cream.
And Hainanese coffee that also wasn't half bad.
I thought that we were done with stuffing our faces until the mini chocolate cream puffs came out. Haha.
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