Heard about this place out back in secluded corner of Dempsey which I never realize existed. Jiu Zhuang (6D Dempsey Rd, tel : +65 6471 1711) is essentially a contemporary Chinese watering hole veneered with a mid 1900s Chinese decor burnish. There's a small selection of food and dim sum on the menu but the operating hours commences from late in the afternoon. Not exactly the time of the day I would normally go dim sum but what do I know?
There's chilled tofu with century egg, some crab meat and ebiko. I thought this would have been better textured if there were more of the "blacks" to go with the liquefied yolk. Crab meat tasted like it was thawed.
The gem from what we had was their dumplings in double boiled soup with conpoy accompanied by nu er hong (女儿红). The latter, a Chinese rice wine from Shaoxing came on the side in an old styled wine cup so that one can add as preferred. The server had advised us to do a bowl per person because one would be insufficient for sharing. To their credit, they were absolutely right. After the first, we ordered another because the soup was really good.
We had stir fried carrot cake with X.O. sauce. There was supposed to be lup cheong in there, but it must have been so minced that it got lost in the sauce. Nothing really noteworthy here.
Jiu Zhuang's siew mai came with seaweed skin. The stuffings were pretty decent if unspectacular.
They are also apparently known for their whisky xiao long bao. I would like to think positive and applaud their enthusiasm with the whisky (I don't know what they used, it didn't taste classy but it probably does not matter) but I felt that the whisky element was a little too strong. There was little from the rest of the ingredients in the dumpling that was sufficient as a balance. Too little fat in the meat and far too little salt as well. Memorable in not a good way. In essence, this was a literal whisky meat dumping.
