PaiGu

Thai Thai is a gorgeous, classy restaurant tucked away in the Mandarin Gallery that I discovered one day entirely by accident. It is adorned in regal purple, with colourful pillows and elegant chandeliers.

Adorned in soft pastel tones, comfy high-backed seats, crisp white tablecloths, and with a warm light descending from ornate chandeliers, this intimate restaurant is more akin to a king’s palatial tearoom. Source: Time Out

I couldn’t have described it better myself. Service is extremely attentive, among the best I’ve experienced in Singapore. They also happen to have delicious Thai food, the kind that will be featured in recurring dreams afterward (I should know).

Pandan chicken is well-seasoned and very tender. Fantastic with the sweet Thai sauce.

The menu called this “Shrimp with coconut strips” but it did not prepare us for what came out. It was more like shrimp cake, with coconut strands in the batter, but after frying, there was no fragrance from the coconut at all, which was a little disappointing. The shrimp cake was executed well but the batter itself was just average.

Traditional duck in red curry is the dish that I dreamed about after my first visit, and was the object of my return visit. The first time we had it, the duck was tender and succulent. There were also many ingredients in the curry that surprised and delighted us, like pineapples and grapes for a sweet taste. The second time we ordered this dish, the duck was tough to chew and the vegetables in the curry were under-cooked. The curry paste itself was good, but overall the dish was a bit disappointing.

Pad thai came with truly enormous prawns, that were less appetizing in real life than in photos. The pad thai itself was very well executed though, with a harmonious blend of sweet and sour.

Custard with roasted pumpkin and ice cream was a unique dessert that initially surprised my taste buds, but after I got used to the custard-pumpkin combination, I really liked it. The ice cream, on the other hand, was supposedly vanilla but had a very bizarre after taste that made me think there had been an herb of some sort mixed into the vanilla.

Thai iced tea here is the best I’ve ever had. It is vaguely like bubble tea in that it’s black tea with milk and sugar syrup, but it is so much better than that.

This is a rather pricey joint if you have frequent Thai cravings like me, but I would definitely want to come back to try more of their menu. In future, I might only come for dinners as I have reason to suspect their chef skills are better for dinner than for lunch.

Rating:

I’ve been eating extremely well in China, which isn’t difficult given that everything¹ here is better than anything I’ve had in Canada times ten.

Let’s walk through a typical day of eating for me in Nanjing.

Breakfast starts at 5am² and is usually at a xiao chi dian which is kind of like a dim sum stand with road-side aluminum furniture. Sketchy? Yes, a little. Delicious? Definitely. Luckily, I’m not someone with a sensitive stomach and I have never gotten sick from eating in China.

In the last four days, I’ve had quite a variety of breakfast items: plain steamed buns (man tou), veggie or pork-filling steamed buns (bao zi), glutinous rice buns (shao mai), fried dough sticks (you tiao), soy milk or tofu soup (dou jiang, dou nao), congee (xi fan).

Some xiao chi items can be repeated for lunch, such as steamed buns. Nanjing has the best xiao long bao in the country, many would argue.

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1. When I say ‘everything’, I’m mostly referring to all Chinese food. [↩]
2. Everyone gets up really early here because mid-day and early afternoon is too hot to function, so that’s usually nap-time. [↩]

Sen5es Bakery & Restaurant is located on the ground floor of the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto. I’ve only ever read glowing reviews of this fine-dining establishment, so I readily accepted an invitation to go for a Summerlicious dinner this past Friday.

Three and a half hours and $60 later, I walked out with only two good things to say about the place: the servers are courteous and the washrooms are clean.

We had a reservation for 7:00 pm but were cooling our heels in the lobby until 8:00 pm. Unacceptable.

It took another 40 minutes for our first course to come. Granted, we had a party of 12, but we were all ordering off the Summerlicious menu, so they could expect the volume ahead of time (and everyone knows its pre-made anyway), so how long does it take to arrange appetizers on 12 plates?

Grilled romaine lettuce heart tasted exactly like what you would expect romaine lettuce hearts to taste like. The portobello tasted bizarre, and not in a good way.

Gazpacho is a cold Spanish tomato-based vegetable soup. Given that it was a vegetable soup, I wasn’t ready for the chill. It tasted fine, nothing to write home about. The half-cherry tomato came with goat cheese, which was not on the menu. Kind of a big deal, I’m surprised they didn’t put that on there given how they like to put every single ingredient on the menu. Lobster medallions tasted like they’d been frozen and then thawed, but what did I expect? I don’t know, maybe something fresh from such a “fine-dining” establishment. » Read the rest of this entry «