Dad's bday - Feast@East

was kinda last minute thingy. searched/surfed the foodies' blogs towards the later part of the night and thereafter confirmed with bro who came home about 1-ish am.


went for my morning bukit timah hill walk with mum and headed home to catch dad just in time for brunch. we didnt make reservations, reached at 11.30am and was told that the buffet brunch cost $42++ though the foodies said that their dinner costs $38 on a weekend. hmm... rise in price for year 2009?

it's at Grand Mercure hotel near Roxy Square

nice decor but furniture a bit old

food selection aplenty. depending on how high your standard is and how much you can eat.

just one corner of the food selection

they have the usual cold dishes of scallops, crabs (as in not flower crabs, but those zi char crabs with thick pincers), mussels, prawns, salmon sashimi and maguro. maybe my standard is high, but hmm.. i think i am average and am reasonable in my taste for food. all the cold dishes failed by my standard.

scallops - bland even though they came with roe
crabs - bland even though they looked pretty big and juicy
prawns - so so, not consistent. some sweet, some bland
mussels - uber bland and slightly stinko. i spit it out. it pretty much sucks.
salmon sashimi - normal, fatty and reasonable
maguro - yucky, powdery taste, slight fishy stench even when with soy sauce and wasabi

the cold stuff which failed miserably

chefs' cooked dishes

laksa

i still prefer the one at parkway basement food court. it's got the oomph of dried pounded shrimp with every scoop. the one served during the buffet wasn't oomph enough. slightly diluted and pretty much forgettable. though my dad and bro liked it.

the average laksa

prawn mee soup

i didnt try but the soup looked darn wicked.

the steak, fish and a very nice soft bun

rack of steak

average and a little tough. sauce is nice though but not mind blowing. youngest bro commented that he preferred the meat on the outer part with the marinate and spices. tastier i gather.

steamed fish

they have this huge steamed fish on display and looked tantalising. unfortunately, all steamed fish comes with a limited display span in that, they can only be steamed and cooked for that long. any further steaming or cooking results in tough meat which doesn't melt in the mouth. Well, that's what happened to the fish. kudos for F@E to come out with a huge steamed fish, but they should prolly think of another method to make the fish last longer.

omelette with sharks fin

this dish is good. stir fried in front of your eyes, it's got a good mix of shredded carrot, spring onions, bean sprouts, sliced ham, mushroom and a good amount of sharks fin. it's very tasty and a good texture of crunch, crisp and softness. but no matter, it tasted like zi char foo yong dan.


warm dishes

the variety of warm dishes..

roast chicken

not bad. like the taste and the the chicken's pretty tender. i tasted only 1 coz i wanted room for other stuff.

fish stir fried with straw mushroom

good. soft but not melt in your mouth and without fishy smell. savory.

pork with fruit salad

unique, but the pork's a tad too tough

lamb steak

the texture of the lamb was good. soft and almost melt in your mouth. unfortunately, it's too bland. the flavours of the marinate did not penetrate the meat. it was quite a waste.

stir fry spicy prawns

err.. forgetable.

stewed beef

soft and melt in your mouth. good to a certain extend

lasagne

erm worst i have ever eaten. it has a strong overpowering beefy smell and when eaten, it has a stoney taste. yucky!!


salad

my fave. their presentation of the leafy greens were quite cute. they used those pots which were used during olden days to contain the leaves, beans, cherry tomatoes and alfafa sprouts. it was wonderful! though the leaves didnt look to be uber fresh, the cherry tomatoes were super sweet.

they had pine nuts, walnuts, raisins, pistachios, bacon, croutons, dried prunes and apricots to add on to your salad. it was really good! we loaded on the expensive pine nuts. hehe.

i must say the kidney beans were good!!

see how much pine nuts i took!

dessert

they had quite a bit of selection. there's fondue for all sorts of imaginable fruits like grapes, watermelon, strawberries, melon, papaya and two types of marshmellow. they also have longan almond tofu, the wicked and heavenly tasty durian paste, bread pudding, the brown rice dessert (issit buloh hitam or something?) durian cake, tiramisu, coffee cake, mini fruit tarts, 4 types of chocolate balls, mini muffins, brownie, ice kachang, ice cream (4 flavours) and also retro snacks like lemon sweets, xian char, kah nar, sugar coated chewy sweets, ginger sweet and some preserved fruit in red colour can't remember which fruit it was.

bread pudding (blah..), grapes and marshmellow coated with yummy chocolate from the 'fountain'

coffee cake, durian paste, nutty chocs and 'gold rush'

i call it 'gold rush' because it's a thin layer of choc covering potent liquor!! once you bite the 'crust' the shot of liquor oozes out! can get high on it man, we smuggled it out from the buffet! haha :p

the retro 'desserts' i was talking about.. brings back those childhood memories don't they??

in short, i prolly wont go back again if the price remains as what i have paid. service was excellent in that they cleared our plates promptly and brought us the utensils when we didnt have for certain dishes. i don't know if it's bec there werent many people as such the service was so prompt or that it's their usual standard. they even gave us Sunday Times to read when we asked for it. i must say the experience was pretty good. what's best is to have the whole family spending time together and hearing what each other has to say. that is priceless :D

NYE din at Shinryoku

din was supposed to be @ 6.30pm. my dear friend was late. she blamed on a particular 'someone' conveniently off her alarm and thus she overslept. She arrived close to 7ish and i had already started before her coz i was famished! I didnt eat much for the whole day in preparation for this huge meal.

interior of Shinryoku

for $68++ you get to order these in the menu. anything and everything. However much you can eat.

The buffet menu

I like their sashimi, it's very fresh and i like their presentation. would have hit on the ark shell if it was available. it's the best and most worth it to come for this buffet! but unfortunately, they didn't have it yesterday. i was SO disappoint!!!

ika and hamachi sashimi

the full sashimi set except for the missing ark shell

Crunchy yam with raw quail egg

this dish is one of my favorite and they were uber generous last night. the yam was cut and filled to the brim of the dish!! i love the cruchy yam coz it is as the name suggests, crunchy, slimey and sticky! as to how you eat the above, basically, you just pour the quail egg onto the yam, pour some shoyu on it and mix some wasabi onto the whole thing. the taste is refreshingly tasty and very authentically japanese. yum yum!


after that i ordered the salmon skin salad. Just in time coz cece arrived shortly after the dish came.

Salmon skin salad

close up shot of the salmon skin

this is a must try! i don't think this can be done this good at anywhere else expect Shinryoku. i am not a fish skin fan, but this dish is awesome! packed with loads of veggies. they have butter lettuce, rockets, romaine lettuces, radish, diakon shoots, cherry tomatoes, purple cabbage and baby spinach. the star is the fish skin. thin, and fried to a crisp. it adds more texture to the dish. the sauce goes very well with the dish, it's slightly nutty, creamy and sourish. till date, i still haven't figure out what's in the sauce.

maguro natto

and yesterday, i was in an adventurous mood. i ordered maguro (tuna) with natto and boy was i glad i ordered the dish! it's very nice! as much as not many people likes natto (i didnt) this one was delish. i'm surprised it came with a raw quail egg. so what i did was to pour the raw egg out, mixed everything together. what always facinates me about natto is that, it's not only sticky, it has these sticky strands when you keep mixing the natto together. i had wanted to order a bowl of rice to eat with this dish. damn sure it will taste wonderful! I think i am falling in love with natto!!!


sadly, the chawamushi wasn't tasty yesterday. but it still looks pretty regardless.

chawamushi

and our all time favourites, the grilled dishes!!! there's actually more, but i was too busy eating and didnt take the rest of the pics..

grilled chix wings

the skin is grilled till crisps and nicely cut and disjointed nicely so that you can easier eat it. comes in a pair for every stick ordered. it's nicely seasoned. and a couple of drip of lemon makes it wonderfully delish! this can be quite addictive.

grilled golden mushrooms wrapped in bacon

grilled king prawns wrapped in mint leave and bacon

they actually have a series of bacon wrapped grilled items. besided the above, there is also aspargus wrapped with bacon and potato wrapped with bacon. i love this series because the bacon actually doesn't taste like bacon. it's like super thinly sliced fatty pork. i wonder where they get this bacon. even streaky bacon is not even close to this bacon they use. so when they grill these dishes, eaten together with whatever they wrap around, it tastes uber yums!

for example, the golden mushroom wrapped with bacon dish? the golden mushroom absorbs the fats and flavour of the pork which makes it moist and crunchy as well!! well u just have to taste it to know what i mean. :D

grilled saba

unfortunately, yesterday's saba was rather fishy and we didnt get the good part. so we ended the night with this and couldn't eat anything else. i also had the grilled ginko nuts (my all time fave) and grilled cherry tomatoes which were awesome!


if you have money to splurge and can eat like crazy, then do go and visit Shinryoku!