Below average experience for a Chinese restaurant located far far away on a little island.
I tried the dim sum buffet ($30++ per pax) as part of restaurant week. As with most restaurants these days, even the water costs extra unfortunately.
On the surface, the menu looks extensive. There is a good selection of the standard dim sum fare and they are OK for the most part. The egg tart is possibly the worst item for being both soggy and oily. The cooked items are mediocre at best, with the char siu being the best dish followed by the ee-fu noodle. The mango sago dessert is abysmal, more on that in a bit.
The main issue is service. The staff is sufficiently attentive… until the restaurant started to fill up i.e. they are understaffed. The kitchen could barely cope with the orders, with the last dish of my first order coming in almost an hour after the order was placed and one missing item to boot. When I asked for an additional order form, the staff needed several reminders before I finally got one. We were pushed to settle the bill barely after the second order was served (through no fault of mine) because the second sitting was starting.
The mango sago dessert turned out to be the litmus test of the restaurant. I ordered a mango pudding, which was OOS, and was served a mango sago dessert instead. The dessert had no sago, no mango, no pomelo, just mango cream (It would be fair to say it looked like melted pudding… so I did get what I ordered in a way. See photo). I pointed it out to the staff, and Manager Chow insisted that the buffet version was not supposed to contain any toppings. She did remedy it reluctantly and sounded as though she was doing me a favor. As icing on the trainwreck of a cake, I was wrongly charged for tea despite asking for water only.
Any one of these screw-ups would have been forgivable, but all of the above? Slow kitchen, overworked staff, mediocre food, and a manager that focused more on table turnover rate than customer experience. All of this can be potentially solved with hiring more staff, which would increase the speed of the kitchen and table turnover rate,, the quality of the service, and fewer errors in the order.) To fail a litmus test this miserably…
The only consolation? I have one less reason to make a trip down to the cove.
