Sunday, October 7, 2012

Samsui Ginger Chicken at Soup Restaurant, Changi T2

You'd expect a restaurant named Soup Restaurant to, you know ... specialize in hot, double-boiled, chinese soup. But it's actually pretty similar to any other chinese restaurant with a whole range of different dishes on the menu - and only a small section dedicated to soup.

Set menus are available - we go for the Chinatown Healthy Set Menu which is SGD48.80 (before service charge/tax) for two people.


The Double Boiled Waisan & Ginseng Roots with Chicken Soup comes in single-person portions. I'm sure most of you know this already, but "double boiled" doesn't actually mean that the soup was boiled twice. It simply means that the soup pot was placed over another pot of boiling/simmering water, and so it's heated only indirectly by the heat of the steam (and not directly by the flame).

As for the taste of this particular soup, I have to say that I enjoyed the strong bitterness of the Ginseng very much. Most commercial ginseng soups are watery and weak and have just a hint of ginseng taste. Not this soup though, in which ginseng is the star of the show.


The house specialty is the Samsui Ginger Chicken, which has a bit of a history, supposedly originating from the samsui women in old Chinatown. It's basically steamed chicken, eaten with a fragrant ginger sauce wrapped in lettuce. Which to be honest feels an awful lot like eating steamed Hainanese Chicken Rice (without the rice).

That's not to say that it's a bad dish, because it's actually pretty nice. The chicken is smooth and fragrant, and the ginger sauce doesn't have a very strong "raw" ginger taste as to overpower everything.


The other two dishes, however, were a little lacklustre. The Steamed San Yu Fish Slices are cold and not particularly mouth-watering, and the Ah Por Fan Shu Leaves taste too home-cooked to really justify paying a lot more money to eat in a restaurant.


Some hits and misses, but overall a decent place to go to for some traditional Chinese fair. This particular outlet of Soup Restaurant is located at Changi Airport Terminal 2 and is open for Lunch and Dinner seven days a week. Non-halal.

1 comment:

  1. ooo, this is one of those singaporean restaurants that have opened a branch in the klang valley (1 utama to be exact). am a fan of the chicken! i think it's a good place for family meals =)

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