Dim Sum at Royal China (Raffles Hotel)

Dim Sum is one of those cuisine sub-types that spawn dozens (if not hundreds) of restaurants/cafe's/hawker stalls anywhere there is a decent Chinese population. The difficulty for the dim sum lover is then to sieve through the myriad of shops on offer and separate the wheat from the chaff.

After all, there are fewer things worse than biting on a siew mai with hard, dry 'skin' and mushy overcooked insides.


We probably won't face such problems with Royal China at Raffles Hotel, though. As a regular ranking (informal) member on "Best dim sum in Singapore" lists around the Web, surely the food will be at least above average.


Looking through the menu on a weekend afternoon, there's the host of the usual dim sum stalwarts, both steamed and fried. There's a few exotic sounding dishes, that we didn't really order because to be honest they didn't sound particularly appetizing.


Of the dishes that we did order, though, in general we found the dim sum to be pretty darn good. Of course, there were outliers like the rather plain congee (porridge), and some of the egg tarts which came with undercooked pastry (gasp!) ...


... but by and large the portions were decently-sized and tasted great.


I think the most outstanding dishes of the day for us were the three different buns we had that were filled with char siu - the meat was tender with the right proportion of fats and sweet sauce - yummy!


The liu sha bao (custard bun) was pretty good too!


Oh, and we also didn't care much for the mango pudding with pomelo, which just tasted a bit off; luckily the lotus pancake was nice and a perfect sweet end to the meal.


While I don't have exact prices, a regular stomach would find it hard to eat much more than SGD30-SGD40 worth of dim sum, so considering the restaurant's target positioning, it's pretty decent value, too. We won't be doing any dim sum rankings, but suffice it to say that Royal China easily deserves reputation of being "among the best dim sum restaurants in Singapore.

Royal China is in Raffles Hotel. If you're not driving, the nearest MRT stations are either Esplanade (Circle Line) or City Hall (Red/Green Lines). Non-halal.