Seafood from the Heart: The Kitchen Table's Dinner Buffet Review (W Hotel Sentosa)

👍 Wide range of seafood and seafood-themed dishes and cuisines. Food's generally pretty good!
👎 Location's inconvenient with no wheels. A little pricey at s$88++ per person.

The Kitchen Table is W Hotel Singapore's buffet / all purpose restaurant, serving up breakfast, lunch, dinner, and brunch (on weekends). On Friday - Sunday nights their dinner goes ocean-themed with their "Seafood from the Heart" buffet spread. It's a pretty expensive dinner, so without further ado let's see if the food justifies the s$103.58 per person (after service charge and taxes) price tag!


The cold seafood station is small, but makes up for it with a solid variety of alaskan king crab, prawns, mussels, lobster, crab claws, and langoustine / scampi. The Friday night dining crowd is sparse, which means that there's plenty of each to go around.


The neighbouring sushi station does quadruple duty with oysters, a whole poached salmon, and ceviche mixed up a la minute as well. The sushi is pretty crappy, and the salmon's a little plain, but the ceviche's mixed up to order so you can tell the chef to adjust the condiments to your tastes.


Salad and cold cuts are pretty par for the course for hotel restaurant buffets, with a decent variety of smoked fish, ham, salmon gravadlax, air-dried beef, etc.


The indian station was one of the better ones, in our opinions, serving up tandoori lobsters and a whole tandoori red snapper in addition to the normal spread of briyanis, dhalls, curries and assorted breads. The snapper, being a large fish, has somewhat firm, but delicious-tasting flesh. We also really enjoyed the tandoori lobsters, flavoured and cooked to perfection!


The hot food line has decent, if not mind-blowing, variety, with around a dozen or so different dishes including a whole salmon, black pepper dungeness crab, baked lobsters with cheese and sambal stingray. The overall taste of the dishes were pretty good, but quality suffers from the fact that the dining room is less then half full: People aren't eating the food quickly enough, so it gets left out for a long time. Long enough, in fact, for some dishes to actually cool down to almost room temperature!


No such problem with the baked lobsters with cheese sauce, of course: It's one of the few dishes that gets snapped up pretty quickly after each replenish.


There's also a noodles & dim-sum station. We tried both: The laksa which pretty damn good; but the dim sum was over-steamed and limp and soggy.


The final desserts station has a chocolate fountain, and individual-sized portions of assorted cakes, desserts, macarons, cookies and a surprisingly wide variety of nyonya kuih. We quite like that even the cakes are individually-portioned, so you don't get the aesthetic problems of serving a full sized cake (and then having the guests really mess it up).


Overall, we really liked the abundance of seafood available throughout the whole buffet line, and also some of the novel (to us, anyway) flavours like the tandoori lobster. What we didn't really like was some of the hot dishes being left out on the line for way too long. We also thought that while the food was generally "not bad," there weren't really any standout "oh so delicious" dishes. To us, we think it's a little much to ask a diner to drive (or UberGrab) all the way out to Sentosa Cove, and pay a hundred bucks for this dinner, when there are countless other hotel buffets in Singapore that are better, cheaper, more convenient, or all three.


The Kitchen Table is at W Hotel Sentosa Cove. For reservations, call up +65 6808 7268 or email thekitchentable.singapore@whotels.com. Non-halal.