Great Sunday Brunch at Clipper Lounge, Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong (Central)

👍 Generally really good food, superb range of sashimi and cold seafood.
👎 Variety of dishes and types of cuisine on offer isn't as high as some other buffets.

Every once in a while we like to go stuff ourselves silly at a good Sunday Brunch. While visiting Hong Kong we decided to spend the afternoon having brunch at the Clipper Lounge, Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong (Next to Central MTR).

Compared to other 5-star hotel buffets, the variety of cuisines and dishes isn't the greatest, but the quality of the dishes on offer were generally very, very delicious. We were quite amazed in particular by the fat and juicy scallops on the sashimi bar, and the king crab legs, oysters, and abalone on the cold seafood table. We also thought the roast prime rib of beef was excellent. There was a huge variety of desserts, some of which were perhaps somewhat an acquired taste, but most of which were good.

Service was friendly, attentive, and prompt, and the dining area is gorgeously elegant. If you're the type of person who absolutely must have over a hundred different dishes at a buffet, then this place might not be for you, but otherwise we highly recommend it if you're hankering for a Sunday Brunch Buffet in the city!


Some photos of the bread and cheese table, sashimi, sushi, oysters and cold seafood bar:









Some photos of the Hainanese chicken (a little dry), Roast Beef & Ham, Hot Dishes, and Desserts:








Some photos of the food we brought back with us to our tables:









Finishing off with (complimentary) coffee and tea:


Sunday Brunch at the Clipper Lounge, Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong costs HKD718 per adult (+10% service charge). Add HKD400 to include free-flow Champagne R’ de Ruinart Brut NV, house white and red, beer, soft drinks and fruit juices. Visit the Mandarin Oriental HK website for reservations. Non-halal.

Look See Eat

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.

Festive Plates of Pleasure at 10 @ Claymore, Pan Pacific Orchard

People always tell you that "with age comes Wisdom." What they don't tell you, is that reduced metabolism, appetite, and stomach capacity also come along for the ride. I mean I'm not old, I'm just now treading water into "medium adult" territory, but even then I find myself going to buffets less and less because I simply can't whack as much food as I used to.

Nevertheless, a good buffet once in a while is still awesome, just that the goal is slowly shifting from "stuff my face with as much food as possible" to "sample and taste the different foods on offer," ha ha!


Pan Pacific Orchard's 10 @ Claymore Restaurant serves up a relatively limited buffet spread, complemented by what they call "Plates of Pleasure." These plates are basically quarter-sized versions of ala-carte dishes, which you can order unlimited servings of.


Their cold appetizers station consists of salmon and tuna sashimi (nice and fresh), some assorted cold cuts, and parma ham with melon, which was pretty delicious. We ended up eating a lot more parma ham than sashimi. A selection of different breads and cheeses are available for you to mix-and-match - starting from mild cheeses like Camembert and Brie, and all the way up to Blue cheese.


The salad bar has some decent variety although strangely enough, we forgot (subconscious desire to skip the veg? Hmmm) to mix up a salad for ourselves.


The two carving stations for the day were a leg of lamb (pink, moist, juicy and tender), and the mandatory Turkey breast (seeing as it was Christmas eve). I'm personally not a huge fan of turkey because it's often cooked up really dry, but the turkey here was nice and decently juicy. Well, as juicy as an (almost) fat-free poultry breast can be.


For the hot foods station, the only dishes that stood out as being "nice" were perhaps the braised lamb shank, barbecue'd Pork Ribs, and the Singapore Chili Crab. The other dishes were forgettable at best.


Moving on to the Plates of Pleasure for the afternoon - House Pressed Chicken Snail Sausage, Penang Aromatic Spicy Prawn Noodle Broth, Norwegian Breed Wild Farmed Salmon, and Victoria Gippsland Natural Fed Tender Cut Angus Beef.

The surprise of the afternoon had to be the Prawn Noodle, which was delightfully faithful to the bowls you'd get all around Penang island. The steak was also nicely flavored and grilled, and it being served with truffle mashed potato was a bonus. Unfortunately the chicken sausage was rather run of the mill, and the salmon (is there even such a thing as "Wild Farmed Salmon?") was a little dry and overcooked.


Moving on to desserts, we really liked that the fruits counter had more participants than just the 'standard' watermelon/papaya/melon combination. Other cakes, pastries and tarts were overall pretty nice stuff, except for the log cake which turned out to be a durian log cake. We don't eat durian :P


For SGD58.00++ per person for lunch, we thought that the buffet was pretty good value for money. What we don't get in quantity is more than made up for in quality (considering the price we paid, of course). The restaurant was also not too crowded, so it doesn't get cramped or noisy.

10 @ Claymore is located in Pan Pacific Orchard Hotel, and gets its' name from the Hotel's address: 10 Claymore Road. Call up 6831 6686 for reservations. Non-halal.

Singapore National Day Oriental Brunch at Jiang-Nan Chun Restaurant (Four Seasons Hotel)

Happy 47th Birthday Singapore! To celebrate the occasion many restaurants around town have put up special "National Day" set menus at a "special" pricing of SGD47 ... one of them being Jiang-Nan Chun over at Four Seasons Hotel. They've put their popular Weekend Oriental Brunch up for SGD47++ instead of the usual SGD58++, so what better day than today to sample the restaurants' delicacies?


And sample is the operational word here, because with one hundred (!!) different kinds of dim sum on offer, you'd need to be a champion competitive eater to stand any chance of eating the entire menu at one seating.

The darling and I take stock of the nine-page menu and set a pre-stuff-your-face strategy of keeping ourselves to just three or four items from each page.

From the Soups & Porridge page we order:
- Braised Hasma with Shredded Fish Maw and Dried Scallop
- Double-Boiled Morel Mushroom with Chinese Cabbage and Black Chicken
- Porridge with Pork and Century Egg

The soups were a pretty nice start to the meal - they'd had obviously been boiled for significantly long enough for the flavors of the ingredients to be extracted into the liquid. The Porridge, however, was notable only for its' mediocrity - smooth but utterly bland.


Next up, the Appetizers:
- Crispy Roasted Pork Belly
- Chilled Poached Hong Kong Kai Lan
- Deep-fried Fish Skin with Salt and Pepper

I really dug the siew yuk. Nicely roasted with thin, crispy skin, I ended up ordering another serving. The Kai Lan was also pretty nice, if a bit unconventional as it's the first time I'm eating almost-ice-cold vegetables. The Fish Skin ... well, it was sort of like potato chips made of fish skin instead of potatoes.


We then move on to page 1 of the Dim Sum:
- Deep Fried Prawns Dumpling served with Mayonnaise Sauce
- Steamed Pork Dumpling with Shrimp
- Steamed Barbecued Pork Bun
- Steamed Scallop Dumpling with Luffa Melon and Crab Roe.

Portions are pretty small - an example being the siew mai, which came in bite-sized pieces; probably not an issue since you can order as many of them as you want. Overall pretty par for the course taste-wise, except for the Scallop Dumpling which had (relative to the size) skin that was way too thick and hard.


- Fried Carrot Cake with XO Chili Sauce
- Deep fried Spring Roll with Crabmeat, Scallop and Egg White
- Baked Flaky Pastry with Barbecued Pork, Bacon and Ham coated with Sesame Seeds
- Deep fried Beancurd Skin Roll with Shrimps

The Spring Rolls were terrible - we couldn't taste the crab meat or scallop at all.


On to the Seafood menu, where we try:
- Steamed Cod Fillet with Preserved Mustard Leaves and Olives
- Steamed Cod with Minced Green Ginger and Spring Onions
- Stir-fried Scallops with Asparagus
- Deep-fried Prawns with Butter and Oat

The two Cod dishes were on opposite ends of the like-dislike spectrum. I thoroughly enjoyed the Cod with Green Ginger - being much less "gingery" than yellow ginger; but the other Fillet was flaky and dry. Prawns and Asparagus in the other two dishes were notably fresh.


At this stage, our already-full stomachs forced us to throw in the towel, which sadly meant ignoring the entire Meat, Vegetables & Beancurd and Rice & Noodles sections, and skipping straight to the Desserts:
- Chilled Aloe Vera with Lemongrass Jelly
- Fresh Mango Pudding topped with Pomelo
- Chilled Longan and Almond Beancurd
- Oven-baked Mini Egg Tart

Egg Tarts could have used a bit more time in the oven at the "baking the pastry" stage, and the Mango Pudding was, putting it nicely, simply not up to par. I liked the Aloe Vera / Lemongrass Jelly though - a nice refreshing end to the meal.


The biggest surprise of the night, for me, was the Peking Duck (1 serving per person only). Despite the restaurant bandying it around as one of the signature dishes, I found it a bit crap. I'm not sure how long the duck skin had been sitting in the sauced-up pancake, but there was absolutely no crispiness left. What's the point of eating non-crispy duck skin? I also didn't like that the restaurant left out the scallion.


While the one hundred dishes available are probably without rival anywhere else in the restaurant world, the dishes do lack in consistency. The dim sum and the dishes were mostly "not too bad," with a few of them being delicious, and a few going on the "would not order again" list. No different from your standard normal distribution, then.

We also noticed that once the dining room started filling up, the kitchen wasn't able to churn out food quick enough. We ended up sitting the entire three hour lunch session, much of that time waiting for food despite "ordering in advance" - which is a first for me in any restaurant.

Jiang-Nan Chun is located on the 2nd floor of the Four Seasons Hotel - within walking distance from the Orchard MRT (walk through ION and Wheelock Place to maximize air-conditioned time). The Weekend Brunch times are as follows:

Sunday (first seating) - 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Sunday (second seating) - 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Saturday 11:30 am – 2:30 pm

Non-halal.