Haha Thai restaurant in Ngee Ann City

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Haha Thai restaurant is the latest food outlet to open at Ngee City. It is situated on the 5th floor, near the Best Denki electrical appliance store. If not for its name, one might not have guessed that this is a Thai restaurant. The decor is set in the retro-industrial style that is popular with many cafes these days. Exposed electrical trunking, some naked light bulbs, old style furniture and throw in a couple of bicycles that seem like they belong to the 1960s to get the look.

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We were at Haha Thai for lunch over the weekend and had half-expected a crowd since this was such a new restaurant and were therefore surprised to find that we were the only group there. We ordered a selection of various items from the menu. Here are some random pages of the Haha Thai menu.

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We started off with a complimentary welcome warm drink that had strong lemon grass notes. It was quite appetizing. The Thai fish cakes ($5.80 for 5 pieces) were tasty with a good chewy texture. The fried spring rolls ($4.80 for 3 rolls) were quite ordinary tasting but we liked them for the crispiness and being consistently and lightly fried. The size of the pieces were quite small (our close up shots make them look bigger than they really were).

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The pandan chicken ($6.80 for 3 pieces) was very well presented in tightly wrapped pandan leaves. The content inside each package was a small nugget of succulent chicken that had a gentle pandan flavour.

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The Haha salted egg squid ($15.80) was the best dish of the day. The salted egg taste in a mild curry was like a good rhythm guitar player. You can sense its presence but it does not overpower the lead, in this case the natural flavour of the squid, allowing it to shine. The portion of this dish was also normal in size.

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We also tried the Haha fried rice ($11.80) which comes in a variety of flavours. You can choose up to three in one order. We chose belachan, olive and pineapple. They were served like thee handfuls of rice on the same plate. It looks quite beautiful but the portion was really small. The taste was of each main ingredient quite distinctive and the texture of the rice was good. In terms of preference we would rank them as follows: olive, belachan and pineapple (which tasted rather sweet).

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For dessert, we tried the red ruby and the mango sticky rice ice-cream. We liked the mango sticky rice. There was a generous helping of sweet mango. The sticky rice had good consistency and blended well with the coconut flavoured ice-cream. The red ruby however was disappointing. We could not detect any water-chestnut in the rubies. So basically, it was red starch beads with ice-cream on a bed of ice.

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