Claypot & dim sum lunch at Peach Blossoms Marina Mandarin Singapore

We had a claypot & dim sum lunch at Peach Blossoms Chinese restaurant in the Marina Mandarin Hotel Singapore. It has been sometime since we last visited this hotel at Marina Square. The first thing we noticed were the birds singing in cages in the atrium and just outside. At first we thought they were just fake birds with recorded sounds, but they were real – alive and singing.

There were two species of birds singing away – the Red Whisker Bulbul and the Chinese Nightingale. The latter reminded me of the Hans Christian Andersen story about the Chinese Emperor and the nightingale.

Anyway, the birds and their sounds did provide an interesting atmosphere for the restaurant and the hotel atrium. The entrance to the restaurant is quite plain. In fact the golden words and entrance make the restaurant look rather dated from the outside. But the interior of the Peach Blossoms restaurant is classy and attractive.

Peach Blossoms menu

We were at Peach Blossoms for lunch and were drawn to the special items in the menu. The Chef’s Recommendations had quite a few interesting items. We decided to try the Teochew Yong Tau Fu ($24) from this list.

A special claypot menu is available for the month of October 2017. The six types of claypot dishes all looked enticing. We decided on the Stir-Fried Chicken with Basil Leaves and Taiwanese Rice Wine ($24) as there was a picture of it which looked rather appetising.

Peach Blossoms Marina Mandarin also serves the usual array of dishes in a hotel Cantonese restaurant. Dim sum is served during lunch. A dim sum buffet is also available ($52++ on weekdays and $62++ on weekends). There is a short ala carte dim sum list, from which we ordered two items. Here are a couple of sample pages from the Peach Blossoms dim sum and regular menus.

The two dim sum which we had were the char siu soh or baked bbq pork pastry ($5.8) and scallops with crispy filo strings ($6.80). Both of them looked gorgeous and tasted very good. The scallops deserve special mention as they tasted fresh, not the rubbery sort that we sometimes encounter. In fact we were sufficiently impressed by what we saw that day to put this restaurant on our to-do list for buffet dim sum.

We had no clue what Teochew yong tau fu was supposed to be. It turned out to be a soup dish of six pieces of bean curd with fish stuffing in the middle. The presentation of this was quite plain. In fact the claypot was too big and made it look half empty. The yong tau fu pieces looked similar to those we find at hawker centres. But the soup in this dish probably saved it. It was a complex, tasty soup. It reminded us of the soup used in some types of ramen and “beauty pot” kind of soup which entails boiling bones and other things with collagen for hours.

The chicken was the better claypot dish. This was full of flavours. Each nugget of chicken was coated with crisp outer surface saturated with the gravy. This variant of the usual ‘three cup chicken’ (三杯鸡) was the best we have tasted as the flavours were rich and well-balanced.