Chinese New Year at The Singapura

Apparently, this was awesome. The Singapura restaurant at Milton has been good quality for a number of years. The owners used to run a similar restaurant in Port Moresby and have been impressing the inner-northside with their scrummy treats for ages.

The other night, The Singapura catered a Chinese New Year function. And I'll have to add at this point that the reason I haven't been blogging about CNY 2008 yet is because I DID organise a banquet (I thought it would be an improvement on last year) and we DID go to the Golden Palace in the Valley, and we had the $42 per head banquet, and there were about 300 people there, and it was TERRIBLE. Truly, tongue-scrapingly terrible. Cold, congealed food, seafood extender in the mixed seafood dish, what looked like Kan-Tong sauce poured over a plate, food that had been cooked about eight years ago and reheated, bland floury sauces, and it goes on. And it took almost three ear-splitting, noisy hours to get through it. We ended up leaving as soon as possible, and someone later wrote an email to complain... they came back and said that they did their best. Which I'm sure they did. But it doesn't make the visit any more fun, and I was so gutted by my terrible CNY 2008 experience that I tried to wipe it from my memory and I refused to blog about it.

Anyway, until now. And until a friend went to this OTHER, much BETTER banquet at the Singapura. And for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, I thus tell you about my experience. Hope I don't get into trouble.

The Singapura banquet was the same cost per head, around the $40 mark, and the food was exquisite. Feast thy eyes upon the lovely printed keepsake menus:

Note the wooden beads decorating the menu spine, and the cute rat face.

Inside, the order of service looked very interesting.

Lo hei (this was the best, they say)

Crab meat with white mushroom soup
Scrumptious fish fillet

Salt and pepper pork

Prawns in special sauce

Crispy-skin Shang-Dong chicken

Tofu/vegetable hotpot

Mushroom with broccoli

Fried rice

Red bean soup with lotus seed and dried longan (hot)

Chinese tea

Soft drink

And throughout the evening, as well as the lion dances, there were a number of raffle draws. Someone at our table won a hideously trashy, plastic, gold fat rat with an enormous round tummy with "Happy New Year" written on his side in red writing. His back lifts off to reveal a hollow tummy filled with melon-flavoured Chinese lollies. He is so truly awful, it's fantastic. He was brought home and given to me (slightly disturbing, that when people think "trashy gold plastic rat" they also think of me) and he now has pride of place on top of the bookshelf, next to the beckoning Chinese gold cat.

Obviously, CNY 2009 will have to be held at the Singapura. I need to win more trashy plastic animals.