Address: Beach Road, diagonally opposite Shaw Tower, Singapore
A definitely unpleasant dining experience for me. The lighting was poor. We could hardly see what we were having. The service was hurried.

The place was packed though. These people were probably attracted by the relatively inexpensive $15 per pax all you can eat steamboat offer. So there we were jostling with the crowd at the buffet line and trying to bring all the desired uncooked items to our table.The items available included prawns, cockles, chicken, pork, mutton, liver, fish, meat balls, fish balls, vegetables, squid, beehoon, crab legs, crab sticks etc etc. Something good was that there is a condiment table. You get to mix and match your choice with the selection of chilli (3 kinds), vinegar, sesame seed oil, paisley, spring onion etc etc.

Back at the table, the steam consisted of 4 compartments containing different kinds of soup stock. The Ma La (or spicy) soup stock was too strong for our palates. There was Chicken Soup stock and Vegetable (i think) based soup. The best of what was available would be the Tom Yam for me. Although, during the course of the meal, the taste of the soup stocks became uniform in nature. We were not able to distinguish between the Chicken, Vegetable & Tom Yam…with the strong Ma La being the exception.

My friend Sky then suddenly gave the super Tu Lan (it is hokkien for being pissed off…the literal translation being having your penis poked) look. He had apparently found an insect in his soup. To him, it looked like a baby cockroach. We were contemplating whether to ask the owner for a refund (it was more for gunning for a free meal rather than to compensate for any distress we had faced) when we realised that:
(1) it might not be a baby cockroach (there was bad lighting); and
(2) we were dining al fresco and the insect could have flown into the steamboat.
So we continued eating while Sky retained his Tu Lan look.

That was the day when I proudly displayed my new Dunhill man bag to my friends. The man bag was a gift (a rather expensive one too) to me from my gf. My friends were obviously not in tune with the latest trend. Their immediate first thought of Dunhill was that it was a brand for their parents’ generation. Sigh…I need to educate them or get new friends.