Vintana

Hello everyone!

I finally received our Boracay photos from Jeffrey so I'm going to do a post on my most-visited restaurant during my recent trip to Boracay, which is also the main morning breakfast buffet restaurant in my hotel, called Vintana!

There are a few reasons as to why that was our most-visited restaurant: bad weather (it rained 7 out of 11 days we were at Boracay!) deterred us from venturing outside the hotel to source for food, room service menu is actually similar to the ala carte menu at Vintana (so we might as well just take a short walk down to eat at Vintana) and (I'm so ashamed to say) that the biggest reason was pure laziness! haha

But in our defence, we did eat at the two other restaurants in our hotel as well as another on White Beach so we did make a feeble attempt to visit a few restaurants!

Okay before I go on to show you some photos of the food that Vintana serves, I shall post a few photos to let you know what the little island of Boracay looks like.

This photo of Boracay was taken at the top of Mt Luho, which is the tallest point on Boracay. Boracay is actually a very small dog-bone-shaped island which only houses about 12000 people from what I last read!

Our home for 10 nights! Shangri-la's Boracay Resort & Spa Philippines.

Okay so here's the deal. Vintana serves 7 different types of buffet dinner (one cuisine per night) and I think we tried 4 out of 7 of them! The seven cuisines/ culinary features are: Buono Italia (Monday), Oriental Express (Tuesday), Wednesday Wave (aka Seafood), Asian Wonders (Thursday), Mediterranean Flavours (Friday), Poolside Barbeque (Saturday), Continental Cruise (Sunday).

Two photos of the interior of Vintana which are taken at night. It's actually quite spacious and it manages to hold the morning breakfast crowd well.

Okay so here's where the formatting goes a little cranky. Blogger used to upload photos in a particular way and apparently it doesn't do it in that way now. I wasn't aware of it until I finished uploading my photos so the order of my photos are slightly off but I figured it's alright since I'm blogging about buffets so it's fine if the order of photos gets jumbled up! (:

First up, these are photos taken during our last buffet dinner at Vintana. It was a Saturday night and we were supposed to have Poolside Barbeque but unfortunately the weather didn't hold so they shifted all the food to Vintana and we ate indoors instead (: Frankly I didn't see many barbequed items on display but that didn't bother me because the spread was decent enough. There was no outstanding dish for this particular dinner buffet and the food  tastes as good as it looks so you be the judge. Photos of some dishes available at Poolside Barbeque:

Okay the second dinner buffet that I'm going to talk about is actually my favourite dinner buffet of all: Mediterranean Flavours. I suspect it's partly because I could eat almost ALL the dishes on display (which is rare) so I was particularly gleeful at being spoilt for choice that night. Coincidentally, that was the night when Vintana was the least crowded (in fact, we can't even call it crowded at all because there were so few of us there; Jeffrey & I were its only customers for the first 30mins of the buffet dinner!) so we almost had the entire buffet to ourselves. I think both of us enjoyed the dishes tremendously, and special mention has to go to the mushroom risotto, which we liked so much that we cleaned up half a pot of it! The desserts were good as well (: Photos from Mediterranean Flavours dinner:



Asian Wonders dinner on Thursday night was actually surprisingly good because of the wonderfully boiled soups that were on offer. I thoroughly enjoyed the bowls of thick and flavourful broth - they were a welcome change to the comparatively drier and oilier dishes. Because I'm not a big fan of Chinese/ Asian food, I didn't expect much from this buffet but it turns out to be one of the better dinners I've had:

The only day that we went to our nice little private beach to soak up some rays was also the day we were approached by one of the hotel staff to attend the seafood dinner buffet (Wednesday Wave). We were pretty excitied to have an outdoor dinner buffet but it seemed like the heavens weren't willing to grant us that pleasure so we had to shift indoors to Vintana for dinner. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Wednesday Wave was the absence of lobsters! What's a seafood buffet without lobsters! haha Other than that, the rest of the dishes were pretty palateable and I think Vintana saw the largest number of diners at their buffet that night! Photos from Wednesday Wave:

If you recall, I mentioned at the start of this post that our room service menu is similar to Vintana's ala carte menu right? Well we were lucky enough to visit Vintana on one of the nights when they were not hosting any buffet dinner so we ordered our own dishes! Jeffrey ordered a Philippines-dish whose name I've clearly forgotten but he says it tastes like three-layered pork in black sauce. We spoke to the waiter and asked if it's really the 'national' dish of Philippines and he said that all filipinos know how to cook and eat this dish! (: Cool. I ordered a veggie burger with fries and it took ages to come so they were kind enough to give me a complementary bowl of (very sour) tomato soup to savour while I waited for my gigantic burger to arrive. Here are the photos taken at our ala carte meal:

Last but not least, we brought the camera down on the last day of our stay so that we could shoot some photos of our breakfast. Frankly speaking, the majority of the breakfast dishes remains the same for all days so we kind of knew what was on the menu after day 2 but they did make the effort to change a few dishes here and there. My favourite section for breakfast has got to be the kids' section! There're hidden gems at the kids' section (such as mac and cheese and macaroni soup) so I make it a point to visit the kids' section everyday to see if there's anything that I want to eat! (: Other than that, breakfast is pretty standard! 



Alright that marks the end of my post on Vintana! (: Just thought I'd share what I've been feasting on at this particular restaurant since we spent so many mornings and nights there - we're such regulars that the staff know our room number without us telling them after the 6th day or so. Amazing.

Alright the hols are coming to an end soon and I shall spend whatever time I've left preparing myself (mentally) for the flurry of activities that will whirl me all the way to the end of the year!

Have a good and restful Sunday! (: Will be back with more updates on food places in Singapore soon!

Mabuhay Boracay! (:

Hello everyone!

I'm back from the glorious island of Boracay (pronounced Bo-ra-kai) where I was a contented inhabitant for 10 (!) nights! Most people we know only stay for 3-4 days so I think we kind of out-stayed ourselves there!

You would think that the weather'll be balmy and sunny at this time of the year, as I happily presumed before the trip, but you would be as wrong as me! It rained 7 out of 11 days we were there! Haha I really pity those people who travelled to that island to have their holiday plans rained upon! =( That would be terrible.

In some sense, the rainy/ stormy days were good for me because my main objective of getting away was to catch up on sleep and REST, which didn't sit quite well with most people because people tend to HAVE to do something (i.e. sightseeting/ explore the island etc.) when they are on holiday. Well those people must be appalled to know that I spend most of my time in holed up in my hotel room and that the TWO places that I visit daily are Vintana (more on that in my next post when Jeffrey's done with the photos) and the gym/ entertainment centre (where I play my two favourite games airhockey and arcade-style basketball). The rest of the time will be spent lounging in my airconditioned room in front of my laptop (only because I'm chatting with friends, blogsurfing and doing other random websurfing) and the television. We actually watched quite a few dvds and we watched many (bad and old) movies that were being screened on cable tv! You know I actually didn't realise how unaccustomed I am to being in a non-airconditioned room till last night when I'd to unpack and I kept wondering to myself, why is it SO warm?

On the whole, it was a good trip (: I am thankful that Jeffrey's quite fine with my lazy trip and that he plesantly indulged in all my fancies (or rather, non-fancies since I wanted to do NOTHING, not even going to the mall!). Frankly it is the first time that we're taking a non-sightseeing holiday and I'm pretty glad that it turned out well for us (: Apart from the perpetual delay of flights to and fro Boracay, I think Boracay's a heavenly respite for the tired body and restless mind. I will definitely revisit this beautiful island.

Alright I apologise that this entry is not about food but rather it's more like my feeble attempt to make up for the lack of blogposts on this blog as well as to let you all know that there WILL be upcoming posts so keep a lookout for that!

It's the last week of school hols (boo!) and there are lots of things to prepare for but I will try to balance everything out because there're exciting things (i.e. my sister's 21st birthday this Wednesday) to look forward to! (: (: (: Hope that all of you who are having school hols/ summer vacation are enjoying yourselves as well!

Okay I'll update again when I get the photos from Jeffrey. Have a great week ahead everyone! (:

P.S. Thank you Jade for helping me change my blogskin. I like the new layout very much! (:

Axis

Hello everyone! (:

The hols are FINALLY here and I'm going to take a two week break to recharge and rejuvenate so I will be taking a blogging hiatus from this Thursday to the following Sunday because I'll be out of the country! =) Hopefully I'll return feeling more refreshed and ready to take on the second half of the year!

To kick start my many meet-ups this week, I met my bestest buddy Jo, who just came back from her one-month holiday in Europe, for high tea at Axis! I particularly like the ambience at Axis because it's quiet and comfortable and we could just chat at leisure (:

Jo specially picked Axis because it serves non-buffet traditional English high-tea which we both love! =) The high tea set costs $52++ for two people! (:

Photo of our hightea set: three-tiered high tea fingerfood, some fried pastries at the side and two pots of tea!

Here are some close-up shots of the food that we had:

Three little dishes with clotted cream, blackberry jam and orange jam for our scones and two quiches and two mushroom pastries in the bowl on the right. I used to not like having clotted cream with my scones but I think I'm slowly starting to appreciate having some of it with jam on scones =)

The sweet tier (from left to right in clockwise direction): pastry with light custard (I liked this!), chocolate tart (the chocolate was thick!), fruit tart, raspberry on bananacake-taste-alike, pandan macaroon (surprisingly good!), some chocolate stick and the portugese-egg-tart-lookalike which did NOT taste like an eggtart and I'm still wondering what it is. Thankfully, most things tasted pretty good here so I'd no complaints!

The second tier (from left in a clockwise direction): scones (yummy!), fruit cake, a tiny chocolate eclair, some creme brulee (yummy!) and cheesecake with a raspberry sitting atop (not too bad).

The third tier (aka savoury/ sandwich tier) (from left to right in clockwise direction): tuna/ sardine in bao-skin (interesting), smoked salmon in mini croissant, egg mayo sandwich, cucumber sandwich, ham (?) sandwich and ham&cheese sandwich sitting right in the middle! I actually thought that the sandwiches were more than decent and they complemented the sweet bits very well. I found myself alternating between the sweet and savoury food, which I think is the usual way I handle buffets.

Last but not least, the tea pot, tea leaves strainer and tea cup! I think I only got introduced to the tea strainer pretty late in life because I usually opt for iced tea and so I never really got to use the strainer till a few years ago! It's not really a big issue but sometimes I do wonder what I'm missing out because of the (food) choices that I make.

I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at Axis and I would highly recommend this place if you want to have an undisturbed meet-up with your friends or loved ones. The best part is that you won't have to keep getting up for more food because it's non-buffet so all the food that you can possibly have is already on your table! The downside of course is that the food will not be sufficient if you are ravenous but I guess you can always order another set if you want!

Alright that's all for now (: Have a great week ahead everyone!