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!
