Lei Garden (CHIJMES)

Hello everyone (:

I'm taking a break from work so I decided to blog about my family's recent trip to Lei Garden! If you haven't already realised, most of us (meaning the 5 kids in the family) prefer non-Chinese food so if we actually make the effort to have a Chinese meal at a nice Chinese restaurant, you can probably guess that it's someone's birthday or that we're celebrating some event.

Initially, we wanted to go to Royal China for dinenr but the restaurant was booked for a private event that night so we made a reservation at Lei Garden instead. Turns out that this was a pretty good choice too so we didn't regret it one bit!

If given a choice, I'd always order chrysanthemum tea with sugar because I think the others are too bland for my liking. So far, I think Soup Restaurant serves the most fragrant chrysanthemum tea! I suspect it's got something to do with them adding a flower in each tea cup!

The famous Crispy Roasted Pork Cubes ($14.80) which you MUST order when you visit Lei Garden because it's truly divine (according to the rest at dinner of course)! Please don't miss or skip this dish when you visit Lei Garden!

Another must-try dish would be their Peking Duck! We ordered the whole peking duck ($62) and it was just sufficient for us (: I absolutely love dipping the cucumber sticks into the sweet flour sauce and I always cheat for this dish by making Jeffrey eat the duck skin so that I can steal his crepe! haha

Possibly the most expensive vegetable dish I've had in my entire life - broccoli with scallops ($72) - but it was truly worth every cent! Both the vegetables and scallops were fresh and we were honestly surprised by how generous the serving of scallops was! If you're a broccoli lover like me, you should order this dish - it'll not disappoint!

Next comes the most lacklustre dish of the night - stirfried vegetables ($22). Perhaps we ordered the wrong kind of vegetables or we specified the wrong style of cooking, hence it didn't taste as good as we hoped for it to be!

Another of their signature dishes - steamed beancurd with ginko nut ($24) or more commonly known as Tofu Ensemble. The presentation was most interesting and we actually felt that we'd to be more careful when taking our share because we didn't want to destroy the beautiful presentation! The tofu itself tasted pretty okay, I wouldn't say that it's fantastic but it's definitely something nice to try.

Snow fish fillet with greens ($72). This dish was loved by all because the fish fillet literally melted in our mouths! I liked how the vegetables are not overcooked and retained their crunchiness! Would love to have this dish again!

Last but not least, we'd stirfried noodles ($42) and it was pretty okay. I'm a noodle-lover so naturally I'm biased towards noodle-dishes but I would suggest you ask the waitress to recommend other noodles/ rice dishes if you aren't very keen on stirfried noodles!

Lei Garden's version of Mango Sago ($6), which tasted slightly different from the usual because of the bits in the Mango Sago. I can't recall what they were but they were nice-tasting.

Their special dessert for that day was this dish which I call Cold Yin Yang ($7), which was made up of fresh almond cream and black sesame paste. I am not a fan of fresh almond cream but I guess my desire to try something that was not on the menu overcame my dislike for almond cream and I ordered this in the end. The most interesting thing about this dish is that it's COLD! I would think that it would be served warm but cold is good. I would say that this dish is only average so perhaps you would like to stick to their more popular desserts. 
I think the dishes were mostly hits and we only had very few misses, which means that most of us had a delightful time at Lei Garden (: I hope that we'll be able to visit other Chinese restaurants together for more yummy Chinese food!

Alright it's time to head to bed. Goodnight and have a good rest of the week! (: