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| - So, I'm in Vegas for CES 2016 and decided to try this out. Didn't expect much but then again, I didn't expect the food in this place to be this awful. They have an Asian staff who actually speak Cantonese so I had hopes...which were brutally dashed. I ordered the Jellyfish appetizer and the Siu Mai. Both were barely decent but were somewhat passable.
Then I decided to try the "Singapore Laksa." To say that this dish sucks is to insult the whole concept of suckitude. Okay, it had a halved (!!!) fish ball floating in it along with half a boiled egg, some dried tofu and a couple of shrimp but the soup, the key to a Singapore Laksa, tasted as if somebody had watered it down to colored dishwater, it was so thin and flavorless. The richness normal to a Singapore Laksa was so beyond totally absent as to be positively ghostly. Instead of the normal spiciness from the curry and chili along with richness that is imparted by the coconut milk that is characteristic of a Singapore Laksa, this was so bland that it wasn't even salty enough, something that even adding two Chinese soup spoon's worth of soy sauce couldn't remedy. Just doing a Google search, I came up with multiple recipes for this but what they served bore no resemblance to the real thing. Not even close. Not even by a country mile. I gave up halfway through and ordered a Singapore-style Hainanese Chicken Rice thinking that it's pretty hard to mess that up.
What a mistake! What arrived was a disaster. The chicken tasted wrong, even less tasty than a standard Hong Kong poached chicken. One of the reasons being that it had not been brushed in sesame oil after being poached, a prime requirement for a classic Singapore-style Hainanese Chicken. And the rice, which should've been heavily boiled in chicken stock, tasted like they boiled it to the point of what the Italians call "al dente" and came out translucent instead of white...Hello, "al dente" may be good for Italian pasta but where rice is concerned, it doesn't work. This is not a variation on risotto sans cream sauce. No, no, no. Then the sauces...oh my god...what utter abominations. Firstly, a chili sauce that was missing the garlic that is standard for this dish and just plain wrong. Chili sauce, for the uninitiated, is not interchangeable. Hainanese Chicken Rice done Singapore style, as this was trying to emulate, has a very distinctive chili sauce. You *CANNOT* just throw in any old chili sauce to accompany the dish. Secondly, and most egregiously, the black dipping sauce in a proper Hainanese Chicken Rice is basically thick black sweet soy mixed with thin regular black soy. It is *NOT* and has never been Oyster Sauce being passed off as "Gelled Soy Sauce" (after living for over 20 years in Singapore, I know Oyster Sauce when I taste it, thank you very much--it is *THAT* distinctive)! The only sauce they got right was the grated ginger sauce (but you'd have to be an outright clod to screw up grating ginger and sticking it in oil!) To call this "Hainanese Chicken Rice" is a beyond bovine manure. No way in Hell does it even come remotely close to what they're trying to do! Whomever is in the kitchen here has no clue what Singapore/Malaysian food is and should just stop trying. Or get a better recipe book instead of just tossing a bunch of ingredients together and hoping that nobody would notice the drastic differences. Having these dishes on the menu is an insult to the cuisine.
The only things that were decent were the beverages but then considering how easy it is to make Thai Iced Tea from a mix or poured out of a commercially prepared container, it's a no-brainer. Or, in this case, a no-talent-required job.
Service was good and attentive. I know the front of the house is not responsible for what the back of the house throws up (!!!) and tries to pass off as "cuisine" but perhaps they should just stick to the food this place is eponymously named after and not try to attempt cuisine that they obviously have no clue about.
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