I decided to give this place a try considering it looks like it is in a ghetto street plaza area with poor lighting.
Going into the restaurant it was surprisingly trendier than what I had expected.
They offer an all you can eat hot pot option but I wasn't really in the mood for it so we decided to try out their ala carte menu.
This four star review has a few caveats. It basically applies to only two dishes. The seafood rice and the roasted pig belly skewers.
This place surprisingly had one of the best tasting seafood fried rice I have eaten at this price. Short of paella I haven't had any rice dish with actual shells. The squid they had were very soft they are definitely not over cooked. The rice itself isn't too oily either and makes you want to eat more.
The second dish I enjoyed that night was the roasted pork belly. If I wasn't filled up with the other bad dishes, this would've made a satisfying meal with the rice. It had the xin Jiang like spice but not too spicy. They have parts that's all fat which would've gone well with the rice if there was any left. But it's very fragrant and savoury.
Service wasn't that bad. In fact they had a service call system which response time was generally quick. And you can press a button for water and bill rather than wait for server to take your request and go back and forth.
Now that's all the good parts. However there were three dishes we ordered that were definitely sub par. If I considered those dishes this would've been a two star review.
Roasted quail egg. Arrived tepid. Barely soaked up the spices around it.
Spicy fish balls. The spice was overpowering and the balls were meh.
Pork and leek dumplings. The pork tasted like it came from the cheap section of Foody Mart.
However this was my first time at this restaurant and I was just choosing dishes at random. They specialize in hot pot which I didn't try so I didn't think it would be fair to rank them poorly for some random dishes.