Joyous Dinner @ Pow Sing Restaurant

Pow Sing Restaurant 報喜 (Serangoon Garden)
18th June 2010. Written by Xin Li.

It has been a long time since my art clique met up, this time round we met up because our beloved teacher is finally back from the States, hungry for some Singaporean food. My friend, recommended Pow Sing Restaurant for the occasion and their signature Hainanese Chicken Rice.

The restaurant is rather spacious and the service was quite good. The waitress who served was experienced and would recommend how much would be enough for our group.

Plain Water would cost you 20 cents here. The home-made barley was 1.80 SGD and the lime juice was 1.80 SGD. Pickle and peanuts were being served as soon as you get seated so you can have some thing to munch as you decide what to order. (1.50 SGD for each plate would be charged as well and the towels, 30 cents each).

The menu features the usual Chinese dishes Sweet and Sour Pork etc as well as some Nonya or Southeast Asian sounding dishes.

For our group of five, we the Lotus Red Date Soup first (14.00 SGD - Medium), the soup was very good. Flavourful, yet not heavy and oily, the accompanying pork meat was very tender. This would be my favourite item for the meal.

How can we not have some vegetables? We ordered the Kai Lan with Oyster Sauce (10.00 SGD – Medium). While I like that the sauce here was rather light and not starchy at all, I felt that there wasn’t enough flavour. The kai lan was crunchy though.

Sweet and Sour Fish (15.00 SGD – Medium) was nice but not great. Served with onions, pineapples etc, I would prefer that it to be crispier on the outside, but as with the other dishes, the sauce wasn’t thick and starchy like many of the Sweet and Sour Fish I had in other places.

The Nonya Crispy Sotong (12.00 SGD – Medium) was recommended by another friend of mine. It didn’t click with me. I didn’t enjoy this dish (not only because I don’t eat spicy stuff, and I find it is rather tasteless as well. Imagine eating something over fried without much meat left and add a heavy dosage of spiciness to it. It is probably a dish which some will love or hate it.

The Hainanese Chicken (4 SGD per pax) was quite nice. You could eat it with the condiments provided (ginger, soy sauce and chilli). It was rather tender and the sauce that comes with it was just nice, not too salty with a slight sweet finish.

The Chicken Rice comes separately, which will cost you 90 cents for free flow of rice per head(*Correction!)

The total bill for this dinner was 89.20 SGD for 5 persons (who were quite full) after a 7% GST, apparently, no service charge.

Overall, I find the dinner quite okay, and I enjoyed the Lotus Red Date Soup a lot. You get to dine in an air conditioned environment as well. The restaurant is a nice place for family gatherings or just a big group gathering and not too expensive but definitely pricier than the coffee shop tze-char eateries.

Pow Sing Restaurant (Serangoon Gardens)

Address
65 Serangoon Garden Way

Tel: +65 6282 7972

Opening hours
Daily
11am – 3pm, 5pm – 10pm