Bali Thai, Suntec City Mall

January 05, 2010

Because the BF and I visit Thailand so often, we manage to get our Thai food fix often enough to not have cravings for Thai food in Singapore. Also, because Singapore has a dearth of authentic and cheap Thai food.

The BF and I were walking the restaurants circling the fountain looking for a place to eat when we saw that Bali Thai had a festive ala carte buffet promotion at $25 per person. I'm not usually a fan of buffets because you generally pay for the variety of food, not quality of the food. But we decided to throw caution to the wind and stepped in to sample the buffet anyway. You'll never know if you never try right?

The ala carte buffet has a selection of both Thai and Indonesian dishes. Overall, the Thai selections fared better than the Indonesian dishes, but the buffet wasn't worth it. The food tasted pre-cooked and reheated so the quality of the food was compromised and mostly a ho-hum affair. I think the ala carte menu would probably have been much better.

We started off with the Indonesian dishes. First up was the Ayam Soto, Indonesian chicken soup with beansprouts and vermicelli and hard boiled eggs. This had way too much tamarind, which left a weird sappy taste on my tongue.

The next dish was the Sayur Lodeh, curry mixed vegetables. The gravy tasted a little powdery, which led me to think it could have come out of a pre-mixed packet. The ingredients seemed to be cooked separately then thrown in together, there was hardly any cabbage, the long beans were slightly undercooked, whereas the fried cubes of beancurd had been fried too much, to a chewy and tough texture.

We also got the Tauhu Telor. Bali Thai does their Tauhu Telor differently from any other place I know, the eggs are scrambled with coriander and parsley (lots of it) and fried together with the beancurd. Obviously, we took a bite and spat it out, we hate hate hate coriander. And we made it plainly obvious that we didn't want any coriander or spring onions in any of our dishes. I guess if the dish was pre-cooked, the staff would not be able to hold off the coriander and spring onions. This dish would have been alright otherwise.

We also got the Satay Madura Chicken. I felt this was alright, I liked the sweetish peanut sauce drizzled on top of the chicken, which was admittedly slightly tough. The BF was of the opinion that the chicken was tasteless though and didn't finish his satay.

Next up was the Beef Rendang, which I thought was so-so.

The Thai selection came up next. We started off with the Tom Yum Seafood Soup. This was deceptively spicy, and the seafood was fresh enough, although the BF thought it wasn't spicy enough.