Best Food In China

Location

Café Royale is best known for its quality buffet, especially its wide variety of seafood and dessert choices. With a huge selection, Café Royale’s buffet truly offers something for everyone. There are multiple stations featuring salads, sashimi and sushi, pastas, as well as hot entrees spanning a range of Chinese, Western, and Southeast Asian food. Most famous though, are the buffet’s dessert offerings. The dessert station is covered with so many alluring sweets that many guests may find it hard to know where one should begin. According to guests, the New Zealand brand ice cream is to die for, making even the most determined weight watcher return for a second helping. With a focus on freshness and quality, all the buffet food is served in small trays, and refills occur often.

In addition to the buffet, Café Royale also has a delightful menu to choose from. The chef is French, but his style is not traditional, therefore his cuisine has a modern sensibility, often embodying a mix of influences. On this particular visit, I sampled four courses that all exhibited his flair for providing updated renditions of traditional dishes.

The first course was coriander chicken lumpia and warm smoked salmon on a crisp vegetable salad with lemon vinaigrette. At first sight, the salad was an inviting palate of red, green, yellow, and orange colors. Lumpia are served in the Philippines and Indonesia, and are similar to Chinese spring rolls. In this salad, the crispy fried lumpia was paired with soft, melt-in-your-mouth salmon, resulting in a nice contrast of textures. The salad was fresh and crispy, with the right amount of light dressing that had a hint of lemon.

The Provençal fish soup with saffron aioli and garlic crouton was a sublime rendition of the traditional southern French classic from Marseille. This hearty soup was a perfect way to warm up on the cold, blustery night. The soup base was a flavorful blend of tomato, saffron, and garlic that complemented nicely with the rich and creamy garlic aioli topping on the croutons. Adding to the comforting mixture were large pieces of fresh fish and crab.

The main entrée was grilled lamb with balsamic demi-glace, grilled asparagus salad, and dauphine potatoes. This dish was a fusion of different European influences, including French and Italian. Although quite difficult to do, both the grilled lamb and asparagus were perfectly cooked. The balsamic demi-glace brought out the flavor of the soft and tender lamb, and the grilled asparagus had a firm and satisfying texture. The crispy exterior of the dauphine potatoes gave way to the creamy mashed potato interior. All parts worked in harmony with the others, resulting in a delicious entrée.

Last, but certainly not least, dessert was freshly baked apple compote tart with cinnamon vanilla pod sauce and rum raisin ice cream. Served warm, the apple tart consisted of soft, thin apple slices upon layers of flaky pastry crust. The scoop of rum raisin ice cream on top melted and mixed its sweet creamy flavor into the tart. Although the dessert was rich, it did not taste heavy or overly sweet. It was a delectable way to end the meal.

From May 28 to June 6, Café Royale will have a special menu featuring traditional French food. Since most of us are unable to afford jet-setting off to France, this special event is the next best thing – allowing us to eat authentic French food for a fraction of the airplane ticket’s cost!

-- by Vivian Huang

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