Royal China at Raffles Hotel 莱佛士皇朝

Decided to come here for lunch today to celebrate one of our colleagues birthday today, and she is a fan of char siew shu, and we read that the char siew shu was very good here.

This restaurant is located at the third level of Raffles Hotel along beach road. The entrance to the restaurant was simple and elegant, does not give it a very grand feel, but once you step in, it gives you a very comfortable and elegant feeling to the place. The whole restaurant is a combination of silver and cyan, which seems to project a cooling environment.

Anyway, there were 7 of us, and we ordered a total of 17 different variety of dim sum!!! hahahaa... I did not realised we had that many dim sum under I write this review and counted the items on the bills. Yeap... total we order 25 dishes of dim sum, 17 varieties. :P That's probably why this review has the most photos to date! :P

Overall, every of the dim sum we ordered was pretty good. My 2 female colleagues commented the char siew shu taste was pretty good, and they felt is similar to that of Wah Lok (hahaha...even the shape is the same!).

On average, most of the dim sum items are around $4.80, which some cheap at $3.60 like the spare ribs and chicken claw, and some at $4. Given we ordered so many items, and generally all are pretty good, I felt the cheong fun (scallop or chef recommended) was pretty good, same goes for the har gao and siew mai.

After all that, we ordered desserts. I tried my colleague's marchee with durian and black sesame, which was very nice, while I ordered the rice dumpling, which was normal. It is special in the sense of instead of being coated with roasted peanut on the outside, it uses cashew nuts instead, though my colleague tried and she can't tell it was cashew nut. hahahaha. We also ordered a plate of red bean pancake to share, which I found was just average.

Overall, total damage after UOB 15% discount, the bill came up to $184.30, which works out to less than $27 per pax, which was pretty good, and the service from the waitresses were all very friendly and food was served pretty fast. The ambience is also very nice. So if you are looking for a good quality dim sum, do check this place out. I'm sure it will not disappoint!