Breakfast here is a many splendored thing. Huge assortment,
some of the things pretty good, most of a middling standard.
I ate reasonably well off the Asian offerings; lili mostly
off the western ones.
There was a dim sum station. There was nothing Trader Joe
couldn't have thought of, but the gesture was welcome (the
food, too, pretty much). These were variously available
during our stay -
Siu mai were pretty edible, but the chicken filling was
strangely Spamlike (I discover that sometimes they grind the
meat too fine in an effort to disguise its identity perhaps,
then mix it with a little too much starch - this is true at
even dedicated dim summeries of the lesser sort).
Shark fin seafood dumpling is something I've not seen on
a buffet before, not because of the cost (there is actually
no shark fin in it, but rather it's named because of the
shape, by which it would more properly be called Portuguese
man o' war dumpling, but that's not as appetizing) but
because it's more laborious to make than regular shaped ones.
Chicken char siu bun was as good as chicken char siu gets,
which is not very. The bread was of a good standard.
Roast chicken pastry was less Banquetlike than the usual but
with not enough of the brownish filling. Went well with sriracha.
Various small steamed baos were offered - lotus (yellow), red
bean (red), and kaya (brown coconut jam filling, bread tinted
green). They were decent examples, which means I liked them a lot.
Juices were mango and green guava, the latter replaced later by
pink guava. I believe orange is available on request, but we didn't.
The usual semi-western stuff, which I left alone - fake bacon
(turkey), chicken sausage, baked beans. Eggs on request - fried
sunny side only (they apparently haven't figured out how to
flip 'em), scrambled, boiled, poached, or oddly Benedict, which
one review on the Internet cavilled about because the Hollandaise
was too sour. Well, excuuuse me.
Four kinds of cereal, which I didn't pay attention to except to
note that the red-blood-cell-shape cocoa rice cereal was available.
A rotating repertoire of noodles, of which I passed up udon and
something else but tried the mee goreng, standard and tasty, and
a supposedly Italian-style spaghetti with tomato sauce, which
was nonstandard and strange, the spaghetti having suffered from
steamtableitis, the sauce seemingly made from tomato paste and
Maggi or soy sauce, nothing else.
Congee with the usual garnishes; not being that fond of the dish
I passed.
Roti canai with chicken potato curry or vegetable curry with
lentils - sort of hard staleish bread but pretty good curry.
There was also a darker colored and much deeper flavored chicken
curry with coconut rice one day next to the noodles.
Fruit: watermelon, papaya, banana, all fresh and good. I think
one of the days there was also pineapple and regular apple.
Nyonya desserts, rice-flour based, in many shapes and colors, all
tasted pretty much the same: I plowed through maybe 10 one day and
2 different-looking ones the next to make this determination.
Bread pudding - dryish, not enough custard, dominant flavor of
nutmeg; as with other western buffet items I've encountered at
other eastern buffets, this seemed to have been cooked by someone
who had read about the dish but never tasted it nor seen a recipe.
Vegetable pizza - neither of us had the balls to try this.
Of course, ice cream, which many people were seen heading outside
to get.