Singma Deluxe @ Admiralty
For lunch a friend and I went to Singma Deluxe to grab a quick bite. Rather than having a separate menu for lunch, they have their regular menus available and the items with a sea-horse sign on them are 'lunch set-available', i.e. you get a drink with the item during lunch hours.
After looking through the extensive Singaporean-cuisine based menu, we both decided on Boneless Hainan Chicken Rice set, which came with a soup + coffee/tea. Hainanese Chicken Rice sets typically come with a bowl of chicken soup, the stock from the liquid boiling the chicken, and a bowl of rice which had been cooked using the cooking liquid from the chicken. The soup at Singma however, was a typical Chinese soup found in many households, rather than the chicken soup that you normally find with Hainan chicken rice. Different, but the soup (Pork with beans and lotus root) was tasty, so I'm not complaining!
Between us, we had one of their original chicken rice set i.e. with skin on chicken (white and dark meat available) plus a pandan flavoured rice, and one sans skin and with plain white rice (in case the pandan rice was bad, right??)
Above, we have the original Singma Deluxe Hainan Chicken Rice. The slices of boiled chicken looked very nice, but definitely not the smoothest in texture we've had. The chicken was quite tasteless itself, so the sauces here were very important to impart some flavour.
The pandan rice was basically rice which had been cooked with some pandan, which gave it a nice aroma, and a slightly different taste than your standard chicken rice which is cooked with ginger and garlic... The flavoured rice was tasty, so chicken stock was probably used, but it was not oily at all.
The other set we ordered was asked to come with plain rice instead, and without skin on the chicken. The meat was the same as before, not bad with the sweet soy sauce and chilli.
The plain rice however, failed in comparison to the pandan rice as it was poorly cooked. It was way too mushy and overcooked, having no bite and being too 'wet'... Not sure how they managed to mess up plain white rice over pandan rice, but they did.
A little mention on the sauces - whilst the dark soy and chilli sauce were fine, the ginger sauce was a disappointment. Predominantly oil, they need to fix their minced ginger-to-oil ratio!
In hindsight we probably should have ordered something totally different between us, e.g. the steamy bowls of laksa (chicken / seafood / vegetarian) that we saw coming out of the kitchen and onto other people's tables!
Food: ♥♥1/2
Service: ♥♥♥
Price: $$
Shop C2, G/f, Far East Finance Centre, 16 Harcourt Rd,
Admiralty, Hong Kong
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