Ah Yat Tian Xia

Mention Ah Yat, and abalone and seafood comes to mind. Ah Yat Tian Xia, located at Orchard Central, is positioned as a mass-market, cha chan teng-like (Hong Kong cafe style) alternative to their main restaurant. That's where we ended up for dinner last Saturday evening, treating ourselves to the DBS credit card 1-for-1 promotion on the 7-course set menu at SGD55++.

Chilled lobster salad with diced mixed fruit salad. Done in typical Chinese cold salad style a.k.a mayonnaise heaped over cold cooked seafood (usually prawns) and canned fruit cocktail cubes. This is not usually something that I help myself to at Chinese wedding dinners so I left half of it untouched :-)

Braised sharksfin soup with crab meat in mini claypot. Really a miniature claypot indeed, but the amount of sharksfin (small whole fins) was decent enough, and the broth was also suitably tasty.

Pan-fried fish fillet with special home-made sauce. This got the thumbs-up from the entire table. A simple dish of fish coated in batter and lightly fried, the coating could have been more crispy but the fish was fresh and seasoned just-right, and went very well with the sweet and spicy sauce.

Poached fresh abalone in superior soya sauce. I was expecting something a bit bigger but I suppose one can't complain at this price. Two petit fresh abalone sitting pretty in their shells, braised till tender, this was not bad although the sweetness of the meat that one gets from the larger mollusks was missing. We took back the shells as decoration for the fish tank - the iridescent mother-of-pearl lining was just so pretty!


The last three dishes - braised lettuce, e-fu noodles, and red bean paste with sago - the usual de rigeur dishes for Chinese dinners, were very ordinary. Overall, we had a decent and filling dinner, and my parents-in-law were well pleased, though I think there is better value to be had elsewhere! (For instance, Jing.)