PUBLISHED October 27th, 2017 05:00 am | UPDATED March 14th, 2018 04:03 pm
At City Nomads, we’ve seen countless reinterpretations of Cantonese cuisine – that is to say, the cuisine of China‘s Guangdong Province – and nearly all of them manage to excite our intrinsic love for Chinese food time and time again. The recent menu relaunch at Holiday Inn Singapore Atrium’s Xin Cuisine Chinese Restaurant by the new Executive Chinese Chef Chan Shun Wong did the same thing. With a glass of wine in hand, he does a quick toast with us before slinking back into his kitchen to get the meal started.
After acquiring decades of experience in his city of Hong Kong, the chef takes up his new role with plenty of vigour. His style? Less traditional, more modern and artful. We are served an elegant appetiser of Stir-fried Assorted Mushrooms with White Truffle Oil ($10), beautifully-plated with capsicums, flowers, and microgreens. Straw, black, and maitake mushrooms are stir-fried and finished with a touch of fragrant truffle oil – simple, balanced, and texturally intriguing. There is the restaurant’s signature Home-style Roast Duck with Tea Leaves ($32), first smoked with aromatic pu er, chrysanthemum, and jasmine leaves and then roasted for a crisp skin and tender flesh that slides on the tongue.
Chef Chan’s Deep-fried Prawns coated with Yuzu Mayonnaise ($26) is reminiscent of the once-popular ’salad prawns’ that you’d find in many a tze char stall around Singapore, but it is much better. Fried to a marvellous light crisp, the batter complements the juicy whole prawns that it encases, and then some housemade yuzu mayo and fresh yuzu top it up for a zing. He also does a Stir-fried Wagyu Beef Cubes dish ($36) with black pepper, which sounds standard enough if not for the longans that he adds. The natural sweetness from the tender Australian meat, spicy kick from the pepper, and some tanginess from the tropical fruit make for an excellent match.
Several cuisines, including the Italians and French have been putting clams in wine since time immemorial, and the Chinese have their own version too. In this case, it is the Poached Clams, Xin Cuisine Style ($22). Cooked with preserved vegetables, shredded, bamboo pith, and a dash of premium Chinese wine, it really is quite difficult to put down the spoon on this one. Equally heartwarming is the Poached Rice with Seafood ($14), and you can mix in the rice (brown and aromatic) on your own to soak up the superior broth, resulting in a harmony of lovely textures – crisp rice, scallops, prawns, and compoy.
Even you’re not usually one for desserts, you really should try the Chilled Mango Coulis and Hashima ($18) – rich and sweet mango sauce served in a small pumpkin and accompanied with a freshly-fried red bean pancake. Granted, it’s not a new dessert, but it is perhaps the best there is.
Xin Cuisine isn’t the fanciest Chinese restaurant out there, nor is the best, but we’ve never been disappointed with a meal here. Whatever they do, which is quality modern Cantonese fare, they do it well enough to keep people coming back – and with a new chef and menu, that includes us.
Xin Cuisine Chinese Restaurant is located at 317 Outram Rd, Holiday Inn Singapore Atrium, Singapore 169075, p. +65 6731 7173. Open daily 12pm – 2.30pm, 6.30pm – 10.30pm.