V Cuisine     彩晶軒  

I just finished eating here an hour or so ago, for lunch on a Monday. The place was surprisingly busy-- first of all, it's Monday, and second, Nina Tower is generally pretty empty. But V Cuisine was maybe 2/3rds full-- and it's not a small restaurant. So be forewarned: it's popular, and you'll probably have to wait if you're going on the weekend.

The normal dim sum menus don't have any English on them, so they gave us a separate sheet of paper with English selections. I suspect that the selections were more limited on our menu, but, y'know, I'm glad they had a menu for us at all.

Here's what we had: Shanghai-style soup dumplings, chiu chow dumplings, red bean cakes, stir fried Malay style green beans with pork, and deep fried fish. A few thoughts:

Soup dumplings (4): tasty enough, but pretty unremarkable. Either the broth or the dipping sauce was too vinegar-y. Eat them fast because they cool off quick (but don't burn yourself!). 6/10

Chiu Chow dumplings (3): I'd never seen something like this. The dumplings contained a variety of intriguing ingredients, like peanuts and water chestnuts, in pretty big chunks. I found them hard to pick up with my chopsticks because they tended to just break open and fall apart. They came with chilis in oil for a dipping sauce-- but good luck dipping them if you can't hold them. Fun to try, but mediocre. 6/10

Red bean cake: this was my favorite: a sticky dumpling skin, crispy and fried on one side, and filled with red bean paste in the middle. Sweet and savory all at once. Kind of like the red bean sesame balls... except not in a sesame ball. Recommended. 9/10

Malay style green beans: If you think 'Thai' when you read 'Malay' here you won't be far off. Crunchy, wok-seared green beans with highly seasoned, fragrant, slightly spicy pork. I liked it. 8/10

Fried fish: The breading on the fish tasted like the sort of cornmeal breading you get on catfish in the southern US. I can't say for sure that it was cornmeal and not something like it. The fish was also very catfish-like in texture. If you like fried catfish, this is great-- there were a bunch of bones in it though-- excellent taste but hard to eat. 7/10

In general, I thought the food was great, and it was $175 for the two of us, which is very reasonable. Like I said, go on a weekday if you don't want to wait. Overall impression: 7/10

Two people had:
蘿蔔酥: so so.

蝦餃: OK.

黑魚子燒賣: nothing special

珍珠雞:" very poor. much fat inside. no other things. very oily.

veg: so so.

the service is poor. we ordered the tea for three times. not cheap. need to wait for quite long time on Sun. black-listed

Had 3 dishes (between 2 ppl):

六頭鮑魚 was the starter ($128)....nice and tender, but it was obviously 罐頭鮑魚 and not actual dried abalone. Of course at that price I wouldn't expect dried abalone.

西檸煎雞 ($88) was not bad...not as buttery as "some other restaurant" famous for this dish but I prefer this less buttery taste.

三鮮窩巴 ($138) was made with a tomato soup base. Good ingredients with no cheap fillers like squid. Only problem was that it took 45 mins to arrive despite the fact that the captain kept checking our orders to see what hasn't been served.

For the deco and food, price is quite reasonable.