Hai Tien Lou @ Pan Pacific

As it's been a long time since Stevie's ah ma and us went out for a nice meal, Stevie decides to bring ah ma out for dim sum when aunt say she might not be cooking on saturday.

The restuarant that came to my mind is Hai Tien Lou as i was browsing through the web recently and saw quite a number of good comments on the restuarant.

We ordered the usual dim sum items, tried their Deep-fried sea perch wrapped in vermicelli, crispy glutinous rice and finally the famous and highly recommended Hai Tien Lou Trio of Treasures.

My favourites: Si-Chuan style dumpling and Deep-fried sea perch wrapped in vermicelli.

And....the rest is Disappointing. It is probably the worst dim sum restuarant i have eaten. Usually when i am trying to compare restuarants, i will have my doubt as to which restuarant or which items taste better in the different restuarants. But without much thought, Hai Tien Lou just did not make the cut compared to the other dim sum places i have been.

The steam shrimp dumpling which is my favourite dim sum item was just terrible. The shrimp is lacks the bouncy texture and the dumpling skin sticks all around my teeth after chewing them. The steam carrot cake is not as nice compared to Wah lok and Victor's kitchen.

The pan fried rice flour roll is also not as tasteful as Victor's Kitchen.

Lastly the Trio treasure, prawn is not bouncy and the deep fried flour is soo hard, we had to cut the prawn up into mini pieces for ah ma to eat. The duck skin is crispy, the meat is tough and since there is no sauce to go with the duck, the meat taste quite bland. The crab meat marinated in sake is ok.

Was there too high expectation due to all the great comments on the web? I doubt so.
Maybe everyone is just too pre-occupied with the 37 floor view that the restuarant offers. Well, when the mood is good everything taste good as well.