| Ting Yuan steamboat at liang seah street | |||
|
| See Also |
|
|
|
Friday, 30 March 2007 Written by alayeska - See all my reviews Top 50 LocalKing Writer |
I had a 25-persons group outing last Saturday and through voting, we decided to eat our dinner at some steamboat restaurant at Liang Seah Street. Quite sometime back, I tried the steamboat from a few doors down Ting Yuan. It was pretty good and I had wanted to go back there but I remembered there wasnt alot of space for us to sit (we had 10 people then), what more for 25 people. So when my friend said Ting Yuan was not bad too, we went ahead with her decision. There was another level upstairs owned by them but the tables were kinda not enough for our huge group, despite the waiter's constant assurance that 25 people can fit in. After about 15 to 20 minutes of squeezing attempts around the 3 or 4 tables, there were still not enough space for us. As a result, 4 of our friends left first cos they had something on right after dinner anyway and I think the time wasted trying to fit all of us in made them have to leave so soon (even before eating!). This dampened our moods a little. After we've settled down, we ordered our steamboat ingredients according to our table seatings and handed the order forms to the waiters. The service was slow as the soup and food was served only after 10 minutes or so. The most irritating thing that happened that night was that the waiter lost my table?s order form! And he only told us that after we reminded him 2 or 3 times that our food is still not served yet and to add oil to the fire, we were starving! A hungry man is an angry man, I tell you and we were really on the verge of flaring up. After more than 30 minutes, he handed us another order form and didn?t sound very apologetic. The service was really, really slow. We requested for iced water and it only came after 20 minutes (not forgetting our constant reminders). My friend who visited Ting Yuan before also commented on the slow serving of iced water. Our lips were burning from the ma la (very spicy) soup and the refilling of iced water took so long, we had to bring the jugs to the waiters to help us refill. In addition, the waiter even forgot to serve the canned drink which one of my friends from my table ordered! The service is terrible. We even complained (that?s what Singaporeans do best haha) to the shop owner. Well, she sounded much more apologetic than her waiters and waived the 5% charge (on either GST or service charge, can?t remember) for us. The food was not bad and had some of the usual variety offered at other steamboat places but there were not a lot of variety compared to those at Marina. However, the price is rather steep - $16.80++ (or $16.80+++) for one person. There might be people out there who didn?t have such bad experience with Ting Yuan, but this was what we met with that day and here I?m sharing it. The decision to patronise them is yours, but I?m never going back there again.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
