One Last Hurrah at Asia Grand Restaurant

The BFF arbitrarily reserved a table for a dim sum lunch at Asia Grand Restaurant weeks before they announced the closure at Odeon Towers and the last day of operations is on February 15. We didn't know, of course, and we were happy to have scored one last meal here. There hasn't been an update about a new location by now. Acccck. Gosh, please don't close permanently. We'll miss their food LOADS, and the staff too. 

From January 24 to February 15, the restaurant serves only festive set menus, no dim sum at lunches or weekends. We won't bother coming here for dinners. We're not that keen on its a la carte dishes. Say, duck — you won't be coming here if you have a craving for good Peking duck or roast duck. However, Asia Grand remains my all-time favorite restaurants for lunch and 'dim sum'. I don't really take a lot of dim sum per se since those involves prawns and wayyy too much bao. But the other dim sum dishes Hong Kong style, yes I do. They've somehow gone less oily over the years, went slightly lower on salt, but never compromising on the flavors of the dishes. 

The BFF was only here for the har gau and siew mai, and laap mei fan (蝦餃、燒賣和臘味飯). I bravely added another pot of rice to it — a pork rib and chicken feet (家常港式風抓排骨飯). I do enjoy how they do it here. She randomly added char siew cheong fun and other small items since we had more stomachs at the table to share the food. The kitchen didn't boil up their famous pig stomach soup today. SAD. I really love their iteration. Thankfully I can still find good versions of this soup elsewhere. It's the claypot rice that's going to be a problem. It's hard to find one with such homemade flavors and not oily af. Back to my hunt of decent Hong Kong style claypot rice in Singapore. 

I was in the mood for fish and a bit of soup, so I ordered the dace fishball soup (石鍋魚湯鯪魚球). It was gorgeous. The man didn't know what the server was saying in Cantonese, couldn't read the Chinese words on the menu, but happily ordered an item that we didn't know what it was till it arrived. OH. It was a small portion of steamed fish head with black bean sauce (鼓汁蒸魚雲). It was a cheek of Song fish, the Asian Big Head Carp. Not bad at all! We were soooo stuffed, but we squeezed in dessert of gui ling gao (龜苓膏) for me and orh nee for the rest.