Super expensive dinner at Pine Court (The Mandarin Singapore)

After all the seafood dinner trips to the Long Beaches and Jumbos, we had decided to spare the crabs some thoughts and have our celebration dinner at Pine Court at The Mandarin Singapore. I have expected the dinner to be expensive, but not THAT expensive...

Upon sitting down, as usual the waitress asked what we would like for drinks. But unusually, everybody were individually charged for our individual small pots of exclusive Chinese tea with exclusive names like 東方美人 and of course exclusive prices as low as S$4.

While waiting for the dishes to be served, we searched the table for the usual small dishes of peanuts, but they were nowhere to be found. No, there was no macadania nuts or almonds in replacement either. Instead we were each served a small bowl of one 2X2X1cm rice cracker with even smaller mushrooms and carrot cubes in sweet and spicy sauce. One of our German friends was surprised to find out that Chinese food can be as small portion as the French food. Oh well... I think we're giving them some wrong impressions...

After that were the usual dishes - cold dish, clear sharks' fins soup (okay, at least this was served in a bigger portion), Peking duck, sweet and sour crab, fish, vegetables, noodles and dessert.

Actually IMHO, the Peking duck was not really worth it. First of all, the duck was skinned 25m away from our table, so our German friends didn't get to see the skinning process, no matter how skillful the chef was. Secondly, only eleven slices of skin was sliced from the duck. Hmm... either the duck was underage or it went for some slimming course? Thirdly, the whole duck-skin-in-pancake dish didn't taste as nice. There was too little sauce and the pancake skin was rather tasteless. And lastly, the secondly dish cooked out of the duck - stir fried sliced duck meat - was suspiciously small portion as well. Oh and of course, the expected duck soup brewed from the bones was nowhere to be found. It is disappointing that till now, none of the Peking duck I'd tried in Singapore could beat the one I tried at Hong Kong's 北京樓.

The dessert arrived at our table dramatically, with smoke (due to dry ice) rushing out from the bottom of the dish. It was 楊枝干露, my favourite dessert! But maybe because serving just the usual 楊枝干露, which consists only of pomelo pulps in mango juice, is really too cheap for such an expensive meal, a lump of lemon/lime sorbet was placed in it. But IMHO, it just didn't go well.

Finally, the bill... We asked if there was any discount for any credit cards and we were told that we could use UOB cards for 10% discount. But... somehow, only selected items were discounted and that discounted amount totalled to less than S$5... and in the end the total bill was more than S$700... Wow...