Moonfish

C says:

Oh dear… this post may upset our friends who recommended the place to us, but I guess we have to be honest. Moonfish is an Italian restaurant in Millenia Walk (although it will be moving to Marina Square in the middle of May), that branched off from its sister restaurant, the better-known Spageddies.

Moonfish tries to differentiate itself from Spageddies by offering more Mediterranean-inspired seafood dishes, but unfortunately it falls short of achieving that goal, and ends up just being ‘Spageddies… now with seafood!’. I guess it didn’t help that the online menu sounded tantalisingly promising, and set our expectations unattainably high for a pseudo-Italian chain restaurant.

The Moonfish escargot, which was described in the menu as ‘snails stuffed in mushroom caps, wood-oven baked in herb garlic butter topped with parmesan cheese’ and which was one of the main dishes that we wanted to try, was disappointingly out of stock that day. So instead, we ordered the Seafood Platter, which was exactly like the Spageddies ones (surprise, surprise), and a Caesar salad, which frankly tasted like the obligatory salad that Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf serves with their sandwiches.

A had the Spaghetti Vongole, which I’ll leave him to tell you about because I didn’t taste it. My main was the Lobster & Chicken, which I thought was severely misrepresented in the menu: ‘lobster and chicken with butter cream sauce’, yet the sauce turned out to be a lot more tomato and a lot less butter cream. The lobster was pretty fresh though, so that was good. The chicken was again uninspired – a hunk of not particularly tender chicken was coated in a salty batter and deep fried. The accompanying aglio olio pasta was again typically Spageddies and so laden with garlic that any other flavours were simply overwhelmed.

I shouldn’t be too harsh though, because if you’re looking for a fairly reasonable place to have ‘localised’ Italian food, and are sick of Spageddies, this is a pretty acceptable alternative. It’s just not up to par with an authentic Italian restaurant, but I guess I shouldn’t even be comparing them.

Anyway, the evening wasn’t all disappointing, because there’s a store called Candy Empire, also at Millenia, which stocks sweets, chocolates, chips and other snacks from all over the world but primarily from Australia. A whole range of Arnott’s Tim Tams, mini Cheezels that are particular to Australia, Burger Rings (what a blast from the past!)… the list goes on and man, was I in heaven! I’m not sure if Moonfish warrants a return visit, but Candy Empire definitely does.

A says:

Food blah. Service blah. Ambience blah. Total waste of time.