My Choice Chinese Cuisine

C says:

My Choice isn’t a new restaurant – it’s been around for quite a few years. While I cant remember the exact background, I think this place was opened by an ex-chef or owner of Crystal Jade, who decided to introduce wine to Chinese cuisine. The menu at first glance looks like a typical Crystal Jade menu, but on closer inspection, it’s obvious that the dishes are more creative and innovative. What stands out are the various headings that recommend wine pairings for the food, like “Dishes for Red Wine”. Not being whiners (the term A coined, of which he’s so proud), these mean nothing to us but we did see other tables enjoying wines with their food. The restaurant doesn’t impose any corkage either, encouraging you to BYO if you want.

The dishes were are fairly small, so we had four dishes in all and were pleasantly full, Te menu has changed since we were last here, so some favourites weren’t available anymore. Tonight we had the pan fried lamb cubes with sliced garlic, beef cubes with mixed mushrooms, deep fried squid with salted egg yolk and stewed mee pok with meat, eggplant and chilli sauce.

The beef was much more tender than the lamb, but the sliced garlic in the lamb dish packed more of a punch. When we were last here, they had the beef cubes with the sliced garlic, so I’m a little upset that they’ve gotten rid of that dish – it had the best of both worlds. Maybe I’ll ask them to do a special order next time, since they clearly do have both beef cubes and the garlic in the kitchen…

The squid was excellent as usual. It consists of battered and deep fried squid slices, which are then tossed in a mixture of salted egg yolk and melted butter, so that they’re coated with the rich creamy sauce. It’s absolutely heavenly and a must-have whenever I come here.

Finally, we had the mee pok; interesting to have this in a restaurant since mee pok is very much a hawker dish. The noodles were very springy – perfectly al dente – but the dish could’ve been a little spicier. Also, they’ve gotten rid of the ee-fu noodles with mapo tofu that they did so well here. Quite disappointing.

All in all, this was a very satisfying meal for me. A probably didn’t enjoy it half as much as I did (it is Chinese food, after all), but he agreed to come here so too bad, har har. Anyway I’m going to have to savour the experience, because I don’t think A will agree to coming back here again any time soon.

A says:

It wasn’t crowded like the last time we went, which was good for us but bad for them I guess. The main problem I think is the lack of parking in the area. We parked at Valley Point mall and did the 400m walk only because we wanted to check out the ice cream joint there (more on that later). Although the food and service are good, I wouldn’t go so far as to make the walk.

My Choice Chinese Cuisine
419 River Valley Road
Tel: 6333-8328