Couple of months ago a friend told me about the weekend afternoon tea at Hotel Jen Tanglin.
Tell the truth, I was surprised.
I had completely forgotten that their afternoon tea buffet was available year round, even now, at Christmas time, and not just during the (mutually) patriotic month of August every year.
One very cool thing about the restaurant here is that the food's halal.
That makes a difference, really, because for the longest time there didn't seem to be a lot of halal hotel buffets here on the island, save for this well known one on Scotts Road, and I'd always wondered why.
Yes, there's no pork and there's no wine, but oy, we're in the age where there's chicken char siew pau and chicken siew mai, and there're plenty of alcoholic-free beverages to go around.
Perhaps that's where the charm of high tea comes in.
I don't know anyone who takes wine or beer or champagne at tea time.
But I do know that everyone and anyone can have a coffee, a tea, a teh tarik, a fruit punch, a peach tea, a rose drink.
And that's one of the things we took this afternoon during our meal.
My friend (surprise of surprise) helped himself to a big mug of thick, sweet teh tarik.
I, for some reason, hovered all around the drink dispensers until I decided I wanted a rose syrup drink (without the milk, so it wasn't bandung) and got myself a glass.
You'd be really mistaken if you thought that the food here wasn't good.
No, on the contrary, everything was very well prepared.
Here at Jen65 they had specific cuisines at various counters all around the restaurant.
On one side they had the salads and fruits fresh and cold.
On the other side they had the sushi and the soba (if I'm not wrong).
There was the cooked food side where you got soups, you got pasta and mashed potato and even stir-fried vegetables done Chinese style.
There were the appetizer type of bites, then near to the show kitchen there were the briyani rice, the mee goreng, the satay
Especially all the spicy spicy local dishes that tend to make an adjusted palate and adjusted appetite feel very, very heavy when they're eaten elsewhere.
I don't have to worry about feeling jerlak when eating the mee goreng here.
In fact, so clean-tasting are the noodles that I can have more than one portion, and this afternoon, I went for two. Best thing I liked about these noodles was that I could taste the spice, but didn't find them overwhelming, nor too uncomfortable.
On the same plate I took a couple sticks of chicken satay.
Eating them kosong style, sans the peanut sauce, there was a bit of sweetness to the meat, they were fun to eat (as all satay sticks are) and they tasted good.
One of the dishes that we took a lot of this afternoon was crab laksa, done our way and done our style.
It wasn't just the crab that was attractive.
The offering included a lot of mussels, prawns, and some other chilled seafood which we eyed but went more for the crab instead.
Of course having crab laksa style meant much more effort on our part, but prawns fill you up, neither of us wanted mussels, and fresh crab meat seemed (by calculation) to be the most worth.
Obviously that meant that my friend had to get in all the cracking and the hammering, but- with some help from the makcik wait staff- got into the hang of things pretty fast and we worked together where he hammered open the shells and I pulled out the meat with either fork or chopsticks.
Into this bowl of laksa soup all the meat went, and even though you can't see it, it was smooth, tasty, good, and we slurped it up by the spoonfuls.
All that effort made one very hungry though, so in between watching my friend hammer out the crab, I went for another plate that had some of the food I had been wanting to try the first round.
There was this spinach quiche which I had been eyeing.
There was a fried ham and cheese toast that had been cut into long rectangles and which, simple as it was, tasted pretty good.
And I got myself some mashed potato simply because I'm not the kind who can resist trying (even a little bit) of mashed potato when I see one.
Maybe the quiche would have felt cozier on the palate had I been able to eat it warm, but what with dividing my time between the laksa, the quiche, and the mashed potato, some parts of the quiche were warm, others, unfortunately, felt a bit cold.
Still I liked the spinach.
Spinach, like pumpkin and boiled soupy leafy vegetables, is one of my favorite vegetables.
I like it for its distinctive taste, its mushy mushy feeling on the tongue, and the dark green color that makes one feel somewhat calm.
The mashed potato too was pretty good.
I wish I had taken a bit more and eaten it fast.
But there were still other foods I wanted to try.
Like the soon kueh, the kueh pie tee and a piece of char siew sou that, well, made me wish I had gone for the soon kueh instead.
You know, I had thought that soon kuehs would only be appreciated by those familiar with it.
Guess what, I could not be more wrong.
The tray of soon kuehs was almost empty by the time I got there, and right behind me, a lady (whose soon kueh is not in their dining culture) took three, ladling out a generous amount of sweet sauce.
Small and simple though they might be (really, just glutinous flour wrapped around turnips- nearly tasteless) these little kuehs had a most lovely boing boing chew when you bit into it.
But it were the kueh pie tee that I fancied though.
First of all, it is really hard to find kueh pie tee outside.
I mean, you have to get the pastry cups, you have to prepare the ingredients, you have to lay them out nicely and you have to ensure that they're all prettily done to the right proportions.
Lazy lar.
I'm more chin chai when it comes to ingredients, just so as long as there're those that I like.
So this afternoon, instead of the usual mix of ingredients- the turnips, the finely chopped hard boiled egg, tiny prawn, everything- I filled the little cup with just the hard boiled egg, the parsley (a lot of it), the sesame seeds, and a little bit of sweet sauce.
That was it.
Nothing more.
I liked it better this way.
I didn't have to worry about the ingredients falling out when I bit into the cup.
I didn't have to think about the prawn sliding off the turnip or the parsley entangling itself with the prawn.
Best of all, because I hadn't put in any of the warm, moist turnip, the pastry stayed dry and crunchy and crispy till the end.
So nice was this combination that I went for Round 2 of kueh pie tee, taking on the fruits of dragon fruit and watermelon this time.
After that came dessert.
One cannot come to an afternoon tea and not have sweet cakes or anything of the sort.
So there was a plate which held three cream puffs (or profiteroles), a mango (or is it passionfruit) mousse cake, a kueh lapis (too difficult to resist) and what I think is a lemon curd cake.
Then there was another plate which held more cake, of strawberry mousse sponge, more of the lemon curd cake (or is it something else), and then little cubes of Oreo cheesecake.
I didn't get to try the nyonya kuehs or the pudding or the scones or the ice creams.
A bit silly lar, I know, I also don't know why.
Instead we tried making our own version of ice kachang where we ground the ice, dumped a whole lot of gula melaka syrup, and ladled some chocolate over it whilst waiting for it to freeze up a la McDonalds ice cream cone style.
Hey, it worked.