Food review 2008 #05 - Forrest @ OrchidVille

We had an outing to the Singapore Zoo today and to settle our hungry stomachs, we dropped by the nearby Mandai AgroTechnology Park for lunch. I had reviews from a forum abt a restuarant located there. It's called Forrest @ OrchidVille.

Visited the website of this restuarant the night before and really liked what I saw. It looked interesting. So there we were ard 2pm.

However, I wasn't too impressed with the interior after I stepped in. It looked rather different from what I saw in the website.

Next the food.... As there's only 5 of us, 2 being my kiddos, we did not order much food. Also been snacking during the zoo visit that made me felt rather full. We finally decided on 4 dishes.

First up.... 蒜泥白肉 (pork slices with garlic sauce). This dish was highly recommended by the forumers so it's a must-try for me. The dish tasted ok... but it wasn't up to my expectation. The portion was rather small tho'. The sauce wasn't too heavy on the garlic taste, as it's mainly chopped garlic mixed with a sweet/sour sauce.

The next dish was mushroom with seasonal green veg. This dish tasted average...altho' the veg looked and tasted rather fresh... the sauce was too starchy for my liking but it went well with rice.

Another speciality of the restuarant was fried chicken wings. When we asked how big the portion will be for the small and the medium, the serving crew told me that small would mean 6 pieces while the medium, 9. We had in mind that 6 pieces would mean the 3-joints of a chicken wing... but we were surprised to see that it was only either the mid-joint with the tail end or the drumstick! So we had only 3 wings with the tailend and 3 drumlets. The fried wings tasted good! the crust was crispy and the flesh juicy. Just that we felt abit shortchanged. Finally we had seafood fried rice. This dish is delicious too. The rice was well-fried and the ingredients generous. There were prawns, egg and crab meat in it. I meant real crab meat. All of us enjoyed this dish.

After the meal, we walked around the place abit. Since it's located at OrchidVille, there was actually retail of orchids... potted and cut ones. The boss of the orchid nursery gave us a short intro and lesson in orchid growing, and I had a good time photographing the beautiful flowers.

My verdict of this place? Well, I won't purposely make my way there... and if I were to go to the zoo or somewhere nearby, I won't be visiting this same restuarant again unless someone specially requested for it.