No more Casuarina

Am in the lab after an afternoon of mahjong playing at applecow's.

I think MJ fever is spreading like wild fire amongst my friends, and even fatfreddy has gotten into the act too! And not just mahjong either, thanks to my friend HL. It's a good thing he's off skiing next week and not in Singapore for the annual Chinese New Year gambling spree, when every other chinese household in Singapore turns into a mini casino intergrated resort.

Next time, we will need two tables to accomodate everyone nicely. It will be a humourous scene, a mahjong table occupied by one Pinoy (I give up trying to spell Philipino correctly! :P OK.. its F-I-L-I-P-I-N-O), one Ang Moh, an Indian Pakistani and the token manjen, with some of them looking furtively into slips of paper translating the chinese words for the directional tiles and numbers one to ten before deciding which tiles to keep and which to throw out!

After a round which took five hours(!), we adjourned to dinner at the newly renovated Casaurina Prata along Upper Thomson road. And let me put it down on record here:~

This place is over-rated.

S's mee goreng with muttion was not very nice and she could not even plough her way through half of it. My chicken murtabak was OK. I think Zam Zam and Victory make nicer ones. Sometime after placing our orders, we decided that we would also like some fish head curry and I kept emphasizing to the server who took my order that I wanted a small serving, seeing as it was that none of us actually wanted the fish head, but were merely in it for the gravy. He looked as if he understood and went off. In due time, our food arrived, as well as the fish head curry. As he placed it in front of me, the server told me 'this is the smallest we've got'.

Fine. The fish was off just a little bit, but we didn't quite persue the matter, even when the chap came back while we were midway in the meal and asked us if everything was ok. We should have said something about the fish then. Anyway, time for us to get the check and go and I found out that we were being charged $20 for the fish head when it says on the menu that the small serving of fish head was $14. As it turned out, the small serving consisted of half a fish head, and they had run out of small servings and took it upon themselves to give us the large portion without informing us. Feeling rather disgruntled, I went up to the cashier to tell her that we weren't informed of the change in portions and would only be prepared to pay $14 as it was stated on the menu for a small serving. She rang up the server and was told that he had informed us of the no-more-half-fish-head crisis in the kitchen and we had oked the change to the large serving.

What kind of BS was that?? I had five other people who could tell you otherwise! The fish wasn't even fresh! Finally she said, ok.. just pay $16 for the fish head but I said no.. we will pay $14. It really wasn't about the money then, how can any F&B place anyhow suka suka charge us whatever they feel like without even consulting the customer first? In the end she relented because while standing at the cashier counter, I bumped into an acquaintance of mine who incidentally also had some problems with her bill and we talked about what we were standing there for, as you do. It's bad PR for the place.

Suffice to say, Causarina has lost some points with me after this incident. It's no big loss for me, although applecow and BL might have to re arrange their faces or do something equally drastic in order to patronize the place again without the waiters snarling at them or something.

While I'm on the subject of food, here's a place worth plugging; Jeju, a small, nondescript korean restaurant along Seah Street, right next to the Soup Restaurant. Fat Freddy loves the ginseng chicken soup here and everything is reasonably priced, with no taxes included. The chicken soup, for example, costs only $15 and is a portion large enough for two. I also quite dig their vegetable rice dish. The proprieter is this friendly and smiley korean guy and it's a real pleasure dining there. Do check it out!