Taste Paradise: Fine dining or just fancy restaurant?

The Paradise Group is a home grown wonder...from a small cze char stall to a rather large conglomerate of restaurants, spanning the range from fine dining to traditional favourites.

The post today is on Paradise's top end offering...their Taste Paradise in Ion offers a fine dining environment, where beautiful decor, impeccable service and excellent food using innovative cooking techniques and ultra premium ingredients are the order of the day.

We started with quite standard fare...a roast pork

Well presented. The meat was tender, tasty, and the skin was roasted to a perfect crisp. Very good sio bak.

Prawns in two styles were presented in a rather unusual way in a martini glass...a la cocktail

Impeccably presented. The prawns were succulent, and fresh. One done with a mango sauce, the other a wasabi sauce.

Paradise is rather famous for their XO carrot cake, so we ordered one

Again excellent. The wok hei was apparent. A tad too much egg, though it tasted heavenly. The XO sauce...a home made speciality from scallops, prawns, dried shrimps, pork, and other ingredients selected by the chef...each XO sauce is different because of the special ingredients used. The radish cake itself was a bit too soft and tender...I wish for a more firm bite on the cake. But the flavours meld well in the palate.

A simple bamboo clam which was well received

Bamboo clams are at once easy to prepare as well as difficult to execute. Easy, because it is usually simply stir fried, or steamed. Fresh clams have a wonderful sweetness that is just so intoxicating. But the cooking time needs to be judged right...just a tad overcooked, and the clams turn tough and spoils the dish. Needless to say, the chef tampered his work very well.

We had the crispy seafood noodles as well

The noodles were faintly aromatic...just nicely so. Very crisply done. The scallops, prawns and mushrooms complement the sauce and the noodles very well.

And a bit of the unusual, though a dish which can be found in some hawker offerings in Malaysia...deep fried ice cream

Ice cream, in this case, I suspect a rather generic type as it did not taste anything special...is encased in a flour shell, which is quickly deep fried. The flour crisps up, and provides the ice cream with a heat barrier while in the deep fryer, and the ice cream remains cold and frozen. The sensation of hot and cold that one experience on the palate is what makes this special. A bit like a molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.

A rather well presented menu, great tasting, if a bit expensive. But definitely a great place to entertain clients or foreign guests to show off our culinary diversity and heritage. Recommended.

Taste Paradise
2 Orchard Turn, #04-07 ION Orchard
Mon–Fri: 11.30am–3pm, 6pm–11pm
Sat–Sun & PH: 11am–4.30pm, 6pm–11pm