Review: All You Can Eat at Si Chuan Dou Hua, Parkroyal KL

Si Chuan Dou Hua, the Parkroyal hotel’s Sichuan-and-Cantonese restaurant, serves an all-you-can-eat menu for lunch and dinner everyday (except public holidays) at a relatively economical (but not necessarily rewarding) RM55++ per person. To be fair, it’s difficult to find deals elsewhere that stretch RM55++ this far.

60 Dish Selection

Customers can order from a roughly 60-dish selection that looks promising on paper, featuring plenty of prawns, served steamed

… or deep-fried in kataifi-inspired pastry …

… or with cashews and chili. Each ends up being less than memorable though, whipped up with competence but little complexity or flair.

Prawns in garlic sauce, battered with wasabi mayo and deep-fried with spicy salt, mainly examples of irrefutable quantity over irresistible quality.

Roast chicken. Patrons should probably request dark meat, since the breast and wings provided here border dangerously on dryness.

Chicken braised with black mushrooms, deep-fried with butter and with lemon sauce.

Fish of the evening, with hot bean sauce. Could have been fresher and less muddy-tasting.

Stir-fried beef (a bit mushy in parts) and bean curd all succeed in stuffing the stomach.

Skip the xiao long bao, cursed by the thickest skin we’ve ever seen.

Soup’s up: Eight-treasure with slivers of seafood is worthwhile, while the dumpling soup isn’t.

Seasoned baby octopus and ginger-sauce mushrooms. Service could be more cheerful; also note that dishes can sometimes take a lengthy time (up to half-an-hour) to emerge from the kitchen.

Marinated spicy chilled cucumber and stir-fried vegetables with garlic.

Crispy noodles with shredded chicken. Enjoyable enough, this one.

Dan Dan Noodles, sufficiently flavorful. Perhaps it might be prudent to return someday to sample Si Chuan Dou Hua’s regular a la carte menu instead; that would probably prove more satisfying.

Watermelon and honeydew, Chinese pancakes (too doughy), bean curd with wolf berries, longan with inexplicably nonexistent lotus seeds (served sadly at room temperature instead of cold).

Fortune cookies can be fun, even when they spout nonsense like “You have a potential urge and the ability for accomplishment.”

Be warned that tea costs an extra RM7++ per person, separate from the RM55++ for the food. It’s tasty tea nevertheless, served with stylish showiness.