When you can only have your meal at 3pm, there are limited choices as most restaurants do not have all day dining. To make matters worse, if you simply want some good hot soup, there aren’t many options around. Imperial Treasure Steamboat serves up to 4:30pm for lunch, so we headed there.

They have set menus and out of convenience, we ordered a $88.00++ set, with a soup upgrade to Ginseng Chicken Soup for an extra $20.00++. I find this top up rather ridiculous as the list price for Ginseng Chicken Soup is only $25.00++ and the default soups to be $15.00++.

Anyway, it was quite a spread and very filling.

The condiments are an at extra $2.00++ per person. I liked the sze chuan pepper chilli sauce but before I was done with it they took the entire tray away. I find that quite ridiculous, as they charged us but didn’t let us have it throughout.

I think if I could redo it, I’d go for ala carte and do without the fish & seafood, as it wasn’t the freshest. I would rather have more meat. The meat here is US marbled beef and Kurobuta pork, both were quite tender and soft. There was plenty of vegetables to make this a healthy meal. I quite liked the meatballs and dumplings too. It is so much better than the hard instant sort of meatballs.

Not photographed was the noodles, egg tarts and xiao long bao which we ordered from the dim sum menu. The egg tarts has the same custard as the wonder ones from Imperial Treasure Teochew Cuisine, but the pastry wasn’t that good. It had some smelly oil taste to it. I suspect they took the dim sum from the kitchen of Imperial Treasure Noodle & Congee house at B3, since I had tasted similarly nasty pastry there before. So when you’re here, just go for the steamboat.

It is probably one of the most expensive steamboats I’ve ever had, but to be fair, the soup was good. I overheard the next table commenting that the soup here was better than the outlet at Triple One somerset, so if that’s the case it’s probably a different standard from the other restaurant with the same name. This meal was my only meal for the day too, so in a way, it isn’t that expensive as it settles 3 meals!

*****

Ambience: 8/10

Food: 7.5/10

Value: 6.5/10

Overall: with numerous steamboat places around I can’t say this is the best option, especially with the price tag. But for a hygienic, serene steamboat experience, this is one of them. I didn’t end up with any sort of stomach upset at least!

*****

Imperial Treasure Steamboat Restaurant (ION) 

2 Orchard Turn

#04-09/10

ION Orchard

 

Tel: 66369339 

*****

11am–4.30pm, 6pm–10.30pm