First Visit to Oriental Spice

After visiting All Spice, my next visit to Kuravankonam area included me visiting this restaurant owned by the same Supreme Baker’s group called Oriental Spice… One of my good friends recommended this place to me knowing how I like the Chinese cuisine…

The place is at the floor right above All Spice and unlike All Spice, the Oriental Spice is a fine dining restaurant that looks beautiful… And of-course, “fine dining” implies an above average budget level…

Even though the friend mentioned only Chinese, turns out the menu has Thai and Malay food as well… Since its my first visit, I thought of going safe and order items I am already familiar with from dining at other restaurants… Hence went for the Lung Fung Soup, Yong Chow Fried Rice and Kung Pao Chicken… As soon as I gave my order, this came to my table:

When I asked, what it is, the waiter said that its chinese green tea… No sugar was added to it… Just the tea served in a tiny chinese style cup.. 🙂 Then ofcourse after a few minutes, came the soup I ordered…

The Lung Fung soup is a variant of the clear soup, but is slightly thicker and has more ingredients in it… In this case, what I ordered is the Chicken Lung Fung soup, which came with chicken and egg and a lot of diced mushrooms, carrot, bell pepper, lemon grass, green onion, spring onion, ginger, garlic, chinese cabbage, bok choy and coriander leaves all seasoned perfectly with salt and pepper in a thickened chicken stock based broth… And the whole soup tasted amazing with the flavours from each of the ingredients…

Then came the Yong (I guess they mean Yeung) Chow fried rice and the Kung Pao chicken…

Unlike the variants of the Yeung Chow fried rice that I have seen before, this one is different as it comes with a combination of rice and noodles, done in a bit of schezwan style with vegetables and protein of your choice, which is either chicken or seafood, of which I took the sea food option… The sea food option came with some pieces of fish and small prawns inside the rice… Mixed feelings about this to be honest… Probably because I didn’t expect the rice to have noodles in them…

The kung pao chicken is by far my favourite Chinese dish that I like to have and so far my favourite version has been the one they serve at the Mandarin Trail… I must say, this one is fairly close to it… That smokey sweet taste from the cashew nuts and peanuts and hot taste from the schezwan chillies in the sauce can really mess with your tastebuds in a good way 🙂 A must try dish if you haven’t had it before 🙂

Although the food tasted great, my only problem with this place is the huge portion sizes which quite frankly borders on to being ridiculous… The size of the soup however was just perfect as they served it in a small bowl… But the rest, were so huge that quite frankly, I struggled to eat half of what was served (the pics don’t really do justice to the dishes in this area)… This was basically my inspiration for my previous post on portion sizes of food served at restaurants… Anyways, on the overall a great place to dine with friends and family if you are into the food from the orient…Personally I am looking forward to trying out the Thai and Malay food when I’ll be visiting there soon… 🙂