No $ignboard

Friday dinner was @ No Signboard in Vivocity with the division.

Seldom feel so un-excited about food. That's how the company can really affects one's appetite. :P Anyway, didn't feel like taking pics so no pics but didn't miss much.

For such a well-known restaurant, I have to say the food is really mediocre. The organiser of the dinner ordered this $499 set for each table (there were three) and we had:-

• lobster salad - seldom get to eat lobster so I'm not complaining. My fav sides of this dish turned out to be the sweet & juicy .... orange! ha! bummer
• shark's fins soup - quite perturbed that the soup is orangy. Its too thick and colleague complained that there weren't any sharks fins and its plain starch. Agree. We left the soup mostly untouched.
• deep fried toufu with minced meat - what's so big deal about this simple fare ? Nothing :P But ok, i luv toufu and minced meat.
  
• steamed fish - the flesh was rubbery. nuff said
• cereal prawn - sinful deep fried prawn with cereals. Think this was one of the rare occassions that I ate so many pieces of prawns. Luv the cereals too ... colleague was warning me about how sinful it is, but do i care ? :P
• noodles - yucky. How wrong can u go with noodles right ? Its not like the most diff dish for a chef to master. But sigh ... you will be surprised. Its horrible. The noodles were almost clumpy, soggy and its just noodles without ingredients!!! ok, i saw another bowl with mushrooms, so i think the waitstaff didn't do a good job in distributing the portions. More about the waitstaff later.
• crabs - that's what No Signboard is all about right ? Sigh, so disappointing. The crab in the chilli crab was soft, a sign of not being fresh ? The white pepper crab was touted to be their signature dish. I'm not a fan of pepper and that strong pepper smell when that dish was presented to us already sorta turned me off. So I guess I'm not a good judge to this dish.

Now to the waitstaff. Two of them. Mr BIG-Man-In-Suit first swiped my head with the lobster when he was carrying the plate away. Eeeks. Later got bumped by him while he walked past. Think I'm just plain suay that day. Whole night I was just busy answering calls from the bosses about some fire that ignited out of an email from a head to the bigger head. Haiz, stupid politics. Anyway, the other waitstaff Mr-BO was way too loaded that night. Poor guy was doing his best but with that many tables to serve, the service definitely fall short. Our plates were only changed once at the start of our meal (after the first dish). Our requests to refill our glasses with warm water were also left unfulfilled. The pot of tea wasn't refilled even though we had overturned the lid. Worst of all, Mr-BO was so busy that he must have perspired and he reeked! I had to hold my breath each time he came near ... that surely did a lot to kill my already waning appetite.

Last but not least, a few of us were quite puzzled by the decor with the black chandeliers (which a colleague commented to be gothic) with golden dragons that coiled round the big pillar in the middle of the restaurant. The whole decor just seemed so confused.

I recalled how i used to enjoy my meals at the branch at Pasir Panjang. I thought the crabs there were pretty good. And I also patronised the branch at Geylang and my friends and family also enjoyed the food there. But this more up-market branch has definitely not lived up to its name (it has in my opinion tarnished the name though).

Will I visit this branch again? Not likely in the near future, unless someone convinced me otherwise.