Jumbo's Joys - The Restaurant's Seafood, Drink, and Service

Jumbo Joys
Jumbo seafood restaurant on Singapore's East coast is a good place for group meals, big and bustling. The premises are huge but it is also hugely popular. So, you must book a table.

Food
I am allergic to shellfish, so to save wasting my time and the waiters' time, and risking making a mistake, I read the menu online in advance.

What about the food! And the prices? When I had sussed out the menu online and saw that you paid extra for Chinese tea, which I don't drink, and peanuts, which ruin my diet. So the other diners had the tea but I refused offers of both tea and peanuts.

I am allergic to shellfish but my chicken dish came up first. It was very good, just right.

Crab at Jumbo seafood restaurant, Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

The others liked their crab. "A bit dry and tough, but it is a living animal and that is how that one was. The flavour was fine and we would go there again."

We also had fish, garoupa, Hong Kong style, with soy sauce.

The cheeks are supposed to be the best part. I tried it, just a bite of fish flesh in round shape, but it did not strike me as significantly different to the rest of the fish.  So I shall happily let the others take this so-called delicacy next time.

Our vegetable was Kan Kong, water spinach in English. (The other well-known vegetable dish in Singapore and different to England's food is Kai lang.)

Prosecco, sparkling white wine from Treviso, Italy. Photo by Angela Lansbury

Drink
Our guest ordered a bottle of Prosecco for us to share. Tall glasses to enclose the bubbles. An ice bucket to keep it at the right temperature. Just right.

Service Slips
We had made a booking so we eventually got past the queue of people without reservations. At the front on the unwelcome desk I spotted the restaurant address cards and toothpicks. The staff are too busy to chat or smile. That's good. We want our table.

Joy of joys, by chance we are beside the fish tanks.

Lots of servers rushed to and fro. Seems like their first language is Mandarin and our Mandarin is even less than their English. This lead to a few misunderstandings, but they quickly brought up whatever needed.

Service Scores Well
The restaurant provided bibs. They packed up our leftovers. On two occasiona I heard recordings of Happy Birthday to you sung for birthday groups.

Best Bargain
Most of the dishes come in three sizes, small, medium and large. The prices are proportional with no savings on large sizes, so you could order a small and order a second platter of your favourite dish if it is not large enough and you don't mind waiting.

You will double the size of your bill if you keep ordering large sizes and adding more dishes.

The best bargain was the dessert. Five dollars for yam. One branch online offered durian. I did not see that at Jumbo in November.

The others were in a hurry to leave, with one of our group catching a cruise ship to Australia the next day. So I had the yam wrapped up to take away. No problem.

Verdict
When we left, nobody said goodbye and thank you and please come again. You need a small family-owned Indian restaurant for that, in Little India. But if you want authentic local Singaporean Chinese food, on the seaside, with the bonus of watching live fish, Jumbo is the place.

"Would you go back to Jumbo?" I asked my host.
He replied, "I've been back many times!"

Useful Websites
Jumbo Seafood Restaurants Around The World
https://www.jumboseafood.com.sg/en/home
https://jumboeshop.com.sg/eshop/


Singapore flag.

Singapore Airlines
singaporeair.com

About the author, Angela Lansbury.
Travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please bookmark your favourite posts and share links with your friends and family

For text and pictures on the ambience including my favourite photo of the anxious fish, see previous post headed Jumbo Seasfood Restaurant - Ambience and Aquarium.

East meets west in the Trump and Kim Jong-Un Lunch Menu

Problem
What could I learn, or try, from the menu enjoyed by Trump, and Kim Jong-Un, two top world leaders in the news? I'll give you my Western and British view of this meal choice. Although I have lived in the USA, and Singapore, and been to south Korea and Korean restaurants in London, England and Korea, I have my own biased viewpoint.

Answers
Starters
Prawn cocktail is an old favourite in the UK from the 1960s. Good.  Avocado salad is a modern salad, with tasty and filling avocado supposedly having health benefits as well as tasting subtly good. Yes, that's ok by me.

I must pass on the octopus as I'm allergic to shellfish.  Although I used to eat prawn cocktail, I got caught out by Pacific Prawns and crab.

Main Courses
Beef rib was served with Red wine sauce on the side because Trump doesn't drink. That suits me, too. I am not keen on alcohol in food. A waste of good alcohol. Masks the true flavour of good meat.

Desserts
Chocolate tart.
Ice cream. Vanilla - sounds a bit dull, but I bet it really tasted of vanilla. Cherry coulis. That means cherry sauce. Bright colour to contrast with white ice cream and sharp flavour.
Can't go wrong with chocolate and ice cream. (Any refreshing fruit - well, they did have the cherry sauce?)

Kim Jong-un is keen on Western alcohol.
For me, no wines.  If I were him, I think I'd rather have a take home gift of alchol. When you are meeting a world leader on camera, discussing nuclear weapons which could blow up the world. getting drink, drunk, tipsy, is not a good idea.

It sounds like a good meal, with enough mixture of the familiar and the special and surprising.

Website
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44447714 - the menu from the BBC

Author

More Welsh Animals, from a cranky crab to a dog with a key

Problem
How do I remember Welsh words for animals?

Answers
Make unusual mental pictures.

Welsh - English
anifail - animal (both start with ANI but the Welsh animal fails to be human or English)
cranc - crab (think of a cranky crab; both words start with CRA; the letter c follows b)
ci - dog (imagine a dog carrying a key)
llew - lion (both start with the letter l, think of Leo the lion; vowels aE IOu - l l e w)

English - Welsh
animal - anifail
crab - cranc
dog - ci
lion - llew

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages. Please share links to your favourite posts. 

Bangers Restaurant near Moorgate station on the Met line in London

Bangers Restaurant, only a few steps from Moorgate station on the Metropolitan line, turn the corner and it's on the next corner across the road.

In a basement, but surprisingly large, with lots of rooms and nooks.

Service
Warm and friendly staff. They serve wine and food until late at night, starting with breakfast at 7.30 am with free coffee.

Decor
One of the main rooms has white walls, black ironwork and wooden floor, tables and dining chairs. All brightened by the electric lights, and small and large candles.

If you want to snuggle up on a sofa, they've got that.

Want red to wake you up at breakfast time? You can have that.

Just want to stand at a bar? They've got that? Plus a barrel or two.

Private Side Rooms And Alcoves

English Food
Bangers and mash is the traditional English comfort food of sausages with mashed potatoes. They have two side rooms using the name Cumberland, which is a kind of sausage.

But we ordered much grander food for dinner in the evening. We were a wine society group enjoying a dinner where we were allowed to serve our own wines. I presume there's either a room hire or a corkage fee, not sure.

Starters - Smoked Salmon, Crab
My starter was a very tasty and smooth smoked salmon enhanced with thin slices of radish. I'd never tried radish before. It looks pretty and adds a refreshing bite. Others in my group had crab starter. Two of our group of about twelve were allergic to crab and chose smoked salmon instead.

Main Course - Duck
The main course was duck with potatoes - and watercress and green beans.

Cheese
Our dessert was the cheese board. Two generously large slides of cheese, with octagonal crisps biscuits in three colours, dark, light and medium. The cheeses were tasty a softish blue cheese which I made the mistake of eating first, because after it the other yellow cheese seemed like a tasteless cheddar. I would have preferred portions half the size and three cheeses or better still four cheeses.

Looking at my picture I recall that the cheese and biscuits came with three grapes and some tasty sweet chutney.

Water, Service and Loyalty Card
Our deal included water, sparkling or still. Staff were always around. Somebody to point the way to the ladies. Somebody to fetch toothpicks. Somebody to get me still water instead of sparkling. Somebody to find me a loyalty card.

Coffee and Chocolates
The restaurant was able to provide a decaffeinated coffee.You might expect this everywhere. However, during the last year I was at a restaurant which did not have decaffeinated coffee.
With coffee we were served orange flavoured chocolate segments.

In case you are curious as to what we drank, two sparkling starter wines, one from Tesco, perfectly acceptable, and another which most people thought was even better. After several Saint Emilion reds, provided from the collection by our wine club group organiser, far too much to drink, we ended with his own port wine.

Prices
I was going to give you a section of prices, then I thought, I don't have time to type all this. So I took a photo of both sides of the menu.

This was for May 2016. For seasonal items and updates check out their website.

In addition to the Bangers menu which you can read on line, they have a daily special written on a board.
Eldon House | 
2-12 Wilson Street, London EC2M 2TE, England
Tel:020 7377 6326 

http://www.davy.co.uk/wine-bar/bangers/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangers_and_mash

Toilets And Amusements
A trip to the toilets revealed more decor. I saw one downstairs toilet for Ladies where the cubicle door has the amusing line: Take a seat.  It is a framed advertisement for their restaurant, but an amusing location for it.

Every time I turned a corner I found something new. It wasn't until late at night when most people had gone that I noticed these creatures, fish, birds and animals.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, researcher, speaker.

Please label buffet dinner dishes to help those with diets and allergies

I am looking forward to attending a buffet dinner but will it contain things I should not eat? Many people need to know, anybody who is vegetarian, seeking kosher or halal food. Also anybody likely to get stressed mentally by certain foods, such as sheep's eyeballs, frog's legs, horsemeat, brains, testicles, haggis, dog, monkey! 

Others have intolerance (feel nauseous) or a full blown allergy (ranging from a rash to trouble breathing and fainting) to dairy food, tannin in red wine, gluten, nuts, strawberries and shellfish.

I'm sure your food will be delicious so I hope to taste as much variety as possible.

But I have previously ended up in hospital after a bad experience eating what I thought was pink salmon but it turned out to be crab.

I can happily eat smoked salmon, whitefish such as trout and cod and plaice, but if I accidentally eat shellfish I am likely to develop a rash like chickenpox. My face swells up. I have trouble breathing. I vomit for 24 hours - I want to prevent this!

If you are running a restaurant, hotel or club buffet, including a pot luck dinner in a private home, please could you label any dish containing shellfish, crustaceans (crawling things with shells), molluscs (things with wavy arms): eg crab, Pacific prawns, shrimps, oysters, octopus. 

I am allergic to crustaceans and shellfish.

I can recognise a large crab and a plate of pacific prawns.

But I don't want to eat: rice containing hidden prawns/shrimps; nor meat in oyster/fish sauce. Other worries are unidentifed contents of sushi; surf and turf; prawn crackers; canapes and vol au vents with white sauce which looks like mushrooms but contains shellfish, crab sticks.

It will save your serving staff a lot of time if they don't have to keep dashing to the kitchen to ask the chefs what's in the food.

Shellfish is the most common allergy so in a large group I will not be the only one.

If your main dishes are normally decorated with shellfish, it would be an advantage to some of your guests to have another plate without the garnish. 

Many thanks. I hope to give your hotel, restaurant or club dinner a glowing report on the internet.

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