I like visiting Marina Bay Sands. For one, I love the spaciousness and natural lighting of the place. Even on crowded weekends, there are stretches of the mall which are still quiet. And even though I hardly buy anything from the stores because most of the stores are high-end stores, I do frequent the F&B outlets quite a bit. There’s also the Art-Science Museum, which gives a vibe unlike any other museum in Singapore. I feel like I’m visiting an overseas museum whenever I’m there. It certainly helps that there’s a cafe at the Art-Science museum now, because I always like to have a cuppa after a visit to the museum when I’m overseas. I could tell you more about it but that’s another story for another day.
Today, the story will be about the recently revamped RISE Restaurant buffet that we visited to celebrate my mother’s birthday. Oh this is not a media invite, if you were wondering. If you’ve been to the previous iteration of RISE, you’ll realise from the pictures that the decor has all changed. The restaurant looks even more spacious now, thanks to a better seating layout. Yet despite the size, many tables are round booth seats, so you feel cosy and cocooned off from the rest of the restaurant. You will also see hues of emerald blue, jade green, light ash timber and bronze for a touch of elegance. Spend some time to look at the hand-made tiles on the buffet counter facades, which pays homage to Southeast Asian culture.
A total of 8 open-concept kitchens, with “live cooking stations” so more food can be served up fresh.
Rise Restaurant at Marina Bay Sands has been open for a couple of years now. I’m sure most buffet fanatics out there would have tried this buffet by now. I’ve dined at Rise Restaurant on a couple of occasions but they were always ala carte orders. So I decided the time was ripe to take my parents for a nice lunch at Rise Restaurant. I was pleasantly surprised by the pricing. $49++ for weekend lunch buffet makes Rise Restaurant a very value-for-money buffet, don’t you think? This is especially when you consider the size of the spread.
Even though I look like I’ve been gorging on buffets quite often these past few months, the truth is that I haven’t actually gone for a lunch or dinner buffet in about a year! All the previous buffets you’ve read about on this blog this year were Afternoon Tea buffets, which ahem, is quite different from a lunch/dinner buffet!
I’m a sucker for pretty desserts. The dessert display at Rise Restaurant is definitely worthy of being part of an Afternoon Tea buffet. My idea of a good afternoon tea dessert display is that it has to be whimsical and eye-popping.
I am not one to eat desserts before mains, but when it comes to posting pictures, who’s to say we can’t post pictures of cakes and sweet treats first?
The other day, thanks to a conference I had to attend, I finally made my maiden trip to Marina Bay Sands. The Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre was just awesome. It was as grand as can be. Everything looked so polished, the whole place looked so humongous and spacious, and even the doors looked 3 times my height.
On the 4th floor where my conference was held, you could look out onto the Singapore River and at all the buildings along Shenton Way. For the 1st time in my life, I could actually see Singapore from an angle that just 1 year ago did not exist! It was just a very awesome and inspiring feeling, and if I as a Singaporean can feel this way, imagine what it would be like for all the foreign delegates. I have no doubt that we now have one of the finest convention centres in the world.
A friend who works at MBS went to London for a holiday recently. He commented that Big Ben was not as impressive as MBS. I’d thought he was joking because how can something so steeped in history be compared to MBS? I may still disagree with him but I can certainly now understand why he felt so.
I have one advice for MBS though, do something to the noisy doors! Every time a delegate leaves the conference, the door slams shut loudly. If there were a bad speaker, half the room would leave in boredom, the other half would leave in irritation at the noise from the slamming doors.
Anyway….that was the Convention Centre. After the conference, we tried out the Rise Restaurant. There was the buffet going on, but after all the canapes I had at the conference, I wasn’t too keen on a full fledged buffet, at $70+ no less! Decided to go local in the end.
Nasi Goreng – It was not bad, but I think the hawker centre nasi goreng is far better. Only the satay was good enough to have to pay hotel prices for local food. The peanut sauce was also very flavourful and crunchy.
Hainanese Chicken Rice – Shockingly, this was quite bad. The rice was only warm, and it felt mushy. There was no fragrance to the rice, the type you’d expect when eating chicken rice. The chicken fared only slightly better. It’s a disaster if you ask me. The only thing good there is the soup and the sliced cucumber. Hotels always charge an arm and a leg for local food, so at the very least, I expect them to deliver a pretty good meal. If you had me blindfolded, I would not have guessed that this was produced by a chef working in a hotel.
Conclusion: I was awed by the Convention Centre, and brought back to earth by the Rise Restaurant.