The Place - Curry Times is Old Chang Kee's new cafe/restaurant concept. Stepping into Curry Times feels like being transported back in time to a Seventies coffee shop with marble topped tables and wooden chairs. It has a casual, laid back,retro vibe with bird cages suspended from the ceiling adding olde world charm, and piped in sentimental Chinese oldies playing softly in the background.

The Food - You won't find Old Chang Kee's signature Curry O (deepfried curry puffs with a wedge of hardboiled egg within) and popular skewered snacks being sold here. Instead, the menu offers a selection of Asian, Peranakan, Hainanese dishes. Curry is the higlight here and we ordered the signature chicken curry which was rich, concentrated, fragrant with generous pieces of chicken thigh and chicken breast. The curry goes so well with plain rice that we finished every morsel and drained the last drop of gravy from the bowl. There is a weekday lunch promotion where each order of chicken curry comes with your choice of side dishes such as Hainanese chap chye, homemade salmon otah, etc and a cup of coffee or tea. After 2pm on weekdays there is a tea time special when their big & yummy chicken curry bun and a cup of coffee/tea costs just $2.50. We will return in a bigger group soon to try their fish head curry and other dishes like spicy chicken wing, ngoh hiang, beef stewThe Prices - Very reasonable with most item& meals priced below $10 - the exception being the fish head curry.

The Service - Cheerful and efficient crew.

The Little Fish Shop is a proprietor managed specialty seafood restaurant in a quiet corner of NEX. The small, dim, cosy restaurant with personalised service makes it a perfect place for a romantic dinner in the heartlands without travelling to town.

We opted for a la carte and ordered a salad & mushroom soup to share. The soup was redolent with the rich taste of fresh buton mushrooms. Free crusty bread was served with an olive oil pesto dip.

Live airflown Boston Lobster is always a treat and I had mine steamed so I could appreciate its fresh taste & texture. The buttery zesty dip was perfect. Companion had his lobster baked in Thermidor style which was rich & filling with cheezy white sauce topping.

The creme brulee dessert was prettily plated & tasted as good as it looked - rich, creamy, smooth. Perfect with their fragrant milky cafe latte.

Popeyes is probably the only place at the Singapore Flyer where one can have a meal for $10. The 2pc Spicy Chicken & Sjora Meal costs $5.20. I added a small/regular coleslaw and dessert for $1.50 each. Popeyes chicken is delightfully crunchy. I was given a piece of fried chicken thigh and a piece of fried chicken breast. Both pieces were juicy & meaty - tasty enough not to need any ketchup or chilli sauce. The biscuit is nice & crumbly - like the scone served for afternoon tea. I paid $1.50 extra for the coleslaw which was fresh & crunchy with a tangy dressing. An extra $1.50 for a delightful dessert of 4 chocolate coated vanilla ice cream nuggets. Like Magnolia's Eskimo Pie ice cream bar that I ate as a kid, but now in an easy-to-eat round nugget form. An adult's happy meal on the first day of CNY.

The Place - Tung Lok Seafood on Level 11 of Orchard Central Mall next to Somerset MRT is fast becoming one of my favourite Chinese restaurants. Besides its convenient location, I like its unpretentious interior unlike Chinois or the Humble House which call for a definite dress code and busy menus that take time to decipher.

The Service - The staff here are experienced so you won't get orders mixed up and unlike the seafood restaurants at East Coast Park, there are no pushy waitresses promoting off-menu 'catch of the day' items at non-transparent prices. Here you get class without the crass service. The staff are pleasant, polite, proactive and service-oriented. Having reunion meal on weeknight ahead of the CNY Eve means we are not restricted to the set menus and having our meals within 2 hour time bands to fit in 3 dinner seatings per night.

The Prices - Usual menu price applies for a la carte orders, with most dishes priced between $18 to $28 per portion. Early birds also have a choice of both regular set menus and special CNY set menus. If you are planning to order mainly live seafood cooked to order, then the set menus offer better value. If you have shallower budgets like us, then pick several a la carte items for a no less satisfying meal.

The Food - Tung Lok's kitchens deliver consistently high standards and this restaurant is no exception. All the seafood dishes we had that night were fresh and delicious.

The yusheng here thankfully did not have too much of the glaringly coloured pickled ginger & the salmon sashimi for the yusheng are sliced more generously than other Chinese restaurants like Lei Garden and Crystal Jade. Here are my top picks from the a la carte menu:

* Live prawns steamed with garlic. The prawns were very plump and fresh, deveined and halved for easy eating, and cooked just right. Minced garlic and a drizzle of superior soya sauce enhanced the flavour.

.* Garoupa fillet with wine which was a wholesome dish, fish was very fresh, with honshimeji mushrooms and black fungus providing textural contrast. The wine based broth was flavorsome and we finished every drop.

.* Sauteed scallops and broccoli with XO sauce. The scallops were plump and juicy; the premium XO sauce lent a mildly spicy kick to the dish without overwhelming the fresh flavor of the scallops. Broccoli was cooked just right - slightly crunchy* Yam ring - attractively plated and tasted as good as it looked. The yam was crispy on the surface and creamily melt-in-the-mouth smooth beneath, enveloping a mound of sauteed celery, carrot, baby corn, sugar snap peas, straw mushrooms, lean chicken chunks,shelled shrimps and cashew nuts. Yummy.

.We had seafood noodles to round off our meal, this was delicious without being too greasy. A nice gesture was the offer of complimentary dessert - honeydew sago.

Three of us decided to check out the new Paradise Dynasty Restaurant on Level 5 of Causeway Point to beat the Monday blues. We were given a queue no but our table was ready in 5 minutes so I guess it is their procedure. I recalled there was a resident tea master at their flagship restaurant at Ion Orchard Level 5 when we dined there last year who would serve tea using a copper kettle with a very long spout. There is no tea master at work here in Causeway Point. It was just as well since we didn't have to wait for one tea master to do his rounds, hot Pu Er tea was served immediately once we were seated, and our cups were promptly topped up by servers throughout our meal.

Everything in the glossy menu looked temptingly delicious so we decided to stick to their signature rainbow dumplings which has one of each of their 8 types of soupy dumplings served in a wicker basket ($13.80++). We ordered three portions ~ one for each of us, plus one portion of their LaMian with Preserved Vegetables & Shredded Pork in Pork Bone Soup ($8.00++) for sharing. The noodles arrived first in a huge bowl; the serving is easily double the size of the portions served at Din Tai Fung. The hand pulled La Mian was freshly made in the show kitchen and its texture was excellent, smooth & absorbent of the flavoursome pork bone stock that it had been immersed in. I must say the kitchen crew here has been really generous with the toppings - we had plenty of shredded vegetables, shredded bamboo shoots and strips of lean pork floating in the broth, plus half an onsen egg. Great value. We slurped up the noodles and soup happily & half way through, a chef emerged from the kitchen with our piping hot wicker baskets of soupy dumplings.

Every morsel of the soupy dumplings was pure pleasure. The dumpling skin was thin & elastic so it did not break when lifted with chopsticks. Each dumpling was bursting with meat juices & robust tasting soup. Start with the original flavour (off white colour) and leave the dumplings with the strongest flavours till the last ( the grey coloured garlic flavour & the pink coloured xxx spicy szechuan chilli flavour). My favourite ones are the truffle (black coloured dumpling), fois grais (beige dumpling) & ginseng dumpling (pale green coloured dumpling). I prefer Paradise Dynasty's soupy dumplings to those served at Din Tai Fung's restaurants in Singapore partly because the dumplings here contain more soup per mouthful & partly because the minced pork filling is leaner without any greasy aftertaste. I think Crystal Jade & Din Tai Fung both use a larger proportion of fatty pork in their dumpling filling so there is a strong porky aftertaste whenever I eat their soupy dumplings.

We ordered the Egg White Souffle Balls ($4.80++ for 3 pcs) which were quite good, but not the best to be found locally. The souffle was light as it should be but there was too little mashed red bean filling inside so the souffle ball tasted rather bland. Besides a light fluffy texture, an A version of this dessert should strike a fine balance between the unsweetened egg white & the sweetened red bean filling. Our bill of $68 works out to $22.70 per person which is a fair price to pay for innovative gourmet soupy dumplings whose taste & texture are comparable & imho superior to those served at Din Tai Fung in Singapore (I think there is a big gap in taste & service quality between DTF outlets here & those in Taipei). Great food & affable service will beckon us back to Paradise Dynasty 2 at Causeway Point which does not have the patience-testing waiting time at its flagship restaurant in Ion.