Jade Palace is a well established Hong Kong style cantonese cuisine restaurant in Singapore. After more than 20 years, I think it is still the “go to” eatery for cantonese dining which is testament to the restaurant’s consistency and focus on serving quality dishes.  We wanted to introduce our Italian wine maker friends to some Australian wines recently and thus, had a menu of some better known standards along with some new creations.

One of the outstanding staples on Jade Palace’s menu is its fried frog’s legs with ginger. The colonel doesn’t come close – apologies to Kermit but these are simply finger lickin’ good. And the deep fried thinly sliced ginger are good too.

We had a very good clam dish – steamed with lots of finely chopped fried garlic. This is one of their seasonal items – Jade Palace has some tanks with fish and shell fish and depending on what they have on the day, the fresh seafood does vary.

Since our Italian friends are Amarone makers (Nicolis), we stayed with red wine for our entire meal, starting with a Rauzan Segla 1998 before moving onto a sampling of Australian Shiraz that my brother-in-law wanted them to try. I’d probably say that the bottle I liked best during our meal was the Yarra Yering Underhill 2004 but the Chapel Hill McLaren Vale 1998 was also drinking very nicely. Both are lesser known than Henschke (we had the Mount Edelstone 1998), but no less good. I found the Oliver’s Taranga 1998 a bit heavy. We also had a bottle of Wynn’s Cabernet Sauvignon and port from Pocas, another friend’s product.

Jade palace has decent standard cantonese roast meats – so we sampled the roast duck and roast pork belly along with the soya sauce chicken. We had a friend allergic to shellfish so hence, the orders of both duck and chicken.

One of the more creative off the menu items was the fine egg noodles that is served with raw fish – in this case lobster – that is served with fried shallots. You drizzle the shallot oil on the noodles to your liking. It’s a great combination.

We ordered sweet and sour pork, a popular classic dish but made all the better because Jade Palace used Iberico pork. Nice melt in your mouth pork!

Alas, I was really full by now which made it little hard for me to fully enjoy the following dish. This is another new creation by Jade Palace – roast piglet stuffed with glutinous rice. But the presentation is nice in that the rice and piglet is cut in its rolled shape, somewhat resembling a swiss roll. It’s a nice and novel way to enjoy two favourite dishes.

Our vegetable dish was stewed Chinese spinach in a broth dressed with crab meat. This was a really nice way to have the spinach that is different from the standard sauté style.

This was the end of our meal. I was way too full for dessert – hence no special dessert photos here. My husband had his usual almond cream with black sesame dumpling. I think it’s not quite as good as what you will find in Hong Kong but decent among the cantonese restaurants in Singapore.

Jade Palace is located in the basement of Forum The Shopping Mall on Orchard Road, next to the Hilton Hotel. It’s open daily for lunch and dinner.

Jade Palace website: http://www.jadepalace.com.sg