Mr. Jiu's

We went to Mr. Jiu's, a Michelin-starred Chinese place, for dinner for Julie's birthday. Some of the food was great, and some of it was (in my opinion) only all right, though the service and ambiance were both lovely.

We chose the prix fixe menu with the roast duck and pluot sauce. I've been working on losing weight so I should not have been as ambitious as I was eating everything in the earlier dishes because the duck was fantastic. But we'll get there.

We decided to get a cocktail each. I liked mine (a rum, carrot, banana, and cilantro affair) but it wasn't particularly notable. Julie got one called the Harmony which tasted just like a fried sesame ball if it were liquid. I'm not a big fan of fried sesame balls, to be honest, but it was fun to get the flavour in liquid form.

This thing tasted like a fried sesame ball!

The shrimp chips they brought as appetizers were good, and I mostly ate them with this hummus type thing they brought along with the carrots which was top notch. The mala peanuts were not super spicy or anything, sort of mild. At the start, I was hoping they'd bring more out since I really liked the appetizers, but I'm glad they didn't. There's too much food!

The rice noodle roll was great. It has uni on top, which Julie loves and which I like, but the sauce and the seaweed and lettuce stuffing were my favourite bits

We also got the scarlet turnip cake which is pretty much a standard turnip cake which looks like it's been extra-fried. Julie's usually a fan of these but she didn't like this one as much.

The second course had one hit-that-we-expected and one that miss-that-we-sort-of-expected. We really liked the Scallion Milk Bread. Milk bread is always delicious when done well, and they did a great job adding in the scallion. The ham on the other hand I wasn't sold on. We suspected it might be what it was but we were curious. It's pretty much ham with some fruit on top. It didn't feel particularly novel.

The milk bread is enormous! I could only eat a quarter and Julie saved most of it for the later course. By this time I was already regretting having eaten all of the food because I was starting to feel stuffed.

I was stuffed by the end of this

The prime dish in this meal is the duck.

Unfortunately for me, I was so stuffed I only got a few pieces in

Sadly, I was so full by this time that I only ate a little of the duck. But what little I had was fantastic. They have these savory pancakes that you wrap the duck, the mousse, and whatever sauces you like in and then you have this little roll that is great. The duck was fantastic - tender and delicious.

Then we had a couple of desserts. A chrysanthemum rice milk and a nian gao. The former was good but nothing particularly unique, and the latter was very different from what I expected. It seemed to be more of a mochi bar with ice cream. I rather liked it, but I'm a big fan of mochi and ice-cream.

Quite the meal, and we had so much left over that Julie and my dad had some for lunch the next day and there was still a bit left over for her to eat the day after. The serving sizes were honestly enormous, in my opinion. Overall, I think the food was pretty good but if I went back I'd be trying out something else just to get a feel for what else they make.

There's also a bar and lounge upstairs that seemed like a fun time, but it was definitely a younger-person sort of feel - music was a bit loud and so on. Fortunately, we had a fun half-hour walk back to our home in SOMA to digest everything.