Food Tasting at Silk Road Restaurant (Amara Hotel)

A couple of days ago, we were at Silk Road at the Amara Hotel for a "food tasting". The 9-course vegetarian menu is as follows:
Vegetarian Cold Cut Combination
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Vegetarian Hot & Sour Szechuan Soup
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Braised Vegetarian Chicken with Broccoli
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Steamed Tofu with Mushroom
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Steamed Winter Melon with Vegetarian Goose
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Yam Ring with Seasonal Vegetables
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Braised Mushrooms with Spinach
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Braised Ee Fu Noodles
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Mango Pudding

The first dish was nicely decorated, and very interesting but the portion was disappointingly small. The soup was pretty good - nicely hot & sour - very appetising.

The third dish had more broccoli than "vegetarian chicken", but since I love broccoli, that was just great. However, the next dish seemed to have exactly the same gravy, but more of it! While the gravy was fine with the broccoli and "vegetarian chicken", it didn't go that well with steamed tofu and mushrooms. Or perhaps I wasn't expecting to have more of the similar-tasting stuff...

By now, I was already starting to get kinda full, but the winter melon in the next dish was a nice touch, with a cool and light taste. The yam ring was not exactly what I expected - I didn't see a ring, just two strips of what seems to be fried yam... Looks more like "yam fries"! Hmm... was it too much to expect them to make a ring for individual servings?

After this was a dish of mushrooms and spinach. The spinach was ok, BUT they dumped a ton of button mushrooms on top of the spinach - uh, I could have gotten that out of a can. In fact, I probably could have made this dish myself! DH hardly touched it...

The noodle dish was rather disappointing, as it was utterly dry, and lacked... everything - it was literally just fried ee fu noodles! Ok, with a sprinkle of mushrooms. What did I expect? Well, perhaps some veggies, say strips of carrot and a few strands of greens, and a little bit of gravy would be nice.
However, the mango pudding was a nice sweet ending, with real mango chunks at the bottom.

SIX of the courses had mushrooms, and given the my DH is not a great fan of mushrooms, I ate his as well. I had totally "overdosed" on mushrooms by the end of the evening!

Overall, while many of the dishes were quite tasty, a few were rather disappointing. Also, the presentation was not at all appealing, except for the first dish, which we didn't take a picture of. Practically all the were dishes served in just a plain white bowl. It almost seems like they put in the minimum thought necessary so that they can justify getting away with it on the actual day, if we didn't say anything! I felt kinda bad that my sis and her fiancé had to pay $90 per person for this.

Silk Road Restaurant
Amara Singapore, Level 2
165 Tanjong Pagar Road, Singapore 088539
Tel: 62273848
http://www.silkroadrestaurants.com/rest.html