Nov 1, 2007
Get set for more mushrooms
Mushroom Park now offers five set meals, up from three, with different fungi combinations to whet your appetite
By Wong Ah Yoke
SLIGHTLY more than a year after Mushroom Park opened last July, this Taiwanese mushroom hotpot restaurant in Serangoon Garden has expanded its offerings.
The concept is largely the same. You order from a choice of set meals, which include some mushroom starters, a selection of more mushrooms, vegetables and meat for the hotpot, and a dessert.
But where there used to be only three sets to choose from, you now get five, with prices ranging from $26.80 to $46.80 per person. Each comes with a different combination of mushroom varieties, and some also include a meat or fish.
The fish, offered in the tilapia fillet set meal ($36.80), is new. The other new set is the vegetarian set meal ($36.80).
If you are dining in groups of two or more, I would suggest you order a different set each. That way, you get a bigger selection of mushrooms and a mix of meat, fish and vegetables for a more varied and balanced meal.
In my case, I shared a dynasty set meal ($46.80) - which comes with both pork and striploin - and the tilapia fillet set meal with my companion.
The meal started with a little snack of shredded mushroom, which looked and tasted just like pork floss.
But the better starter was the xing bao mushroom sashimi that came next. The mushrooms were chunky and had a firm, crunchy texture. Served chilled with a soya sauce dip spiked heavily with wasabi, it tasted great with a cool, clean flavour that was totally grease-free.
Next came the steaming pot of mushroom soup that was put over the stove at the table. We were given a scoop of it to taste first to savour the pure essence of mushroom before the other ingredients were put in.
Those would be the raw mushrooms. The dynasty set had six varieties such as the brown-coloured pine mushroom, the white sponge-like monkey head mushroom and the firm and fleshy long net stinkhorn.
For the tilapia set, we got the chicken leg mushroom, another crunchy variety, as well as the long net stinkhorn.
Besides these, there were the 'today's specials', varieties which were in the latest shipments from Taiwan and China. For my dinner, for example, I had some interesting-looking pink mushrooms which were soft and spongy.
All the mushrooms were added to the pot and left to cook for seven minutes - to make sure that they were properly cooked. The waitress even left a running timer on the table to ensure that we did not jump the gun.
Once the buzzer went, it was time to feast. We added vegetables such as xiao bai cai and Tientsin cabbage to cook according to how soft we wanted them. The thinly sliced meat and fish cooked very quickly, however - half a minute at the most - so those went into the pot only when we wanted to eat them.
We had a choice of rice or steamed bun with the meal, and the restaurant had a new mushroom treasure rice which was cooked with mushroom stock and had bits of the fungus as well as corn and carrot mixed with the rice grains. Like the rest of the meal, it tasted clean and very healthy.
We felt full at the end of the meal but not heavy. That was because we got lots of vegetables to bulk up on fibre and little oil to weigh us down.
Even the desserts were very light.
There was a choice of green tea jelly and strawberry milk pudding. I prefer the former whose clean taste completed the healthy theme of the meal.
The milk pudding, however, needed to be richer to be satisfying. A healthy milk pudding was really neither here nor there.
MUSHROOM PARK RESTAURANT
87 Serangoon Garden Way
Tel: 6281-7600
Open: 11.30am to 2pm, 5.50 to 10pm
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