Bene, Sand Cotai Central, Macau

My partner in crime wanted to have Italian for lunch, so we found one in the neighborhood where we were. The concierge of the mall actually directed us to the only Italian tratorria nearby. 

We ordered calamari for starter, pear salad and spaghetti carbonara that was outrageously super creamy. I love that crispy bread so much that I munched a lot of them while waiting for the food. I think, aside from the crispy bread, I only appreciate the salad.

Parisian, Macau

We stayed there for the first time, it's a brand new huge hotel with 3000 rooms. It's a beautiful hotel with lots of excitement and many objects to take picture of.

Beijing Kitchen, Macau

Our first dinner in Macau was in Beijing Kitchen in Grand Hyatt Hotel. We came without reservation, in fact we did not even plan to come to this place for dinner. We wanted to have Beijing duck, but were unable to have it because we did not arrange it ahead of time. On the bright side, we got the opportunity to order other dishes that we never tried before.  The food was good, the service was excellent, we are happy to keep on coming back here.

The first two pictures below are the starters.

The dish below is fried chicken with peanuts and tons of dried chillies.

Braised eggplants

Sea Cucumber with mushroom.

Handmade noodles.

Agnes B Cafe, Harbour City, Kowloon

We traveled to Hong Kong last week and one afternoon in my "me time", I opted to have a bowl of grilled vegetable salad, a cup of coffee and a piece of mont blanc named Valerie in Agnes B cafe in Kowloon. The salad was cold from, I believe refrigeration, while the vegetables were not as fresh as I like them to be. I was just glad to have chance to have some healthier food, because it can be hard at times when I travel.

Lunch At Koyama, Xintiandi

Toyama is a popular Japanese restaurant in Shanghai. The last time we tried to have a meal here, we did not make it because the waiting time was too long. It was lunch time this time and again, we had no reservation, we did not plan to have lunch there. Somehow, we got a shared table for the two of us.  We ordered salmon sashimi, various sushi and something that we never saw before, grilled eggplant.

Tianzifang, Shanghai

Tianzifang is one of the places in Shanghai that we like to visit. They have little shops that sell arts and crafts, galleries, restaurants and boutiques to name a few. There are many coffee shops and bars too. We just like to walk around, go in some shops and get a thing or two of the stuff we like and take plenty of pictures.

Hairy Crab Business, Wang Bao He

If you go to Shanghai when the season of hairy crab is on, it's like an obligation to have them at least once. People seemed to ask and tell us to go and eat them. It is the perfect place to have them, surely. Of course, you can get them elsewhere in other countries, but the experience probably would not be the same. I know some restaurants here in Singapore, sell them for $40 per piece, not a big one. They are rather small and it's a tad challenging to eat actually, at least for us.

While some people would be super excited to experience the delicacy, both DH and I were on "limited" excitement. First of all, we stayed in Pudong while the restaurant is in Puxi. It's a bit of distance. A friend had managed to book us a table at the very last minute and it was for dinner. I am famous for not liking to go out in the dark and most of the time, we do not take big dinner. We tend to take smaller dinner these days.

But, --. People had been so nice to us and we were in Shanghai for Pete's sake. Just go. So off we went to a restaurant called Wang Bao He, a restaurant that is well known in specializing in crab dishes. Probably all dishes there have crabs in them, except for their desserts and drinks. 

In the end, we were not particularly impressed about the crabs and the dishes we had.  We are glad to have gone and sampled such a popular kind of crab in Shanghai and tasted the dishes (see below) in this well known restaurant, but I don't think this is a restaurant that we'd like to return to.