10.250

12 (Thu) September 2019

Sweet Corn Soup with Fresh Crab Meat

3.25

at Shang Palace

(Makati Shangri-La)

-Ayala Center, Makati, Manila, Philippines-

with the Family

Shang Palace is a Chinese restaurant.  Fancy, as are all dining establishments in Shangri-La hotels.

With our recent good experience at the Summer Palace in the Edsa Shangri-La (see 10.233 Stewed Pork Belly, Su Zhou Style), we decided to give try out the sister restaurant in the Makati Shangri-La, which is much closer to home.

Surprisingly bad.  The ingredients per se were fine in quality, but the preparation and plating of the dishes suggested a lack of skill in the kitchen, resulting in flavors and textures that were a bit odd to way off.

Shockingly expensive.  Total bill was PHP 12,345 (about USD 240) – the most that we’ve ever paid for a meal here (can’t recall if a bill has ever topped PHP 10,000).  The soup was PHP 488 per bowl, which cost us nearly USD 40 for the four us, just for soup.  I had membership points that deducted PHP 9,000, but even PHP 3,345 would’ve seemed too much for what we had.

A retroactive menu comparison suggests that Summer Palace is about one-third to one-half cheaper than Shang Palace, which is closer in price to Canton Road at Shangri-La at the Fort (see most recently 8.042 Mingnan Five-Spice Marinated Pork Belly Wrapped in Dried Bean Curd Sheets).

In high school, if a place egregiously upset us in some way, whether in terms of quality or cost or service or music choice, so as to categorically preclude a return visit, we would declare: BAN.  In four years, we never once went back to a place that had been banned.

BAN.