Crystal Jade Palace

Kudos to the passionate team of Chef Martin Foo and front of house at this joint. Food is nice and service is attentive. The down side is one has to queue to get to our table. Guess there is still a manpower crunch. Hope management will hire more staff as borders eases so that the good team will stay and not burnt out.

Nice ambiance and good service. Very noisy and there's no background music to set the mood. Food is so-so given the price. Beef horfun is very oily and lacked the flavour balance for the dish to be appreciated till the end. The egg tofu with prawns, mushrooms and salted egg was delicate, a good dish to have when you want something light. I will probably not come back as there are restaurants offering similar dishes at a friendlier price.

This is the first time we had revisited the restaurant after the take over, wanting to eat nice dim sum for lunch. To our disappointment, the quality has dropped dramatically. 1st the tea order was taken by the front door waitress when she took us to the table, but was never served until we reminded table waitress when she served dim sum. Food wise, the 肠粉 is way too soft and the meat is rather hard. The sauce is acceptable. Overall it's well below past quality. Either it's overcooked or because it's frozen skin from central kitchen? Or simply not monitored or cooked in batch. 2/10 The roasted pork 烧肉 is very bad... poorly baked top layer which is not golden crispy but rather dull and flat, not what one would normally expect from crystal jade brand. The taste is disgustingly sour, indicating either poor meat freshness or frozen meat that has left to defrost for too long or something wrong with central kitchen if that is where it came from. 2/10 The 鲜虾腐皮卷 deep friend fresh prawn in wrapped multilayer beancurd was below expectations but eatable as the prawn is fresh. However the skin is oily and felt like 1 single thick layer rather than the usual multilayer. 5/10 The siew Mai 烧卖 is ok average, but not to the old standard which is quite consistent and tasty. There is also a strange taste in it which further lead us into thinking the chef has definitely changed or they are now using central kitchen or frozen food to prepare the dim sum. Otherwise the meat would not taste sour or unfresh. 5/10 小笼包 is very bad, definitely not up to standard, felt like frozen food as well. Cannot compare to din tai Feng or even the one at beauty world food court. 3/10 The tea wasn't as good as the usual either. Probably because change of management and the tea used are much different. We used to visit the restaurant at least 1-2 times a month, and we know the quality and standard of its food very well. Either we have had a very unlucky day with very bad cook and food quality or that the restaurant has a new chef that cannot cook or manage its kitchen team. Overall the visit is rated 3.5/10 I did not even bother to call the waitress or manager to complain about the food as it is so bad that I would not want to revisit again. Maybe I would try other outlet at paragon to see if it has similar problems but I will not visit taka outlet again. It totally destroyed my old image of what crystal jade stands for. No more quality food and no more quality services. Sorry about the lacking of more photos, we don't usually not finish all the food that we ordered, so we could only take the photo of the food that we are unable to swallow because of bad taste. We spent most of our time on complaining the food quality rather than enjoying eating them. Only the prawn dumping 鲜虾饺 is ok. 9/10 Leads to another suspicion that seafood supply is ok but meat supply or QC is bad.

Went to Crystal Jade palace at Takashimaya lvl4 for dim sum , do make reservations in advance as place is very popular. Nothing beats a hearty bowl of lotus soup, do check what is their daily double boiled soup . Their har gow , siew Mai , Cheong fun is very good . But what is most heart warming is seeing a diverse crew working ranging from our pioneer/Merdeka generation on the ground to bring delicious food to customers.