Dining Review: Dinner at Kintamani Indonesian Restaurant, Furama Riverfront Hotel
Keywords: Halal - Dinner - Sit down buffet - Indonesian - Value - Furama Riverfront
Month of visit: October 2020
Dinner at Kintamani, Furama Riverfront Hotel.
Situated within the Furama Riverfront hotel, this well-known Indonesian restaurant is having a $22.90++ eat-all-you-can buffet on weekends. As with other buffet restaurants in Singapore during the pandemic, the concept will be a sit-down dining experience, where servers will bring the food over to your table. This value for money buffet allow diners to add on from an Ala Carte menu to enhance their dining experience.
Tip: You can add on from an Ala Carte menu for items that are not included in the buffet menu.
Entrance to Kintamani Indonesian restaurant.
The newly renovated lobby of the Furama Riverfront hotel makes getting to the restaurant a little more complicated. You can no longer take a lift directly to the front of the venue as many regular customers have noticed. Instead, diners will need to take a series of escalators or an elevator at the back of the hotel (close to the function rooms). Once arriving at the entrance of the restaurant, diners will be greeted with a pleasing brick and bamboo themed facade.
Immediately after we were seated, we were briefed on the ordering process, which was to look through a hardcopy menu and indicate our choices on that menu. Once ready, we were told to hand over the order chit to any one of the service crew.
Order chit and menu.
We began our dinner with three appetisers namely prawn crackers, gado-gado with peanut sauce and a plate of mango salad. The presentation was noticeably poor, with minimal effort to make the dishes appetising.
Appetisers served during the buffet.
There was a good variety of staples on the menu, with plain rice, turmeric rice and fried rice for the rice options and fried yellow noodles and fried vermicelli for the noodles. They were all very tasty and we particularly enjoyed the turmeric rice and fried rice.
Selection of rice and noodles.
For the vegetables, we had sitr fried mixed vegetables, baby kailan in oyster sauce and vegetables in coconut gravy. The stir fried vegetable tasted good but the kailan's oyster sauce was watery and underwhelming. Fortunately, the vegetables in coconut gravy was tasty and satisfying when eaten together with the rice.
Vegetables served during the dinner.
Part of the meat selections include a delicious grilled chicken with spicy black sauce which was tender and mildly spicy, beef in Thai coconut milk and crispy fried fish with a spicy sauce. We thoroughly enjoyed the fried fish which was flavourful.
Meat selections from the menu.
A couple of seafood options were made available during the dinner. The first was cereal prawns which was fresh and crunchy. The second was a grilled whole fish with tomato and onion and was equally fresh. This was a simple yet tasty dish.
Seafood options during the dinner.
The dessert selections during their traditional buffet spread were often the highlight of the menu with a wide range of Indonesian delicacies. However, the selection during this dinner was underwhelming. A fruit platter and a bowl of durian paste were all that was available. The durian paste was surprisingly bad given that this was one of their most popular item. Perhaps, the batch that they gave us wasn't made properly and that we were unlucky..
Fruit platter and durian paste.
Concluding remarks: For a buffet at $22.90++, one can expect it to be a great value. However, the selections were very limited and the presentation was evidently simple. With many restaurants improving their presentations for a sit-down buffet concept, this is an area where Kintamani can improve on to enhance the dining experience. Disappointingly also, the service was well below par, being slow and the service crew were relatively unfriendly. Some of the food items were tasty but with the many negative points, this dinner may not be as value-for-money as it seems.
