New eats: Crystal Dragon at City of Dreams refreshes Cantonese menu

City of Dreams Manila celebrates Cantonese cuisine with a refresh to the menu of its premiere restaurant Crystal Dragon.

Behind the new dishes are Chef de Cuisine Chan Choo Kean, who has been in charge of Crystal Dragon since 2015, blending his three decades of experience with Chinese influences and culinary creativity.

The entrees presented showed their adherence to the restaurant’s threefold philosophy of using only the finest ingredients, cooking with traditional techniques, and updating the presentation with contemporary plating. They pride themselves with letting the ingredients’ natural colors shine without any need to use artificial food coloring.

The dining experience starts with a cup of the Crystal Dragon’s delicate floral and fruity Oolong Osmanthus tea and an appetizer that changes from meal to meal. For this meal, it was a savory steamed egg much like a chawan mushi. This also serves as a taste of the restaurant’s tea pairing options for the other dishes.

Cold Brewed Jasmine Cold tea with crisp floral sampaguita notes accompany Crystal Dragon’s Chef de Cuisine for Dimsum She Chong Ngoi’s curated tasting plate.  Take a moment to take in the colors and elaborate presentation of these bites. 

Start with the subtle flavor of the steamed assorted Steamed Assorted Vegetables Dumpling with Chinese Yam. The skin looks fragile by its translucence, but holds the contents well. The goldfish isn’t tikoy; rather, it’s an artsy dimsum stuffed with shrimp and diced pumpkin. The chazou-style deep-fried prawn balls have a western touch topped with a dark parmesan tuile and dehydrated carrots. Last is the Ham Sui Kok, pork buns that have a delightfully flaky crunch with Iberico pork that together make for a melt-in-your-mouth bite.

On the menu, these are listed in sets of three or four of the same kind. If more than one set is ordered, one can request to have it separated with one dimsum per diner. The dimsum sets are also only available lunch time from 12 noon to 3 p.m.

Bold, unexpected flavors made this soup course stood out. This was featured in the Dragon’s Ascent collab with sister Macanese restaurants three-Michelin-starred Jade Dragon in City of Dreams Macau and one-Michelin-starred Pearl Dragon. The soup’s thick collagen like richness together with its unexpected hit of spice got such rave reviews from that collab dinner’s guests that Manila asked for the recipe. Thankfully, Macau relented and this adds to the list of must orders in this new menu.

Crystal Dragon’s aged Pu-erh tea from Yunnan, with its rich, woody and earthy notes, accompanies the main courses.

The first is a baked half-shell crab made with locally sourced blue crab, picked apart by hand then stuffed with mushrooms and black truffle into the shell, then topped with more black truffle.  It comes with a side of black pepper and mushroom sauce, though I didn’t need it just to fully enjoy the dish.

The Tea-Smoked Australian Beef Short Ribs, a best seller, get a refresh in presentation. There is the added theater of lifting the jar to let the smoke waft out for diners to sniff in the aroma, as well as the addition of crispy mantou to make baos out of the tender beef slices.

The pumpkin puree and superior broth sauce of the healthy vegetarian dish, Braised Bean Curd with Morel Mushroom and Vegetables, looks like butter, but there’s no butter at all in this dish. The sauce is very light that allows one to fully savor the morells cooked in with the in-house made bean curd.

In a lauriat, there always has to be rice. This lobster-forward congee with bits of squid, tiger prawn and scallops is cooked tableside in a stone bowl table. One would expect burnt crispy rice underneath. But since the soupy texture is almost a congee, there’s none of that. What they do instead is to add crispy rice to get crunchy bits as one eats this dish.

The most elaborate and most indulgent dessert on this plate is the Snowbird’s Nest & Milk Pudding in Coconut. Normally, the collagen rich ingredient bird’s nest is used in the most expensive soups. Here, they’re the surprise found after cracking open the handcrafted milk chocolate coconut.

Follow this up with the hopia like Crystal Dragon Cranberry Red Wine Snow Skin and the black buchi with Salted Egg Lava, then finally finish off with a bite of marshmallow nougat.

Crystal Dragon refreshes its menu annually keeping tabs on favorites, while adding new dishes displaying the chef’s skills. With dishes like these, one would expect that Crystal Dragon to follow the footsteps of its illustrious sibling dragons overseas and be worth a stop or a detour for those looking for exceptional Chinese food in Metro Manila.