Review - Blossom in Seminyak

This weekend the four of us checked out a new Thai (more like Thai-fusion) restaurant called Blossom, located in Villas Sentosa in Seminyak. I predicted that we would have an expensive night and I was proven correctly. The restaurant was nicely decorated with lots of wood, stone, concrete, and bird cage lamps. My friends who own a light shop were jokingly saying that they spent all the money on the wooden ceiling that they can't afford to get expensive lamps. The seats were quite comfortable. Overall the style of the restaurant (and I'm assuming the rest of the villa complex) was modern and posh looking. Most of the clients were white people except for us and a couple of Asians here and there. We wondered if the people are the restaurant were all guests of the villa.

For drinks we had lemon-orange squash, beer, and pineapple and apple drink. The drinks were nice. For food we ordered five things: a beef salad, crispy Szechwan chicken, black pepper beef with snow pea, green beans, shiitaki mushroom, onions, and pepper, pad thai, and stir-fry squid dish. Rice didn't come with the dishes so we ordered those separately (3). I don't know why but the waitress brought out the rice when she served the salad even though we wanted everything to come out at once since we were eating family-style. She said something about how rice would get cold on the plate, which is odd considering we all know how to keep rice warm.

All the dishes were surprisingly good and spicy. Bonus points for keeping the raw bean sprouts on the side for the pad thai because two of our group can't eat raw sprouts. Pad thai tasted appropriately pad thai with good amount of meat, tofu, and sauce. The squid was surprisingly soft and you can break apart the meat with a slight stroke of the fork. The crispy chicken with a bit of the dipping salt was excellent. Most of the chicken was juicy and the skin crispy. The beef dish would have been better if they actually had more beef. We had trouble finding the beef among all the vegetables. The menu advertised the dish as having shiitaki mushroom but the actual dish didn't have shiitaki; instead, it was "wooden ear." At least the change in mushroom didn't make the dish taste bad or anything. The very dim candle light did not help our cause either. The taste of the dish was spicy and delicious. The beef was surprisingly tender and juicy, but minus points for not having enough beef.

Overall we were quite surprised by the quality of the food, but we had a huge sticker shock when the bill arrived. 840,000 Rp for four of us and only five relatively small dishes (four dishes and one salad). Just as shocking was the 15,000 Rp/rice. Rice should NOT cost that much in Bali. Beef, chicken, and the squid were all around 120,000 to 150,000 each, and the beef dish was definitely not worth that much considering how little beef was there. The drinks were around 30,000 to 50,000 Rp each. With that kind of price, I rather go to Warisan.

I liked the food, but the price is a big turn off. I don't know how they justify the price because most ingredients for Thai food shouldn't be super expensive. I can see the beef being expensive especially if it's imported, but as I said many times already, there wasn't enough beef in the dishes to justify the price of the dish. The service was all right but nothing spectacular. Compound that with seeing the chef or manager fawning over the next table over the entire time while ignoring rest of the guests, it just didn't seem very cool.

As I have said in the past, I don't mind spending money on good food, but the value seemed lacking in this case. A common symptom I see with many of the new restaurants in the Seminyak area.

Mmmm 90 years old booze

A fun and food-related article from the BBS. Farmer at a remote village in Macedonia dug up bottles of what thought to be vintage cognac from World War I.

This is certain more interesting than the cases of 1930s Bordeaux that we had during the wines class at Cornell.