Red Star

What an interesting place. I haven’t seen these types of chairs for thirty years. The venue is very classic and sort of charming. The patrons makes me think this place won’t exist in a couple decades ahem very old
Is it overpriced? Yeah basically. I could swear they are using canned mushrooms. Maybe if you come in a large party like most folks seem to, you will find the food packages more reasonably priced.
Service is nice. No complaints there.
Would I come back? I’m curious about the dim sum.

Familiar food. Familiar service. In an ever changing Singapore where every old thing make way for new, this little corner of history seems forgotten. I am not too young to find the place smell of old people, neither too old to find this place reminiscence.
Food. It seems time essentially kept the food tasting great «just like old times»; both a compliment and a tinge of sarcasm. Compliment becos it still gives us a wonderful memory of the old HK dim sum taste like, and yet when the quality and evolving tastes has improved, this place has not. I am sure many of the customers have tasted better and more exquisite dim sum in HK and Singapore. But where can you find such reminiscence in this present day? Surely you can afford to pay for some historicity!
Service. When compared to the other food places this has an army of people watching over our shoulders offering us the multitude of dim sum choices and the time to explain how each of them is special. Truely an experience only found in an old HK restaurant.
The teacups came in a pot of hot water, just like old times. The pushers (the people pushing the carts) is more varied; both old and young. It’s not fair to keep those ladies working over 20 plus years thou some of them still do.
New dishes. Apparently, they do add new varieties of dim sum, and have quite a number of «newer» deserts in their carts, those you can find everywhere else. They taste just like everywhere else so these I am not impressed! No historicity.
Price. A bit pricey since we are paying for some historicity here, especially when you get to taste some of the old unchanged flavours dim sum in a old HK setting.
Food is average. If you can get the ambiance and the historicity like me, those are the stars.
If you want better food and a nicer modern ambiance with more cute looking or younger service people, leave the Q.
Oh… The fragrance. I have to say something about the smell of food when I came thru the door. Suddenly I am reminded of the HK restaurant back in 1990 when I first met my HK in-​laws! Yes. It was both pleasant and scary at the same time.

Not value for the $. Dishes were mediocre. The BBQ pork and roast pork skin were overpriced and not even that good at $ 10 a plate. Shrimp Chee cheong fun sauce was way too salty. Dessert ‘Chee Ma hoo’ was too diluted.
Some of the other dishes: porridge OK — steam char siew Pao — char siew fillings too sweet, hsia long Pao was dried, bean curd wrapped seafood was OK, har kao standard. Only one item was good — chili wrapped long tau fu was excellent. $ 75 for 4 for bad to mediocre dim sum pricey. We get better dim sum in Dallas!

This place — WOW.
While dim sum here isn’t the best you can get in Singapore, the entire dining experience here make up for it. To be honest, I’ve never heard of this place before until a group of friends talked about it and decided to bring me here for lunch last weekend.
Red Star is located on the 7^th floor of a HDB flat (Block 54) within the Outram neighborhood. The restaurant is super retro — dim lighting, a center stage (for wedding singer or sort) and a huge main dining hall. The dining hall is filled with tables and chairs arranged in the most compact way to maximize the space, a common sight in any chinese restaurant.
We learnt that there are 2 ways to come up to the restaurant — one through the main door and another through the kitchen (back door). I think GOD knows that we’re a curious bunch, the elevator we took lead us to the back entrance of the restaurant. We walked pass the kitchen, an oily walkway, through a few peculiar looking doors that says «RED STAR THIS WAY» before reaching the main dining hall. And then we saw the main entrance on the other side with people already queuing up trying to get a table during the peak brunch period. Lucky for us, another friend was there much earlier and already got a table when we reached.
Service here is world class. Middle aged ladies with their headgear (like Emirates airlines) graciously push their cart to your table recommending and introducing different dim sums available for the day. They speak fluent cantonese and limited english but good enough to understand if you have any visitors or caucasian friend who cant understand mandarin or cantonese. I «interviewed» a couple of them and learned that they have been working here for the past 20+ years and take pride on their job. And with that I truly understand now that despite the average food, people still come back for its exceptional service as well as comfort food that’s friendly to the wallet too.
Red Star is no where near any of the «finer» dim sum outlets we get in Takashimaya or 5 star hotels, but if you’re looking for something different with a local touch, unpretentious, where you can talk and laugh as loud as you can then this place might be the right choice.
I highly recommend this place.

I have been to Red Star twice. It was recommended by a local friend. They served more dishes on the cart on weekends. We anticipated good dim sum due to the long line. We were totally disappointed with the food and the service. It is a traditional Chinese restaurant with traditional CHINESE service — rude and no manners. The food was terrible. So, I thought the staff were busy on weekends therefore provided bad service. My parents were visiting, so I brought them there on a weekday and get a second opinion. My parents did not enjoy the food, every dish was lousy. There were very few choices to choose from. THe worse part was, the servers were very political. THey condemned each other. When I wanted to order some fried dishes, this server said, «It is not my department. You have to ask that lady. That lady is very grumpy. Don’t order the fried stuff, they are not good.» in Mandarin. I got to walk to that lady to get her to come to our table. She was not serving any customer yet she was impatient while my parents making choices. In conclusion, we never went back there since 7 months ago. I will not recommend to anyone.

Over hyped by the locals … i guess mediocre food would taste good if you spent so long queuing for it

The shrimp dumpling was the best of the bunch. The rest, very much the usual suspects you’d eat at a dim sum restaurant, was disappointing. The person most fond of char siew (BBQ pork) in the group only consumed ¼ of the char siew bao (BBQ pork bun), claiming that the sauce tasted funny. The egg tart was cold. The pineapple buns actually had pieces of pineapples in them — not that I would have minded it if the buns had tasted better. The kailan was drowned in some cold, nondescript, greasy goo.
As to the atmosphere, imagine an old Chinatown restaurant that is vast and dark, with nothing done to its deco since perhaps the 1970s. If that’s your cup of tea, by all means, drop by, though don’t expect to be wowed by the food, at least not the dim sum items.

It has a Hong Kong look and feel. When we were in Singapore we craved for dimsum so we went to the Red Star. It was ok. We loved the mango pudding dessert with milk though!!! Other dishes were ok, the thing that we did not like was that the dimsum was served cold because they stayed to long in the carts.

We made a reservation and went to this place last night … only to find it completely empty! Apparently, it’s only crowded during lunch time because of the Dim Sum. No reservations required for dinner. It was kinda awkward because it was a really huge restaurant (100 pax) and we had it all to ourselves.
They stop serving Dim Sums after 3pm. We were very disappointed but made do with what we had. We didn’t want to be rude and walk off since we were majority of the customers they had last night… so we ordered…
The food
1. Fried bean curd & broccoli — LOVE it. The bean curd was so soft and silky. The dish was drizzle with sauce made out of crab meat and egg.
2. Prawns and cereal — LOVE it. Probably one of the best cereal prawns I had in awhile. The cereal was amazing. Can’t quite put a finger to it but we ate every crumb. Another winning point was that the prawn was already de-​shelled :)
3. Roasted chicken — Ok. A bit dry as most Chinese roast chicken are … but its skin was crispy on the outside.
4. Crispy noodles & seafood — Ok. The noodles weren’t very crispy by the time we had it. I would have ask for the sauce separately for this dish.
5. Omelette — Meh — Oily, greasy & not very tasty. Pass!
Service
— Super Fast! of course, there weren’t many tables… except us.

Much has been said about Red Star. It’s one of those places that you either love, or hate.
For me, if you want to have good dim sum, then you probably don’t want to go to Red Star. Apart from the tacky 60’s décor and how they still serve their dim sums in pushcarts, that’s where the similarities end with restaurants in Hong Kong as I feel their dim sum is overpriced and severely lacking in quality.
However, if you’re going there not for dim sum but to enjoy the wide variety of Cantonese dishes on offer, then it’s a different story. Be sure to try the US roast duck, shark’s fin with crab meat, fried garoupa in tomato sauce and their butter prawns, amongst some of their best offerings on the menu.

I’m sure many of you know of this place, since it has been established since quite a few decades ago, and has since been famous for their dim sum brunches. One thing I dislike about Red Star is how inconveniently it is located, and forces me to make a morning trek just to get to the restaurant! But all the better since it does make the food taste like victory!
Be sure to arrive early since they don’t take reservations for daily operations, and is one a first come first serve basis. There is usually a long queue that stretches all the way to the lift landing, so don’t make the same mistake as I did, and arrive with a starving stomach, you won’t be able to resist over ordering!
My staple dim sum dishes would be their fluffy egg tarts which are crisp around the edges and a soft pale yellow in the middle that looks healthy and non-​artificial. The usual accompanying dishes would be siew mai, prawn dumplings with huge whole fresh prawns, and chicken feet if you can handle it! Their service really brings us back to the old days, where there are dozens of little Cantonese ladies pushing carts filled with goodies, going round table by table to serve you. If the food is not to your taste, at least it will be a morning filled with interesting conversations with these feisty ladies!

This restaurant used to be a popular place for Dim Sum amongst my parent’s generation. As a kid, I enjoyed the fantastic delicacies they had. We stopped going there for a couple of years and my recent visit to Red Star was pretty disappointing.
While the restaurant’s age is showing through the dated décor, the old fashioned carts being pushed around by aunties serving Dim Sum still gives the place a nostalgic charm. The food, however, is no where near the standard of what it used to be. While the char siew sou is still pretty good with its buttery and flaky pastry with a moist, flavourful char siew centre, the rest of the Dim Sum we ordered did not impress. The standard of their pau (steamed buns) have dropped and the buns we got were rather stretchy and had a slight alkaline aftertaste. The siu mai just did not work for me. We ended up ordering congee to fill our tummies as we sort of lost faith in the dim sum there.

Red Star is something to be experienced. An experience to behold.
It embodies the gaudy Chinese restaurants of your dreams (or nightmares). There’s a certain charm to it.
It’s also an important piece of our food heritage. The people behind Red Star are also a part of the Heavenly Kings quartet, the four-​some who redefined Chinese food in SIngapore (and some say Malaysia), by creating and inventing some of the dishes we now take for granted, like the yam ring and even the Chinese New Year yu sheng.
It’s a massive hall where people — lots of people, and sometimes the occasional celebrity — jostle for seats from the moment their doors open, especially on weekends. The stage that tells you you shouldn’t attempt singing, on which so many of our parents’ friends got married. The gaudy tablecloth. The dimsum trolleys.
The food isn’t great anymore.
Especially considering the shift towards ‘fine’ dimsum, ordered off menus in restaurants far higher end than this.
There’s a tendency to automatically class this as «kopitiam dimsum» because it isn’t the super refined Cantonese-​style dimsum we’ve all gotten used to, and therefore say this isn’t good.
But it’s still good.
Especially considering how little you’re paying for this, how authentically old school everything on the menu is, and what a funny, awesome, nostalgic experience it is to eat here each time.
There was a period in 2010 or so when the food standard declined dramatically to the point of inedible, yes, but I’m glad to say that these old farts are back and their hargow and roast meats can out-​heritage, if not out-​class, all the wussy Crystal Jades and Imperial Treasures of the world.