Created by the same team behind last year’s pop-up restaurant 888 Fatfatfat, Auntie Āyi is a new Chinese restaurant that has opened in Pacific Place mall. It’s part of a multi-dining concept called Wellwellwell and offers regional Chinese food in a retro-futuristic dining room that has been designed to resemble a time-travelling spaceship.
The restaurant is decked out in plush mulberry and pine green furnishings with contemporary curved edges while mandarin chairs, tasselled lamps, and so-called artefacts in capsules on the wall that add interesting marks across the dining room.
As for the food, the menu is a celebration of Chinese cuisine and filled with dishes that sound familiar. There’s cheong fun, claypot rice, and mapo tofu, but they all have a unique twist added to them. Take the cheong fun (rice rolls), for example, which is created in the most traditional way with a steam cloth but contain more contemporary combinations such as char siu, silky scrambled eggs and coriander.
Then there’s two-way stuffed crab claws which include one modern-style deep-fried breaded crab claw and another that is wrapped in pork caul fat, a traditional Cantonese cooking technique that adds crispy texture, rich fragrance and flavour, as well as Auntie Āyi’s sesame candy chicken which has been inspired by the classic childhood snack of sticky and chewy sesame candy (芝麻牛皮糖) and is arranged in an old-school banquet-style phoenix. Other highlights include the 8 Immortals drunken platter with cold appetisers marinated in Chinese Baijiu and Huangjiu wines, an Angus beef claypot rice with runny egg yolk, and more.