Had been making trips back to the office lately since it was needed, and the revamped 9 Penang Road building that had replaced Park Mall is a place that I would definitely have to pass by on the way home — noticed how the hoardings of Pi Food had came down, and saw how there seem to be diners seated in the establishment enjoying their food, and that’s how we found ourselves making a visit to Pi Food for lunch on the weekend.

Without much information to rely on (they do not seem to have any social media pages, and very little photos of their food seem to be around online) and also bearing a name which is not quite indicative of the type of cuisine that they serve, we only found that they were a Hong Kong Cha Chaan Tang (i.e. HK-style tea room) with a bar concept that also serves bar grub and western fare during dinner service. Found ourselves going for the Char Siew & Scrambled Egg Fried Rice with Housemade XO Sauce — on one hand because we wanted to try out the mains, but yet also wanting to try out their roast meats since we were at an establishment serving up Hong Kong cuisine.

If anything, we felt that the scrambled eggs and Char Siew played it pretty well here — the portion size also being pretty generous as well. We very much liked how the Char Siew seems to have used the cuts from the shoulder — thick cuts of meat that carried quite a good bite; came with a good proportion of lean meat and fat that gave it a good chew, whilst coming all flavourful from the honey used in its preparation process, which also flavours up the rice beneath. The scrambled eggs were silky, soft and runny — pretty satisfying, whilst being topped with their housemade XO sauce. That being said, the only letdown here is seemingly the rice itself; while the name of the dish seem to have implied that fried rice would be served, the item came with simply white rice — a mismatch from the description in its name, thus feeling it was missing the point totally.

Whilst the Char Siew & Scrambled Egg Fried Rice with Housemade XO Sauce was missing the point with the fried rice, we found the other items to be pretty decent — the Five Spice Beef Tripe Noodles were pretty comforting to say the least. Pi Food does serve as a spot that serves up comforting and familiar Hong Kong cuisine to the masses, with an alternative offering of Western food for the post-work wind-down for dinner service. Perhaps it would be better if they could pay more attention to the finer details — such as that involving the serving of white rice over fried rice; something that would work towards their favour in the long run.