Top Taste Restaurant

Rating: 2

We ate dinner here in November 2023.

Orange steak
Satay hot plate with beef
Rice

Delusions of grandeur; the restaurant. They had the checklist of things that made you fancy, and boy howdy they checked every single one off it. Tasteless chandelier, check, smooth jazz playing, check, “leather” seats, check. Top Taste serves a mish-mash of Asian cuisines, with Chinese, Korean, Singaporean and Malaysian all featuring on the menu. This is generally a red flag for someone just trying to cherry pick the dishes from each culture that most appeal to kiwi tastes.

The satay hot plate was not enjoyable. It was generic sauce satay, not peanut satay, so basically just brown meat sauce. The meat was neither chewy nor gristly, but it had only reached the bare minimum for acceptability. The vegetables were raw across both dishes. At least there was plenty of sauce, enough for our large bowl of rice. Then again, for twelve dollars, we expect a large amount of rice. White rice is one of the cheapest foods known to man, and this had just been scraped straight from the rice cooker, with those hard bits from the sides and everything. For twelve bucks, could you do us the courtesy of fluffing up the rice?

Right at the other end of the spectrum, the orange steak was outstanding. When we read orange steak, we scoffed. This meal is normally called orange beef, and we thought it was just another example of Top Taste having ideas above their station. We were very wrong. The meat was delicious, thick pieces of reasonable beef, cooked perfectly in a superb sauce. Little bits of orange peel were very welcome, as was the cooked garlic. It was just the raw veggies that let it down from perfection.