Pearl Chinese Restaurant, JW Marriott Hotel Jakarta

Last Sunday, I went to Pearl restaurant in JW Marriott Hotel Jakarta for a brunch buffet with family. Pearl is a Chinese restaurant known for its super quality Chinese cuisine, which truly lives up to its reputation. The dining hall is not too big, with big round tables all over the room. Rather than looking like a regular Chinese fine dining restaurants, Pearl gives more modern and minimalist vibe although it is still rich of Chinese ambiance, especially the waitresses dressed in cheongsam, pretty!

For IDR 360K/person nett, we can enjoy a large selection of Chinese food served on buffet tables. There are so many stations like noodle, porridge, cold Chinese appetizers, BBQ, seafood, stir-fry, even Peking duck and suckling pig. I was totally overjoyed! Not only that, there is also a separated menu for dimsum selections which can be ordered if the offered buffet are not enough. All of this glorious food can be enjoyed with refillable Chinese tea included in the package. Seriously, considering all of those, the price is just worth it!

As if the buffet wasn’t enough, we greedily ordered some dimsum and after asking for friggin’ 5 times, finally our long awaited dimsum were served on the table but honestly most all of us were already almost dead. Too full!

But there is always a room for dessert! So happy to see the wide array of fancy desserts from tiny cakes, pudding, also daifuku! 

My favorite food from the buffet table was the Lobster with Singapore Chili Sauce, which was soooo good, followed with the crispy pork skin. I apologize that there is no picture of the lobster although I ate quite loads of them, the problem was the moment I came back with the lobsters on my plate, I would just stuff those darn good things into my mouth and totally forgot taking pictures, LOL!! 

The dimsum were very nice too, although we literally were pissed having to wait for such a long time for those to come out. I tried almost all the desserts selections although I skipped some of the hot desserts like green bean porridge (bubur kacang hijau) and sweet potatoes in soup. The cakes were nice and not too sweet, but my favorite was the cute yellow jelly stuff in the round jar like in the photo above, which apparently is something made from lemongrass, so exotic and had the calming effect like I expect from eating a dessert!

Everything about Pearl restaurant really amazed me to certain level, but doesn’t mean it is flawless. Again, I have to emphasize that the most difficult thing to manage in a service business is probably the human resources, in this case, it is the service. Despite of its big reputation and the fact that Pearl restaurant is located in five-stars hotel like JW Marriott, the service was far from good and even worse than average. There were many staffs around but they didn’t seem to know what to do and the service was awkward, slow, and sadly, I found it annoying sometimes. Nobody watched the tables, empty cups were left alone until we asked for refills, and many other failures. I really love this place, and I know I will come back again, again and again. But I hope next time I visit, there will be an improvement of the service, because I am sure it’s not only me who think this way.

Good luck and see you next time!