Room Service Review: InterContinental Saigon

When it comes to hotel room service, we generally have a couple of things to look out for in determining if that particular hotel’s room service is worth it. First, we do expect the prices to be quite high, as with most five-star (or otherwise similarly-ranked) hotels. Correspondingly, in terms of taste, the food should be similar to what one can find in good restaurants in the country. Based on the above, we rate InterContinental Saigon's room service!

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Dinner:

To enjoy a proper room service meal, you will need to eat your meal on an empty stomach. This means you should not have any snacks or light meals that might affect your appetite. Coincidentally, we were outside during the evening and were unable to make it for Club InterContinental Lounge's evening meal service. In the end, we only managed to return to the hotel around 9 pm.

That turned out to be perfect since we arrived in our hotel room hungry, tired, and in need of good food. After a good shower, we were definitely more than ready for a late dinner.

Even though we were only in Ho Chi Minh City for 2 days, we realised that we had not eaten chicken rice for quite some time. Since we like testing hotels’ renditions of the humble chicken rice, we figured we should try InterContinental Saigon’s version as well.

InterContinental Saigon Room Service - Dinner for two

For dinner, we ordered 2 mains and 1 dessert. The first was the Singaporean Chicken Rice while we also decided to try the Seafood Char Kwey Teow. To end the meal, we went ahead with something local. We had the Dumpling Sweet Soup, or Chè Trôi Nước. Essentially, it is a local sweet soup that comes with 2 dumplings, each containing a generous amount of palm sugar filling.

The Singaporean Chicken Rice was the first dish we tried. I have to say that it was just delicious. Maybe we were really hungry but we do not think this excuse does the hotel’s food and beverage team justice. First off, the amount of chicken meat given was generous. The bones were also removed in advance. This means that you can basically eat all the meat that is on the plate, as opposed to having to remove the different chicken bones while chewing on your rice. The meat was also tender. It is not easy to achieve this if you are cooking chicken breast, but the team at InterContinental Saigon is expert enough to achieve this.

InterContinental Saigon Room Service - Singaporean Chicken Rice

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The soup is a good interpretation of Singapore’s version. It was clearly boiled with real chicken stock and you can taste it in the soup. This means that the team at InterContinental Saigon chose to put in the extra hours to cook up a proper chicken rice meal, including the often-neglected soup, to deliver to its guests. When I drank the soup, I could see myself enjoying a delicious plate of chicken rice at any good chicken rice stall in Singapore.

The vegetables were well-cooked and went well with the chicken meat and rice. The chilli sauce appears to be catered to those who might not be able to enjoy too much spice. Hence, most people should be able to take the chilli sauce and find out just why chilli sauce is such an important component of the humble chicken rice. All in all, the chicken rice is a definite must-try for all guests who wish to enjoy a room service meal at InterContinental Saigon.

The next main dish was the Seafood Char Kwey Teow. The taste of the rice noodles, or kway teow, was good. You can actually taste a little of the wok hey in the noodles. This can only bode well for the dish. However, I did notice that this version of the char kway teow is not what most are used to when it comes to the conventional version. While most would think of a wetter version that comes mixed with an egg and sweet dark sauce, the InterContinental version comes simply stir-fried.

InterContinental Saigon Room Service - Char Kwey Teow

That is not to say we did not enjoy the dish. Far from it, I could still taste the Singapore-ness in this dish. It reminded me more of a breakfast dish that many enjoy. For example, take a look at this link for what InterContinental Saigon’s version reminded me of.

The noodles were springy and delicious while there was a decent amount of seafood within. Before long, we cleared the kway teow and were left wanting for more. A good second dish we finished off in a short span of time.

The dessert was the final dish we enjoyed. Just as well that we only ordered one portion to share. The palm sugar-filled dumplings had generous amounts of filling and we would definitely be unable to finish off 2 separate portions.

InterContinental Saigon Room Service - Vietnamese dumplings for dessert

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The sweetness of the dumplings was added on by the sweet soup while being expertly balanced by the very slight ginger taste that was not at all overbearing. Similar to the 2 mains, the soup was cleared in no time.

The total time taken to finish the room service dinner was less than 15 minutes. Perhaps we were really hungry, but I think this is a testament to InterContinental Saigon’s Food and Beverage team. In all the restaurants we went to in InterContinental Saigon, we always left feeling happy and satisfied. The room service meal was no different. For sure, you have to try the hotel’s room service meals the next time you are in this hotel!

Worthiness: Yes!

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