Pots of Gold
Eight Treasures promotes good health through natural diets served in sumptuous steamboat menus featuring quality ingredients and nutritious soups. Kevin Sjahrial writes
ucked away in a corner of the upper floor of Plaza Indonesia lies a gem of a restaurant. Upon entering, Indonesia Tatler’s guests, Susan Yusuf and Veronica Pribadi, are ushered through a hallway displaying intricately shaped cooking pots. The main dining room, decorated with murals of Chinese beauties and lit by lantern-shaped lamps, seats up to 120 people and opens up ahead while three combinable private rooms, for 10 people each, line up on the side.
Only recently opened, Eight Treasures— serving authentic Taiwanese steamboat dishes—is already making waves with allnatural ingredients from the mountain, land and sea cooked in special soups with wellness and health of the customers at the forefront. The name itself derives from an ancient Chinese symbol of fortune with meanings of prosperity, bliss and fulfillment.
Eight treasured ingredients make up the core of the restaurant’s four healthy soups:
fresh ginseng, Cordyceps flower, dried fig, dragon fruit flower, Rhyzoma drynariae fern, coquito nuts, Nostoc sphaeroides kutz algae and maca root. This potent concoction of natural herbs together with freshly plucked vegetables, quality meat and sweet, fresh seafood cooked expertly in traditional Cantonese techniques brings out the most beneficial properties of the ingredients.
Totaling some 12 hours of preparation, Eight Treasures’ soups are unlike those of any other restaurants and are served either in personal or shared pots. The restaurant prides itself on a smooth, silky and collagenrich Nourishing Cartilage Soup; collagen is a protein known to defy wrinkles, cellulite, thinning skin and brittle hair—plus, it also inhibits the growth of cancer cells, promotes better sleep and even repairs joints. This is the choice soup for our successful socialites who jointly opened and run the first exclusive branch of Judith Leiber’s bespoke handbags.
Five minutes into the hot soup of the diners’ choice and out comes the most delightfully springy and fragrant homemade fish-, prawn-, pork and beef-balls. Fresh handmade fish- and dried-scallop paste made each day further enhance the heavenly experience. Live fish, Canadian geo-duck clam and lobster mutiara are also several more among many exquisite seafood offerings.
Unlike a typical steamboat restaurant that offers a multitude of cuts just for the sake of variety, Eight Treasures selects only the best cuts—perfectly marbled, tender and very flavourful, the US Angus Prime Short Ribs and Spanish-import Iberico Pork Barriguera are among the must-try meats. For the vegetarians, the bean-curd skin from Hong Kong is a requisite, aside from the crisp vegetables and plump mushrooms.
Eight Treasures also offers a range of delicious appetisers from chilled cucumbers to deep-fried pork ribs. Chinese tea lovers should try pairing the slightly-bitter herbal tea with the refreshingly sweet and sour cherry tomato salad. Nutritious pressed fruit and vegetable juices are also available for healthy choices; for a modern take on Chinese drinks, try the cooling beverages sweetened naturally with
“This potent concoction of natural herbs together with freshly plucked vegetables, quality meat and sweet, fresh seafood cooked expertly in traditional Cantonese techniques brings out the most beneficial properties of the ingredients.”