Singapore
Last year I was in Singapore. A company rep I was doing business with offered me and a colleague a dinner. Now our corporate policy says we can accept gifts 'up to the value of a good dinner'. So we readily agreed.

The restaurant was this place: www.jinshan.com.sg/ The rep had set me and my colleague up with a 'semi-private dining booth' which was a booth with seats around 3 sides of it, the other side open to the restaurant. We had our own waiter who helped us pick dishes: we declined the menu and just asked for the house speciality. So a stream of sub-waiters brought out various wonderful starters, bowls of this and that, plates with little delicacies, shells full of beautiful food, an endless supply of chinese steamed rolls. Then the main course: chilli crab, prepared at our table, by our waiter. She cracked and pulled and extracted mounds of beautiful meat from 3 or 4 crabs, all with a fantastic sweet chilli sauce. We gorged ourselves silly: the food was too good not to eat.

The wine - this was the only time I saw a price. The wine waiter came out to discuss wines with us. The cheapest bottle was around US $ 50, the most expensive many thousands. The company rep had obviously given some guidance as the sommelier pointed us at some wines of a few hundred US $ each, from which I selected a bottle, with some embarrassment.

So my colleague and I sat in this booth for 8 people or so, the table groaning beneath heaped plates of food, stuffing our faces with copious amounts of everything, swigging down wine that cost more than the previous most expensive meal I'd ever eaten, with a waiter standing over us attending our every need, and a stream of sub-waiters bringing us more and more dishes. All the while other people in the restaurant walked past, or just looked at us from their seats, clearly envious of this enormous blow out. Even though it's an expensive restaurant we'd clearly gone for broke.

At the end of the meal, as I heaved myself up from my seat, hoping that I'd make it back to the hotel without exploding, the waiter warmly wished to see me back again. I never saw the bill. I stopped doing business with that particular company a few months later. I'd had my fill.
(Smale is stuffed, Thu 28 Jul 2011, 20:01, Reply)