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2009-08-28
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Admit it, you have always loved the ads -- sun-blushed tomatoes with dew-drops sliding along the curved surfaces of the skin, fresh, bright green of basil, thyme and parsley, the sight of dough rising in the oven, or spaghetti being drained into a colander ready to be dressed...etc. Kudos to the rise of advertising, food photography and computer touch-up in which the awful reality is often masterfully masked and revealed to you at the very last minute when you're at the table, ordering these pic
For $55 each we ordered from this new extended menu. You can, of course, add a salad and dessert for an additional cost. For the $55 prix fixe we each had a soup "au gratin" with puffed pastry, a pasta dish and a beverage on the side. We chose each of the soup selections -- one mixed vegetable and another cream of chicken (the ever so Campbell's classic!). For the pasta dish we had spaghetti with prawns and herbs, and a deep fried porkchop with rice. Obviously it didn't take forever for anything to be prepared since they're all assumed to follow the factory line production lineups.
Spaghetti with prawns was the first to arrive. Sauce the colour of luscious red tomato, the prawns were flash-fried in the pan before the addition of chunky tomato sauce. This wasn't the place for the al-dente talk, as Ididn't expect the pasta to be, and they weren't. The sprinkle of parsley was the lone spot of green. The tomato sauce, was sweeter than I thought it normally would do if prawns were involved, but the sauce itself was satisfactory enough and it clings well on each strand of spaghetti.
The soups arrived in the midst of us trying to untangle the cake of precooked spaghetti. I considered rejecting the offnesive non-puffed "puffed pastry top" of one of those soups, since it's not very puffed nor was it very baked either. The soup was too full to be baked in the oven as it started to leak from one side and under the pastry roof. The taste was alright though, it's not homemade we reckoned.
It took another shocking 20 minute wait for the deep fried porkchop to arrive (20 minutes after we finiswhed the soups). When it finally came, I'd be nice to call it "cardboard" -- the entire piece of meat has been fried into its horridly frizzled state. If you hack your knife into it the porkchop may fall apart into bread crumbs the colour of dark brown sugar. I couldn't help but request for another one, one which can assure me is not cancerous upon consumption. The meat returned in a lighter shade of brown, and soggy with grease too. Mediocrity, I gathered, has never been such in extreme, but this simply had to be the last straw especially it's a dish from the chef's recommendation menu...Has the chef lost his/her appetite and ability to taste anything before recommending these quality dishes? Or has he/she been still hungover from a celebratory night of too many liqueur shots to tell bad quality from good ones? I cannot assume, but it's possible that there is no 'Chef' at all. If there were one, he/she would've recommended what were presented in those ads, or pictures, not the real things on the plates...
The coffee and lemon tea were good enough, probably because they didn't require the handy craft of the "Chef" to excel in flying colours. The construction of the Chef's Recommendation menu wasn't half-bad, if only the "Chef" would be present with a picture of him or her with a dialogue box to explain how these dishes made it on the top list. People, I believe, respond better from an authority figure in a chef's jacket and hat, the same way we prefer our pharmacists in labcoats, or lawyers in impeccable suits. It's a better deal than ordinary lunch menu selections if all the dishes selected are executed in the chef's recommendation standards. While the mystery of the existence of the Chef who did the recommendations was in question, I must insist, that we disregard the ads, and be realistic here, with what our orders may come, in the truest physical form of edible forms, unless one may feel full looking at the pictures alone.
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