With the fierce competition and rising standards amongst Singapore restaurants these days, one would expect basic levels of service to be well-established, and food to be at least decent in most eating places. What more in a cafe run by one of the premium clubs along Orchard Road?
Tangles, a casual eatery in T Club, was chosen as the spot for Sunday dinner, because we read the advertisement for their new weekend bento sets in the newsletter. We were bought by the photos. Big mistake. We had to wait about 15-min for our orders to be taken. After another 15-min, we were still not served water. By then, our juices have been made, and had been left on the bar counter for 10-min, waiting for someone to pick them up and serve it to us. So much for freshly-squeezed juices. It was only when we decided to help ourselves to the drinks and water, did the staff realize our existence, and rendered some service. According to Fuzzy, he was told curtly," You go sit down, we bring to you." It was there that I thought," The food better be real good to make up for this." I was desperately trying to kid myself.
My F-I-L ordered the pork rib soup noodles, on the recommendation of someone we just bumped into, and found the broth too diluted and the whole dish lacked flavour. My B-I-L, Shan, and I chose the unagi bento and Fuzzy and my M-I-L, the chicken bento. Shan summed up the meal best by declaring after eating, that the fruit was the best part of it all. The rice in which the meat and fish were laying on, was so soaked in a salty gravy, that it was too sloppy to pick up with chopsticks, you had to slurp everything up with a spoon. The assorted maki (sushi rolls) that was part of the bento, were pre-prepared and pre-cut, hence making the rice very hard, stale, and inedible. The sashimi was not fresh. The salad was not dressed. Ok ok, maybe I'm being too harsh. Let's put all grievances aside for a minute and think positive for a second. Maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel with the wasabi (horseradish), gari (pickled ginger), and shoyu (soya sauce)? You can't go wrong with the simplest elements in Japanese food, right? Urm... the wasabi was pre-moulded and left in the too-cold fridge. It was so hard that we had to pierce it with chopsticks to break up chunks for use. The gari had gone bad. They gave so little shoyu, it was hardly enough for three slices of sashimi.
This post is actually on behalf of my M-I-L, who's paying subscription fees to the club. 1) The service seriously sucks. It is slow, and horribly inefficient. The restaurant was only less than 50% full, and service is as such. It was Sunday night; shouldn't the restaurant be fully staffed? We were not the only ones who weren't impressed. The Caucasian family who sat at the next table waited so long for their orders to be taken that they upped and left. 2) The food sucks. None of us finished, even though we were famished. On the way back, we stopped by Waffletown for some fried wings and a waffle. We wolfed them down the second we got home. They were heavenly.
Here are some suggestions from my M-I-L. 1) Forget about food! Convert the restaurant back into a games room like it was before; at least the kids will have some fun. Because right now, no one's smiling. 2) If you insist on serving edible concoctions, stick to snacks, which come frozen, and all they need to do is learn how to operate the deep-fryer. Don't think it's possible to screw that up. Oh wait... but then again...
