Bad Brew

You know.. I don’t usually do this.

Went Essential Brew for dinner with the BGS peeps yesterday to celebrate Yukina’s bday. (Photos up later). I just wanna highlight how downright lousy the food and drinks were; not to mention, how crazily overpriced.

First, the diced tomato on top of my bruschetta was tasteless, and with little seasoning. And the tomato wasn’t properly drained, so the entire mixture was too watery. The baguette seemed soaked with olive oil.

Next, another starter which was called Vegetable Stack or something. You’d expect slices of hearty vegetables oven baked or stir-fried and then stacked together. But nope, it was more like diced red pepper, green pepper, and tomatos, cooked in tomato sauce, served on a piece of iceberg lettuce on a square saucer that couldn’t have been bigger than my palm. No variety of vegetables, absolutely atrocious way of cooking. And they’re charging me $5.95 for that few cubes of vegetables, what’s more, it’s a chef’s recommendation.

And I tried Joan’s chicken pasta. First taste that you get once the pasta was placed in the mouth wasn’t the aroma from the fried garlic in olive oil, instead, it was the pungent taste of expired oil. No amount of black pepper or chilli flakes that were on it could mask its offensive taste.

My drink was called Scarlet Frost. It’s supposed to be strawberries blended with jasmine tea. The strawberry garnish that they put in the drink was absolutely sour; and there’s more sugar in the drink than there were strawberries or jasmine tea. It tasted like those 10 cents ice sticks that we used to have when we were kids, in strawberry flavour. In hindsight, those ice sticks tasted better.

I’m not a person who’s overparticularly picky on the food I eat, as you know, but the way food is served at Essential Brew is an insult to the culinary scene in Singapore. Nice and flowery names for all the items on the menu, but served to receive utter disappointment.

The only things that made up for the food were the friendly wait staff, the ambience and an absolutely great friends.