Cafe Epicurious at The Rail Mall

I was catching up with an old junior of mine from secondary school some time back as she emailed me to ask about university courses. Our email conversations just flowed naturally from university courses to one topic I love and can converse long hours over - food. ;) We decided that since it had been a long long time since we last met, we should meet up to have brunch one day. As I wasn't working yet then, we arranged to meet on a weekday to have brunch at Cafe Epicurious at The Rail Mall (we are west-siders, yay to the westside people!), a branch of the popular brunch spot, Epicurious at The Quayside.

But after researching online, I discovered that the cafe served very affordable lunch sets ($10+ / $18+ lunch specials)! So we naturally rearranged our meeting to coincide with lunch time. ;)

Cafe Epicurious at The Rail Mall

Mushroom soup; Salad

We decided on getting the $18 set deal as it seemed a better deal (plus I read online that there are more dessert selections - I'm in!). The $18 set lunch allows the choice of a starter (a soup or a half-portion salad), a main course, a dessert and a drink. That's plenty, isn't it? I originally wanted to order the caprese salad but it was unavailable :( so I chose the caesar salad instead cos of the poached egg (love 'em), while my friend got the mushroom soup.

Her soup was really good, thick and mushroom-y, not those fake creamy kind with small bits of mushrooms floating about. If I'm not wrong, it was made with fresh mushrooms pureed, the colour above looks sorta freshly prepared too hey? My salad on the other hand, was okay, lots of croutons (a plus!), but the good I would have given it was marred by the fact that my poached egg was, well, not poached? The yolk was 100% hard boiled, with not even a tiny bit soft and gooey like it was supposed to be. I hate hard boiled yolks, truly I do, so even if the dressing of the salad was satisfactory, the egg yolk spoiled the tick as a nice salad.

Menu; Beef burger; Pulled pork sandwich; Iced teas

My girlfriend got the beef burger, while I chose the pulled pork sandwich. While waiting for our food, we happily sipped our iced teas as the weather was super super hot that day. Was perspiring like crazy when I reached the place. Our food arrived and oh so cute! On adorable old-schooled china. Very unlike a western style cafe. But this small detail makes it special I reckon. (:

My sandwich was yummy, i loved how the pulled pork tasted, soft and tender pieces of meat between two slices of toast. My friend's burger was a bit crumbly for her liking, and (it's been too long so pardon if I remembered wrongly) it was also quite salty? The portions were quite huge and we didn't finish half of our meals. They did allow us to bag our leftovers though (thumbs up).

Display cases; quirky wall decorations

 

Chocolate cake (we should have ordered this, it looks so much better! Chocolate always look better.)

I really love the gorgeous glass cake stand they use in the cafe. I want to buy such stands too! Mad pretty. But either I can't find it in Singapore, or if I saw before, it was just to expensive. :(

Strawberry cake; lemon tart

The strawberry cake was a total let down. :( What a waste of dessert. The cake was very dry and I didn't enjoy anything about it. The lemon tart on the other hand, was a delight. It was just slightly sweet and more on the tart side (I like!), and the two of us enjoyed it way more than the other dessert.

It was a really nice lunch session catching up, discussing topics from university courses, to food places, to our shared love for korean dramas (*winks). The afternoon breezed by in a whizz and we left the place eventually after close to two hours. People were coming in and out, but the whole place was never overly crowded during our time there as it was technically, a working day, and the only nearby office crowd was probably the MINDEF staff. (:

A couple of hits and misses at this place, but then, most places are like that, so as long as the hits are good, well, I'll still revisit to try out other dishes. I'll probably drop by next time if I want to have a brunch session and is lazy to travel too far (it's like ten to fifteen minutes away from my place). But then again, I have a never ending list of "new places" to try out. So, at least, that's one tick off my "to brunch" places (though I had lunch, and not brunch there lols). (: