Recipes A Bistro by Shatec

I came here once a long time ago for a fine-dining module that we were all forced to take back in university. Back then, the bistro was called Charcoal, if my memory serves me well, and the food was awesome with good attentive service. Fast forward a couple of years and the bistro is now named Recipes but it is still managed by Shatec as a training ground for their students.

Maybe we dropped by on the wrong day or the standard has really dropped, but it was a pretty disappointing lunch. They did not have the usual lunch menu for that day and we were told that there was only one lunch set available as they had an event earlier on. The waitress read out the details of the only lunch set available and we gathered that basically we only had the choice of either soup or salad, Grilled Chicken  as our main course, and a slice of marble cake as our dessert.

I ordered salad as part of my recent healthy eating campaign but the salad dressing was bland, tasteless and really disappointing. I would have preferred the usual balsamic vinaigrette to what I presumed was the house dressing since I did not catch the waitress' earlier description. Wasn't very tempted to finish my bowl of salad but I persevered to give credit to my own healthy eating campaign hurhur.

The main course was decent. The grilled chicken was crisp on the outside and tender within, but I was not too fond of the sauce. I have no idea what that sauce was though, since I missed that part from the waitress' earlier description but whatever it was, it was way too sweet for me. The kuskus tasted weird and we thought it was cooked and kept aside for too long so we pointed it out to the waitress. The waitress went into the kitchen and returned to tell us that kuskus was supposed to taste this way. We accepted her explanation but chose not to accept the kuskus so none of us really touched the kuskus.

My colleague then asked for some chili sauce to go with her grilled chicken and the waitress returned with several packets of chili sauce. To our surprise, the expiry date printed on the packets is February 2012 so the packets were all about 8 months overdue. We pointed it out once again to the waitress and to Recipes' credit, she went into the kitchen and prepared a bowl of chili sauce for my colleague instead.

It was time for dessert and tea/coffee. The slice of marble cake was pretty good, nice and fluffy, and it goes very well with the chocolate sauce drizzled around the cake.

They served our cups of tea/coffee and the waitress went around to offer us creamer and sugar. I was just about to note their impeccable service when the waitress accidentally dropped a spoonful of sugar on my colleague. And this was the same colleague who had packets of expired chili sauce given to her previously. I suppose that really was not her day....