This is a very busy cafe/patisserie and despite their business, the service was good and attentive. The selection of products there were also very good. Ranging from cakes to various pastries and lots of biscuits. And for such a busy and popular cafe, the prices are very reasonable. But, unfortunately that's all the nice things I can say about it.
I tried a few things there and honestly, none of them really stood out very much. A few things did look very attractive on menu, but didn't quite live up to expectations. Bearing in mind, I haven't eaten since 9am that day and I arrived at the shop at 3pm, so I was starving and would be happy with anything.
Let's start with the key lime tart, the filling was actually good. You get the zing with it and the sweetness was relatively balanced too. You can get an overpowering sourness sometimes, but fortunately, this was good. However, the pastry let it down. It's a shortcrust pastry, so you would expect it to be short, it was overworked and quite hard, which is not quite right for a shortcrust pastry. In fact, if the pastry was thinner, the downfall of the pastry wouldn't have been that obvious, however, the pastry was VERY thick, I didn't have a ruler with me, but just by looking at it, I'm pretty confident to say it was probably about 1cm thick, which is almost as thick as the filling itself!
Then I had the turtle cheesecake. So, the description was a new york cheesecake topped with pecans, caramel and chocolate. My instant thought was "hey, I'm in New York, let's try the new york cheesecake", and the combination sounded nice too. Again, it was quite disappointing. I wasn't expecting a huge amount of flavour in the cheesecake itself, but it was literally a plain cheesecake. I think it would be a lot better if they had incorporated the flavour of the topping into the cheesecake itself. But rather, the topping was lose, fallen apart and didn't quite hold its shape on the cheesecake. Furthermore, perhaps from the weight of the topping crushing down, the cheesecake also felt a bit dense. Finally coming to the biscuit base, I could barely find anything. It's not supposed to be a huge amount of biscuit, but, the biscuit there was extremely thin. Great if you don't like the biscuit base anyway, but I think it would be great if they could double the depth of biscuit there.
The rum baba I had was thorough soaked in sweet rum syrup, the dough was actually alright to the baba, but oversoaked perhaps, it was EXTREMELY wet and soggy. Imagine the texture of your morning cereal bathed in milk for a few minutes. That kind of texture.
Finally, I had a pistachio biscotti. Can't really taste the pistachio, you see a lot of green in there, but can't really pin down the actual pistachio taste and there was certainly hardly any pistachio nut in there that I could see. So, the flavour was lacking, just tasted sweet and frankly, quite artificial.
It's a bakery with a good range of products, though I wouldn't say the goods were particularly outstanding. Worth popping in for an afternoon tea if you are in the area, but don't expect too much.
Overall impression: 4/10
Key lime tart: 5/10
Rum baba: 4/10
biscotti: 4/10
cheesecake:5/10
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