Brussel Sprouts

I keep forgetting to update my blog. My one week mid term break arrived and left like summer love.. not that it was much of a break anyway. sigh.

It's three in the afternoon, the weather's great- cloudy skies, with little sunshine peeking through and a touch of grim- and I'm tryin to finish reading up my quiz on Market Research... What a way to spend Sunday afternoon.. To think a year ago, I was jetsetting around Belgium, lieg-ing belgium waffles, ducking CHINESE chocolate vendors... I had a pretty good time in Belgium- without a breath of doubt, the food played a goliathic role in shaping my opinion.

I like Belgian food and it definitely agrees with me.. the chocolates, the liege waffles, the mussels and the FRITES FRITES FRITES.



Opened by Singapore's celebrity chef Emmanuel Stroobant himself, I had been meaning to try out Brussel Sprouts ever since I read about it in 8 Days magazine. Boy is that place hot! It wasn't packed with the air-kissing crowd but with yuppies, who wear TGIF badges proudly on their sleves.

I wasn't about to muscle (you KNEW that was coming, didn't you?) my way in so we headed off to Cappadocia for dinner instead. However, after calculating the odds of ever returning to this highly inaccessible place, we decided to visit Brussel Sprouts. Thanks to the never-diminshing crowd, we had to sit by the bar, which wasn't all that bad since the bartenders were rather friendly. Unfortunately the place suffered from poor accoustics and I found myself shouting, straining to hear myself over the crowd. Since we already had dinner, we decided to get the all inclusive platter. Yea, something light.


Hand-cut fries, parmesan cheese croquette, grey prawn croquettes, meatloaf with gerkin dressing, Brussel Sprout eggs.

On any given day, this platter would have been 'gawd's gift'. You just cannot go wrong with fried stuff! It is almost incomprehensible for anything deep fried to taste bad.. I mean, it may taste bad as in sinful but SIN (let's face it) is delectable.

The fries, tough and all, was a sob story in the making. I was surpised because Brussel Sprouts offers free flow of fries with every pot of mussels and judging by the number of pots churned out and high turnover rate, one would naturally expect crisp freshly made fries. Instead, the fries here tasted like they have been grazing the kitchen bench for too long... Sorry folks, but even McDonald's has wayyy better fries.

The battered and deep fried mussels suffered from a similar fate- rubbery, limp... Not a pretty picture. I don't mean to get all Gordon Ramsey here but if a Belgian restaurant screws up mussels and fries...



The parmesan cheese croquette was well-breaded and broke away to reveal gummy-ish lympathic insides, which failed to elicit a word of praise from us. The grey prawn croqutte, IN MY OPINION, was a disaster. Reminicent of lobster bisque, the orange gumbo within was fishy and rubbed me up the wrong way. It was an ugly moment.

On any given day, thou shall not venture near meatloaf. My failure to habour any goodwill towards anything that looks SO drastically different from its original pre-handled state produced an inertia but after the disappointing croquettes, there was pretty much nothing left to gush over.. and boiled eggs weren't exactly exciting to begin with. The meatloaf was mildly gratifying, liven up by the aromatic threads of onion and was good with or without the gerkin dressing.

Though I didn't have the mussels or entrees, the sample platter was enough to draw my attention eslewhere.