Where not to eat in Singapore: Cafe Cartel

I realise that many of the Singaporean blogs I read wax lyrical about food, as do I from time to time, so I thought it was time for a new series on where not to eat: places with bad food, unforgivable prices, exercrable service, hopeless ambience, or a combination of all these.

Then I procrastinated.

Congratulations, Cafe Cartel. You made my dinner experience last night so wretched that it jolted me out of my limbo and into writing this inaugural entry in the series.

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I should begin by declaiming that I used to like the food at Cafe Cartel when they first opened. Terz and I were regular patrons of the Siglap outlet in its early days. It was 1998 and the great mushrooming of cafes all over Singapore was just beginning. The menu wasn't as varied as it is today, but what it served, it served well and we ate it contentedly.

I don't recall exactly when things changed, but at some point a few years after, we had a truly awful experience at that same outlet. His pasta came with a soupy substance masquerading as a cream sauce and we swore thereafter not to eat there.

I've broken that promise five times. Sometimes it wasn't my choice where to eat. Other times, I wasn't eating, warned the people who were, and listened to their complaints pile up as the meal wore on. Once, just once, they served up a massive sundae that was everything a massive sundae should be. So that's at least one thing they can do right.

Last night, at the Raffles City outlet, I crossed the rubicon.

Oh, all right, I suppose last night was my fault. I didn't protest when my friends wanted to eat there, mostly because I used to work with them and now I see them less often and I didn't want to make a fuss. I didn't heed last week's warning, when Ondine waited fifteen minutes for them to pack up her leftover cake and eventually had to stand right there at the counter beside her neglected cake before someone scared up a box for her.

So last night, we went inside and as usual, alarm bells went off in my head as soon as I stepped inside. They've deliberately designed the interior of the outlet to pack in as many tables as possible, to the extent that there's only enough space between each chair for someone of an anime heroine's proportions to slip through. I'm a small girl, but the hair's breadth between the backs of each chair made me feel like I was the size of Mr Snuffleupagus.

This, in a cafe where the trademark is self-service: customers scribble their orders down on an order pad, take it up to the cashier to ring it up, and serve themselves water, bread and condiments. And each cup provided for water is about as large as what you get at the dentist's, i.e. it requires refilling after two mouthfuls. If you're going to make me roll over and fetch my own food, the least you could do is give me enough space to walk up to the counter without twitching my butt into other diners' backs.

The food order itself caused a little confusion. I'd ordered a roast chicken sandwich, which the menu states includes egg (but doesn't say 'egg mayo'), and I'd written "no mayo" on my order. My friend who took the order up to the cashier had to flag me over to clarify it because apparently they had run out of egg mayo and would I be all right if they substituted it with just egg? At which point I blinked uncomprehendingly at the cashier and said, "It's egg, right? And I said no mayo?" She assented. I wanted to ask her how that would be any different from what I'd actually ordered, but it was early in the evening yet, so I simply nodded and let her process the order.

But no, they were out of shitake mushrooms as well, which means my friend's mushroom pasta would only have button and canned mushrooms in it. (Who the hell admits on the menu that they're serving canned food anyway?) And was she okay with that? Because she is a much nicer girl than me, she was.

The other two orders were processed and served without incident. When the mushroom pasta showed up, the sauce was on the watery side, but my friend ate it anyway. But it was my sandwich --- a freaking sandwich that doesn't require any cooking beyond toasting the bread --- that proved to be the real challenge.

After a reasonable wait, a manager type pops by to inform me nicely that, doh!, they burned the sandwich, so they were making a new one for me. I squinted, but (again) didn't kick up a fuss.

Many minutes later, by which point my friends were more than halfway through their meals, I got up and pointed out to the first waitstaff I encountered that I'd been waiting a really long time and could she check it please? Of course she couldn't without the receipt, so we had to weave and squeeze our way back to my table (see above on table crammage situation), where my friend had to scrounge the receipt out of her bag. By the time I handed it over to the waitstaff --- who was, to her credit, indefatigably polite throughout all this --- my sandwich had serendipitously appeared in the hands of the manager type and was about to land on my table.

I was hungry. I sat down. I took a bite.

It had mayo in it.

Apparently, the Cafe Cartel SOP for re-making a food item is: Make the food in as much as time as it would take if it were a new order. Ignore the original order slip and any special instructions that it might have. Oh, and be a doll --- try not to screw things up again, or you'll have to start over from the first step.

I thought about making a fuss, especially since the mayo didn't taste exactly fabulous, but hunger won out and I ate it. And it was a good sandwich, not as hearty as Seah Street Deli's, but it would've passed the test --- had it not been excruciatingly late and made so carelessly.

The moral of the story: Only go to Cafe Cartel if you're eating ice cream, which is commercially produced by an external supplier and can't be screwed up. Eat all other prepared foods at your own risk. I will never eat there again --- and this time I mean it.

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