Hello! Here's a rather belated post on our brunch visit to Dean & Deluca at Orchard Central. For those of you who are wondering what Dean & Deluca is, it's a gourmet food and grocery store which also happens to be a cafe!
So the purpose of our visit was to have a birthday lunch with our newest member of our adulthood gang, Melissa!
Hello birthday girl and Hann Khee!
One thing that strikes you first about Dean & Deluca is that you have to line up to make an order. It's Saturday, so the line is pretty long, but waitable, and there's so much food stuffed in the display to keep us occupied deciding what to get!
So we take photos, of course!
Pastries galore! There's just so much to take in so little time. I shall not bore you with general photos, but of the real FOOD!
We order 5 dishes between the 4 of us to share. First up with have a Spinach and Salmon Quiche ($8.50++), which I liked a lot because it had lots of spinach and was warmed up nice and hot. I deeply dislike semi-warm quiches! This one was chunky yet smooth, but my only gripe is that the base of the quiche was way too hard. We had to hack away at it with our knives if any of us wanted a piece of it!
Next came the Macaroni and Cheese ($10.00++)! Could have been a tad warmer, but for the price we paid and the portion we received, it was really worth it! Plus they came in these huge cube shaped chunks, so it felt like we were digging through a gold mine of awesome, melty cheese for this one. Good stuff!
We got the American Country Breakfast ($22.00++), which looks wise didn't impress. Taste wise, too salty too because we kept having to walk over to the water station to refill our tiny cups of water the whole time. The only saving grace was the scrambled eggs, which were quite above average, but for the price we paid... nah! Give this a miss!
My personal favourite photo of this collection (mostly because of the bokeh! Oh, and the giant tower of berry strewn pancakes too!) - Berries & Flap Jack ($18.00) looked fantastic and photographed amazingly, but tasted average. Pancakes should be light and fluffy, but this was way too thick on the inside. It's filling, yes, but we couldn't finish enough of it to enjoy the dish. Don't be fooled by the looks and amount of food blogging on this - it's is a miss too, unless you like your pancakes thick and chewy!
Asians and our food photography fetish!
We also ordered the Portobello Cheese Burger (price unknown!) which I shall not review because I don't eat beef and thus, didn't eat this! Everyone else gobbled it up pretty quickly though!
So overall, it was a pretty interesting experience. Some would say pricey but I find it comparable to other all-day-breakfast places such as Wild Honey. The food is in general, very salty as mentioned, but nothing water can't fix. I'd personally go back to try their Eggs Iberico (poached eggs!) some day because it sounded like my perfect breakfast! So if you're interested in seeing what the hype is about, do give Dean & Deluca a visit!
