Tiffin Club

Bonjour! (:

I'm feeling pretty perky this weekend despite the horrific amount of work that I've (yet) to do but I guess being slightly detached from work at times isn't too bad a thing yea?

To kick start the weekend, Jeffrey and I made our way to Tiffin Club, which is located somewhere near Chinatown. We don't usually frequent Chinatown area and if we do, we usually go to People's Park Food Centre for good hawker fare. Anyway, it was nice driving past Chinatown because we saw Chinese New Year decorations being put up! =) I would love to visit Chinatown again when it's closer to CNY to see the light-up and take in the festive atmosphere.

We managed to find Tiffin Club without much difficulty, probably because it takes up quite a huge corner of this particular row of shophouses. Although it may look quite big on the outside, the interior area is actually much smaller than expected.

There are three levels in Tiffin Club. The bar area occupies the first level, the main dining area is on the second level and there's a relatively small living-room-like seating area on the third level.

The third level of Tiffin Club - in-house living room.

The second level of Tiffin Club/ main dining area. Their decoration is simple and minimalistic, which I like a lot. As their floor area is small, their seating capacity isn't big either. I'd think that the restaurant can house 20+ people at most at any one time.

Although it was lunch time, the restaurant was surprisingly empty when we arrived. We'd the pleasure of feeling like we were eating at someone's place instead of a restaurant, at least until two other families joined us. Nevertheless, the atmosphere was relaxed and pleasant.

Their interesting menu which is pinned to a round-bottom board.

For starters, we shared a tofu and grilled vegetables salad ($12). I'm starting to realise that I'm quite a fan of grilled vegetables so I was more than happy to see that they actually offered such a dish. The vegetable slices were a little too thick for my liking but they were grilled rather nicely. The tofu cubes were fried ala Japanese fried tofu style, which was good because Jeffrey likes them. The most unique feature of this dish is its peanut sauce! It's slightly spicy and somehow it somehow manages to give the entire dish a very exciting twist.

For mains, we had the spinach ravioli ($16), which I didn't like a lot because of a particular strong herby taste and smell. The raviolis were very well done though (:

We also had the fish & chips ($15), which tasted much better than it looked. The crusty breaded layer went extremely well with the soft and fresh dory fillet. We felt that the fries were pretty average and could have been better.

As I was feeling greedier than usual yesterday, I chose to order two desserts instead of sharing one despite feeling pretty full. Another 'justification'/ excuse I can give for my gluttonous behaviour is that the waiter told us that the dessert portions are usually quite small, hence we decided to go for two. Anyhow, we settled for the spiced bitter chocolate pudding ($8), which tasted more like mousse rather than pudding. While I must admit that this was a little too much for me to finish on my own (Jeffrey hardly ate this because he didn't really like the taste), I was glad that I ordered it because it made me realise that non-sweet chocolate mousse can taste good as well! I especially liked the crackly cornflakes-like-things that came with the pudding. Definitely something special which you should try if you're feeling adventurous.

The other dessert that we ordered was more conventional - molten chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and coffee sauce ($10). I think it's a pretty smart idea to place the molten chocolate cake in a cup as seen in the photo because it prevents the 'chocolate lava' from running all over the plate. The relatively bitter coffee sauce was a good contrast to the sweetness that oozed from the cake and icecream. The molten chocolate cake was pretty good though I think the 'lava' wasn't very flowy because the cake wasn't heated up long enough.

On the whole, we enjoyed our experience at Tiffin Club a lot and we'll definitely go back there again in future! (: