Food For Thought

The thing about food with an agenda is that the food had to be good. The agenda can be the after thought. It's this philosophy that is applied to vegetarian or organic restaurants or restaurants that use people from the yellow ribbon project or use school dropouts. Coz if the food is bad, why must I subject myself to it just for a good cause? In the food biz, the agenda of the restaurant can get you some initial buzz but it's the repeat customer that will add the zeros to your bottom line!

Food for Thought is one of these restaurants. A portion of the restaurant's proceeds are donated to a Christian charity. The food there is American, with a little Italian and Asian influence. One dish highly recommended is the Pulled Pork Sandwich. Sadly, this one didn't quite meet the mark. When it's slow roasted for hours, I would expect the pork to be really tender and flavourful but it turned out to be a little tough. And the generous squirts of barbecue sauce masked the pork's natural flavour. Either that or the pork had no flavour to begin with.

Next dish was spaghetti with mushrooms. The beauty of this dish is that it's really hard to get it wrong. Use the freshest ingredients, fry over low heat, make sure the spaghetti is cooked perfectly, combine and toss. This dish met the mark!

Then came the duck pizza. Visually, it was really appetizing! It came on a wooden board and was full of colours from the peppers and herbs sprinkled on top. Full marks for presentation. But I had issues with the duck (too thick and too tough and not very flavourful) and also the pizza crust (too hard and chewy. Either make it thin & crunchy ala Italian style, or thicker and breadier ala American)

Their Cherry cake looked different! The cream cheese frosting one a cherry flavoured sponge cake was not one of the best marriages in my opinion.

Also failing was their Chocolate cake - not light enough for a light sponge cake nor fudgy enough for a fudge cake. It's kinda stuck inbetween - not in a good way.

The last issue I had with them is the ventilation of the restaurant. They have an open kitchen which can be entertaining to look at. BUT the restaurant's kitchen does not have an extractor fan! So the entire restaurant was REALLY stuffy and smelt of oil. It's one of the places that you leave smelling of oil. Not cool.