Hi,
Marks and Spencer has always been a place we frequent for its awesome Colombia coffee beans and other food items. Claire just love ogling all those instant microwave-able food in the freezer, and when we heard they have a cafe now, of course we need to go try it.
Its located at Wheelock Place taking over the O’Coffee Club space. We went there on a whim after our dinner, so Claire didn’t get to try their main courses and pastas. She got the whole menu on jpegs though and I will put them at the bottom of this post.
We are quite badly addicted to coffee so when we go to any cafe, the first thing to look at is the Hot Beverages section on the menu. It has flat white and so I of course ordered that. Check out the latte art guys.
I’d say at least they tried. E for Effort. Maybe the staff were all new so they are still in-training, I don’t really mind, what I DO mind is the taste. With this latte art, I would of course lower my expectations accordingly, but the taste went lower than my expectations! Its bitter and burnt, without any hints of what the beans use to be. I’d liken it to boiled-charcoal-with-overcooked-milk.. Claire had iced boiled-charcoal-with-overcooked-milk they called Iced Latte.
And because its after dinner so I wanted to order a Triple Layer Carrot cake to go with our coffee, but at the time we were there, they don’t have any cake that interest me left to order, so I went with potato wedges thinking what can go wrong with fried wedges right? Only they were baked/microwaved tough and unsalted. What seem like a batter on the wedges tasted bland and we were given ketchup. I prefer chilli but don’t mind ketchup so that’s still acceptable, but we paid $6.90 excl. taxes for 15 miserable pieces of instant food, yes they taste like instant food. They were also small and dry, i added salt and pepper but that didn’t help much…
To be fair, we didn’t order any mains so we can’t conclude that they all taste bad, but I got a little suspicious, perhaps they are selling heated up instant food at a premium price. Since they are selling tons of them in their food section.. Just a speculation, the wedges were bad, the coffee were bad. That’s all me and Claire knows..
And thus, ends our short review, a little sad because we had high hopes. Maybe they’re still new so they needed a little more time hiring experienced F and B staffs. I say this because the waiting staffs were all young and seems inexperienced. But when you open a cafe like this, first impression counts man.. So please buck up.
I’ll probably give it another try, but not in the near future. Maybe a year later, and see if there are any improvements (with the coffees, most important!).
Ciao.
Simon Tey
P.S. If you still wanna give this cafe a try, here’s the menu courtesy of my Claire:
