Goodbye Cartel, Hello New York

It seems that every time I go to Cafe Cartel, the food always tastes worse than my last visit. This evening's dinner with mum was no exception.

Tonight's order consisted of Baked Chicken & Mushroom Macaroni for me, and Fish & Prawn Combo for mum. The macaroni had a choice of tomato or cream sauce and I forgot to specify tomato sauce. I only realized this much later on but refrained from bringing it up assuming that the default sauce was tomato and also because it'd be troublesome to change at such late notice. In the meantime, mum went to get some of the free flow bread. Back then, Cafe Cartel used to sell their bread as well as offer it free flow. Mum, who loved the bread for its crispy exterior and fluffy interior, would occasionally buy home a loaf or two. Heck, even I loved the bread. Tonight's bread however was far from its former glory. Now, I'm just gonna assume that we happened to get an old batch of bread or something and leave it at that.

Our food soon arrived and mum's Fish & Prawn Combo was looking pretty good with a large battered fish, salad side, some cross-cut fries and about 5 or 6 breaded prawns. Unfortunately for me, the default sauce for my macaroni turned out to be cream. Yay. Ok, so I thought I'd give it a try. I mean, how bad could cream sauce get right? Wrong. It turns out that it was pretty bad. The sauce had this milky-cheesy-buttery taste which was not very palatable in my opinion. They weren't very generous with the mozarella cheese either. I requested for some Tobasco sauce to try to save my taste buds some torture but to no avail. Thoughts aside, I braved through the cream sauce to eventually finish most of my macaroni. How that happened, only God knows.

Mum couldn't finish her Combo so she asked if I wanted some. I accepted, hoping that it would do some justice to the macaroni I just had. Upon closer inspection, the Fish & Prawn Combo didn't really look 'pretty good' anymore. The battered fish and breaded prawns were glistening with oil and after eating a bit of it, I just got sick with all the oil and friedness (that was the same reason mum passed the Combo to me haha). The mayonnaise from the salad and the sour cream that came with the Combo also did nothing to help me forget about that nasty encounter with the cream sauce and at that point I was pretty much sure my dinner was over.

On the way home, the greasy concoction of cream sauce, oil and fried stuff in my stomach left me feeling sick and with a bad aftertaste in my mouth. I decided to get a beer from a nearby 7-Eleven in hopes of preventing any potential messy situation and it worked quite well in killing the aftertaste and numbing the stomach.

I guess my Cafe Cartel'ing days are over. Maybe it was just a case of bad bread and bad sauce (the oil and friedness I've encountered before). Maybe, but one thing's for sure - Cafe Cartel now wasn't like Cafe Cartel then. Next time I'm heading for New York, New York.