A really bad restaurant

I sel­dom find a restau­rant or food ven­dor that riles me up so much that I want to blog and say bad things about them.

But it looks like we found one last night — it’s called ‘Grill-Out’, and it’s on the 7th floor of the con­fus­ingly laid-out Orchard Cen­tral. But before I pro­ceed with the rest of the con­dem­na­tion, I would like to com­mend the wait staff of the estab­lish­ment for really try­ing their best. The shit was really beyond their con­trol. So, if you’re the owner / HR man­ager of another estab­lish­ment, when staff of Grill-Out come look­ing for jobs, hire them, ok? (It should be soon too).

As the name sug­gests, ‘Grill-Out’ is where you order steaks and chops. But whether you get them done to your lik­ing really depends on whether your lik­ing con­sists of tough, chewy Wagyu Rib­eye slathered with black pep­per sauce. Yes, they found a way to make wagyu tough and chewy.

Now, black pep­per sauce and chewy beef wouldn’t be out of place at say, Jack’s Place or Swensen’s, but here’s the thing that sent me over the edge after Naomi’s mum ordered the $63 steak: they don’t serve plain water.

We was angry, the staff were apologetic.

They said that although they knew we weren’t the sort of cus­tomers who’d hog the tables and order plain water all night, there was noth­ing they could do about it because they are under pain of pun­ish­ment if they were caught serv­ing even a drop of plain water to a customer.

Not that there would’ve been any cus­tomer who’d be fool­hardy enough to do that (hog the tables and order plain water all night), because in the al-fresco sec­tion (and great views this part of the restau­rant has) of the estab­lish­ment was a per­form­ing duo who can­not be described as a singing duo, because they were so off-key and off-rhythm, you’d have thought you were watch­ing a Sin­ga­pore Idol audition.

Thank­fully for us, they took a long break between sets, so we could fin­ish our din­ner. To be fair, after we com­plained that we were eat­ing wagyu jerky, the man­ager got the chef to get another por­tion of the same cut of wagyu rib­eye, explain­ing to us that the piece that was selected was “near the end”, and so was “a bit tough”. They also took pains to serve a com­pli­men­tary tiramisu, which was called a “marscapone mousse cake”.

In all, a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence. Served me right any­way, think­ing that just because a restau­rant was sev­eral sto­ries above Orchard Road, it was high end nosh.