Cafe Provencal

The afternoon in Shangri-la Mall went by quite fast, and by the time we finished going around Rustan's Department Store, it was already 7pm.  Tired and hungry, we decided to have a fast dinner at Cafe Provencal, which was a favorite at the time the mall was newly opened.  I think the interiors have been redone; we chose to sit at the semi-private nooks, which I don't recall having been there many years ago.

The cafe is not as busy at the 6th floor restaurants.  We didn't want to mix it up with the big crowd, and Cafe Provencal was a perfect choice to lounge around and rest our tired feet; the pace of the meal was also much more relaxed.

The crostini came with tasty herb butter, and Monique and I munched on it with gusto.  Monique ordered Onion Soup (she would have shared this with Andie had Andie been there as this was a favorite of them both), I tasted some and thought that the mozzarella could have been a little gooier.  The broth was good, though slightly on the sweet side.

We had two pizzas, one with truffle oil (the house specialty) and another with pepperoni various other meats.  These were quite tasty,  came out fresh and hot from the oven and the cheese topping was nicely elastic.  The truffle oil pizza came topped with thinly sliced potatoes, and I thought that this was a bit of carbohydrate overkill.

Vicky had a croque-madame, this being one of her favorite Parisian snacks (the dish has a poached egg on top of the croque-monsieur).  I would have wanted a thicker layer of ham though, as their version only had a slice (some hotels give up to six slices of ham).  I had imagined that the restaurant would have served the dish as croque-provencal (croque-madame with tomatoes) just because of the restaurant name, but that was not the case; the croque-madame was indeed a croque-madame.

Prepare something like P700 per head for this restaurant to enjoy the variety of dishes.  They still have beef stew on the menu, which I remember was quite good back then.