e.Black Board, Bedok South Road

I'm not so sure about the tagline from the signboard above the store though. In fact, I intend not to return.

e.Black Board is located in a coffeshop at Blk 18 of Bedok South Rd. I heard about this place from it's mention on the web by another blogger who then advertised his discovery in Makansutra. The number of thumbs up given to this place again, seemed to me to be in questionable light. The only conclusion I can think of is that the thumbs up were either given by people who wasn't really picky about food (if you detect euphemism, you are probably right) or are too interested in hitching onto the bandwagon of new food discovery. Interesting in outlook, it definitely didn't really live to expectations as the mentioned reviewer conveyed.

The store owner was a friendly chap whom suggested that we take a seat while he brought us the store menu. Having some idea of the food that place offers, we didn't really take long to decide on what we wanted.

The Waldorf Salad was something we thought was a "must try" in this place. No other local western cuisine does Waldorfs and it really didn't look too bad. However, the more apt name for this salad could be the 'Two Olive and Four Walnut Salad'. LOL. This wasn't that bad really, but I thought having the olives halved or sliced made a significantly better presentation. There's sliced lettuces, cubes of green and red apple, strips of bell peppers(why?!), raisins, some chopped celery and a mayo based salad sauce. For $3.50, this comes recommended. The neat thing about it was that it actually came nicely chilled. This gets thumbs up. And this is probably the only thumbs up I'm giving.

I'm going to make the comparison to Botak Jones with their Cajun chicken here. It shares the same name as the dish from Botak Jones but was definitely different. And not up to the mark. I personally felt that Botak Jones did theirs more than significantly better in taste. I'm not an expert in Cajun styled food, but this seems to suffer from over infusion of herb. It was in the end edible, unremarkable and not worthy of the good things I've heard of it.

The granddaddy of disappointment came in the form of the 300g sirloin steak. It was the most compelling reason I've had after reading the reviews of this place and I was hoping to find a gem in e.Black Board. I found a dusty old rock. I could have attributed the surprise of finding it drenched in mushroom sauce to the review I saw which the steak came clean without condiments. Back to the point, this $11 sirloin did sound like a tempting steal. Unfortunately, there was nothing to shout about. I wouldn't recommend it. In fact, I'll advice staying away from this. The meat was tough and stringy. That much was noticeable from the moment we made the first cut into the meat. Following that was the overly chewy bite on the meat which contained fibrous sinew. It's probably from a very old cow. I ended up not finishing the steak. Says something about how it tasted.

The owner did mention that he had a change of supplier for the meat and the current one wasn't supplying the food items that are up to his standards. This, he mentioned he intended to rectify. And so it would seem that I have had the misfortune of being here at the wrong time. However I think I should just call what I had as it was. If I had to be forgiving for every time that a reason like this was given for a poor show, everyone would be serving great food at great prices.