Poulèt vous?

I was initially skeptical about this French themed roast chicken joint / rotisserie (#01-175/176/177, VivoCity, 1 HarbourFront Walk, tel : +65 6376 9087) as it was opened by the people that ran Thai Express. I didn't like Thai Express. And the bunch of other chain restaurants that the group manages. In retrospect, I can see why the place draws such a crowd and that people talk about it. The chicken was pretty decent and I did like some of the stuff we had. Which left me wondering if the quality of the food was consistent across the board for each outlet or did we just get lucky here at VivoCity......

We could also see that what they're trying to do, was to simplify the food setup to let the ingredients shine along with some well managed cooking processes in the kitchen.

Mushroom soup was creamy, smooth and not lacking in flavour. This was actually better than I had imagined so I guess that's a good thing.

I thought that a name like salad de Paris was tacky. Overlooking that, it was a pretty good one. There was the piquant from the olives, fruity sweet and tart from the dried cranberries, fragrant nuttiness from the generous sprinkle of pine nuts along with the chopped up greens that lent a great deal of texture, tossed up very well with olive oil and apricot jam. I was thinking, if the food sucked, I could come back just for this. I swear.

The claim to fame for Poulèt was obviously their slow roasted chicken. It's pretty good. The meat was tender, moist and apart from their brine marination, had no other flavouring. And then the sauce. This cranberry one tasted like it had roux with the dominant flavour being cinnamon. Which was not what I had expected since I had imagined a fruity cranberry jam/compote thing. But I suppose if it had been the latter, it'll mess itself up with the smear of mustard that they had also provided.

The regular sauce option was some sort of mushroom cream which tasted like a less mushroom-y rendition of their soup. It was still rich from the cream and made you feel like you've had enough when you're done with the chicken.

Mash was good. Smooth, velvety machine blended good. It was however not the buttery type.

Dessert was caramelised apple in puffy tart. It was okay.