Bao Er Cafe, Holland Village

Haven't been to the original Bao Er Cafe at Balestier. This was the newly opened branch at Holland Village. The experience was mediocre.

For some context, the owners are also responsible for Prawnography and Treasure Toast. Based on both experiences, we avoided their Hokkien mee. Also because we've heard that this one has got nothing on Shiok Hokkien Mee.

I was of the impression that having had a few eateries under their belt, they'd be pretty familiar with running another branch. One would assume that they've gotten experienced from lessons learnt. There's a number panel for order collection notification placed in a position that's obviously not easy to see. 🤔

The digital menu has no indication of anything that was not available. This could likely mean 

i) Usability is not a priority or requirement when they paid for it. 

ii) Or perhaps, it just never crossed their mind that out of availability items need to be made known 

iii) Feature was there and they never thought it would be useful to enable it.

🤔

More than half of our add ons were not available and we only learnt of it after the order was processed and paid for. 🤔

Which led to how that was managed. We were informed of the missing items and then told that we could do another order while they would cancel the first order. We responded by replying that we've already paid for that first order. They then offered that the second order can be offset by what we paid for the first order which we were okay with. Then they offered again for us to just take the first order with refund. Then the first order arrived. And we were kinda "forced" to accept it without the missing add ons in which a refund was given. I felt like we were cornered and because they appeared to be busy. 🤔

This was within the first week of operation and things have already started running out? 🤔

Felt like an absence of planned error recovery for a system lacking error tolerance. 🤔

Which brings me back to the beginning. What happened with them and their wisdom gleaned from running the original Bao Er Cafe, Prawnography and Treasure Toast? 🤔

Coffee's drinkable but not something I'd look forward to.

Bee hoon's oily and bland-ish. I got this thinking it would be the smoky rendition they did for Treasure Toast but it wasn't the same. The chilli saved it.

Luncheon meat fried rice was bland. No idea what went into it but the tiny cubes of luncheon meat barely registered flavour.

It was a good thing that we didn't get their kaya butter toast because the menu clearly depicted pandan kaya. When I went into the shop, noticed and asked about the mustard-y colour, I was informed it's coconut kaya. 😓