Streets of London @ Bukit Merah Central

Located at Block 161 Bukit Merah Central, this place is just one bus stop away from my office. So decided to pop-in for lunch with a colleague.

eye catching signboard

The place is still quite new, and was curious about its food since it was featured twice in 8-days (last week and this week), plus because of its proximity to my workplace...why not try it?

It's a casual joint, so we sauntered in and settled ourselves onto any available table. In fact, we were the only customer there at that time.

choose your table

we sat here, with nice table lamp and a nice framed picture

Menus were quickly presented and the young chap left us alone for us to decide. There's no GST nor service charge here, so the prices are in nett. Set lunches for $10 is available and it comes with a soup of the day and a small glass of soft drink. Options included fish and chips, chicken chop and spaghetti bolognaise. The rest I can't really remember but there wasn't any steak options.

My colleague chose the fish and chips set lunch, and I ordered the sirloin steak ala-carte (@$15) to be done medium rare. For drinks, they're having a whole day Happy Hour promo till end of May, so a bottle of Hoegaarden goes for $6. And we also had a basket of onion rings to share.

First to arrive, the french onion soup that's part of the set lunch.

pepper shaker et french onion soup

Liked the temperature of the soup, and it was quite alright with visible strands of onions cooked till soft. My colleague likes all things onions, so she seemed to enjoy this.

Hoegaarden in a Stella glass

 
Next up, was the basket of onion rings which I think is quite a steal at only $5. Served right off the frying pan, it was very crunchy and very hot!

onion rings @$5

closer view of the onion rings

One bad thing about the onion rings? It was actually dripping with oil, especially the bottom ones. It would be much much better if the oil was drained from the onion rings prior to serving. It was quite alarming to see oil seeping out of the basket and onto the plastic tablecloth!

oil alert!

Now, on towards the main courses. The fish and chips, was shall I say, quite impressive.

fish and chips

The fish portion was of a sizeable chunk. The batter was as thin as it can be, so we're eating fish and not flour.

thinly coated batter

fleshy fish

The fish flesh was firm and soft at the same time, and tasted pretty smooth. Gently salted, so it has some taste on its own. Liked the small mound of fruits and vegetables but the fries was pretty ordinary and doesn't seemed to be double fried.

The steak took some 15 minutes to cook since the soup first arrived.

sirloin steak

served with onion mushroom sauce

looks too rare for a medium rare, yes?

First impression of the steak, was that it was quite thick for a sirloin. But signs of trouble appeared after cutting the meat. It looked pretty rare, so that made it jaw achingly chewy and hard to swallow. It was worse when the knife came to the center of the meat.

Asked the young chap who was running the service, if he too feels that the meat was too rare to be medium rare. He thought so too, and brought the meat back to the kitchen.

Ten minutes later, my same steak re-appeared with some parts still red while the top parts of the meat was cooked to medium.

second time cooked steak

The steak was disappointing, so didn't finish it.

We paid $36 for the meal.