Archangel

C says:

We’ve been meaning to try this place in Great World City for quite a while now. It’s a gourmet deli run by Chef Emmanuel Stroobant, of Saint Pierre fame. In the past though, every time we’ve walked past and glanced at the menu on the chalkboard, I’ve always been slightly uninspired because it only offers sandwiches, and I’ve never been a big fan of having sandwiches as a meal.

On Thursday evening, we strolled by and again the chalkboard didn’t look all that interesting; it had the usual sandwiches and a penne with mushroom sauce. Luckily we spotted a proper menu on one of the empty tables and had a flip through. In addition to the sandwiches, they have a proper, albeit slightly limited, menu as well. There are about 5 or 6 starters/salads, 3 pastas and another 5 main courses. I was actually torn between 3 items – the seafood ravioli with lobster bisque, duck leg confit and the pork belly. Unsurprisingly, I decided to go with the pork belly.


It was a garlic and ginger infused kurobuta pork belly, and the flavours were a lot more Asian than I expected. This suited me fine but A found it too Asian for his Anglo-Saxon tastebuds. (His Teochew tastebuds must have taken a hike today) In addition to the ginger and garlic, the sauce had a vinegary bite which made the fatty pork a lot less rich. The pork itself was obviously very good quality, because it was rich, tender, and even the fatty layers were melt-in-your-mouth and weren’t too oily.

A had the smoked salmon salad with rocket, walnuts and julienned pears. He decided on this because the menu described the salmon as ‘green tea smoked salmon’, and he has a weakness for both green tea and salmon. Unfortunately we couldn’t taste any hint of green tea, just the usual smokey saltiness. We also shared a side of truffle mashed potatoes. The devil to anyone on Atkins but boy, were they good. Creamy, cheesy and positively addictive, these were definitely the highlight of the meal for A.

Being a delicatessen, Archangel sells some pretty good stuff in their open concept walk-through kitchen. They’ve got herbs and spices of all kinds, from traditional dried chili powder and saffron, to crazy stuff like beetroot powder, vanilla salt and elderflowers. They come in nifty little test tubes as well, which is pretty cool.


This place isn’t very cheap – our meal, with 2 drinks, came up to $70 for the two of us – so I don’t think we’ll be coming here regularly since there’s plenty of good food to be found in and around Great World City. Still, I do want to try a couple of the other mains, and I’m sure the call of the truffle mashed potatoes will be hard to ignore.

A says:

The food is good but I think most of it is not really worth the price (like my $18 salad or $7 pear & vanilla juice that was the size of an old 10cent tuck shop drink). The mash however was worth the $6 and more. Freakin’ addictive. The coffee’s not bad too.

I guess I’ll go back to try the sandwiches before I make a final decision as to whether to make this a regular dining option.

Archangel
#03-32/33 Great World City
1 Kim Seng Promenade Tel: 6836-4424
Mondays to Fridays: 9.30 am to 10 pm
Weekends: 10 am to 10 pm