Marché @ Vivocity

I have always enjoyed dining at the various Marché outlets in Singapore. First was the outlet at the basement of The Heeren, followed by the next outlet at Suntec City. With the closure of these two outlets, I moved on to pounce on the rooftop outlet at Vivocity.

As with the former two outlets, the restaurant is almost always crowded during the weekends. As such, I was rather surprised to find myself walking straight through the entrance on a fine saturday afternoon without having to queue.

Up till being shown to our window seats, I was still rather pleased with how things proceeded so far. We went on our usual rounds to order food from the various stations with their cashless, card system. After a couple of rounds, we finally settled on our table with a plate of rosti and sausage (my all-time favourite!), a mushroom and ham pizza, grilled chicken wings and a medium bowl of stir-fried mushrooms.

We began by biting into what we thought were fat, juicy chicken wings but were instead horrified when the first bite revealed pinkish meat near to the bones! We immediately spitted out whatever contents were in our mouths and I stormed straight to the Grill station. Contrary to what I was feeling, the atmosphere at the Grill station was that of peace and tranquility. The cooks, with smiles plastered on their faces, moved at a snail's pace flipping meat over the grill, chatting happily with their fellow colleagues or were simply busy with I-don't-know-what behind the station...doing anything and everything except serving the growing queue of customers standing in plain view right infront of them!

I had to practically wave the half-cooked piece of chicken wing almost in their faces before it finally caught the attention of one of them. He promptly apologized, mumbled something which I couldn't comprehend, took the piece of meat from my hand, threw it down the rubbish bin, took another piece of pre-grilled chicken wing from a dish, grilled it for a couple of minutes before handling it back to me. And that's pretty much it. I really wondered if I should have instead took a photograph, packaged the half-cooked chicken wing in a zip-lock bag and submit it as proof for my complain to the AVA?

At the relatively higher prices being charged at this Swiss restaurant coupled with the less-than-pleasant food and customer service experience, unless someone is giving me a treat, this might jolly well be my last visit to Marché.