Pasta de Waraku (Central Mall)

I’m not a big fan of those fusion type places, so when my friends suggested going to a Japanese restaurant that attempts to put a Japanese twist on pasta, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. Pasta de Waraku at Central mall is yet another branch of the highly successful Waruku chain of restaurants. I’ve eaten at the flagship Waruku restaurant at Marina Bay so I was at least expecting the same value-for-money (read: huge portions and decently priced set meals) dining, decent ambience and service, and good-quality food. Unfortunately, the former is all we got out of the experience.

We arrived at around 7pm on a Saturday night- without a booking. VERY bad idea. For some reason or another, the management simply refused to do call-backs (i.e.: taking down our phone number and calling us when a table is ready) and also refused to explain why.

“It’s company policy” was the rather harried explanation I got from the frazzled-looking manager, who brusquely handed us a queue number and asked us to wait outside. The first 15 minutes were bearable- we amused ourselves by looking at the cute, life-like replicas of the pasta dishes, trying to figure out what to order. After which, a crowd started accumulating outside the tiny space between the restaurant and the escalator.

It was stuffy, noisy and rather unpleasant. People kept jostling past us in order to get to the escalator, or to squeeze into the restaurant to check on their queue number. The manager attempted to appease us by offering little plastic cups of free drinks, but that did absolutely to assuage the increasingly hungry (and cranky!) us.

After one hour and fifteen minutes we finally managed to get a seat. Weak with hunger and annoyed at the fact that we’d just wasted an entire hour idling around, we were already irritable and grumpy. The ambience did utterly nothing to make us feel any better. We got a seat near the kitchen, cramped beside another table with barely enough space to squeeze our (not so huge) asses through. The music consisted of some loud, thumping clubbing-type songs (probably catering to the masses of clubbers who have dinner there before heading to MoS) – a rather weak attempt to mask the din of waiters and waitresses shouting of greetings to customers and orders to one another. Thankfully, the waitress who served us was rather gracious and did attempt to change the music when we told her we complained. Come to think of it, she was rather sweet, and extremely apologetic.

I must say, I can understand why the restaurant is perennially crowded. The set-meals ($16.80 each) consisted of salad, soup, a main course, and a choice of either gratin or pizza. Very affordable and definitely good value for money. We ordered the Carbonara, Spaghetti Bolognaise and another soup-type pasta (can’t remember which exactly).

Thankfully, the appetizers came very quickly. The corn soup was creamy but not too thick, rather decent as a whole. Unfortunately, the main courses came just as rapidly and before we knew it, the table got as crowded as outside the restaurant!

With four main courses, drinks, soup, salad plus three gratins on the table, there was simply no space left (as you can see).

Not wanting to play food jenga and have our pasta sauce congeal, we called the manager over. She explained that during busy periods they prepare similar dishes together and serve them at one go and that other customers have had similar complaints, but “company policy” dictated that they couldn’t do anything to change this. She was polite and extremely apologetic, offering to take the main courses away (but informing us that we would have to wait for the next batch to be cooked). We decided to hang on to our food, eat as quickly as we could, and get the hell out.

My Carbonara had already gone hard (and cold) by the time I started on it, and the raw egg had become a sunny-side-up (as you can see). It was decent enough, but a little too plain for my liking. I couldn’t taste much of the bacon and the cream sauce was quite bland.

I tasted a little bit of my friend’s Bolognaise and it was way too sweet, leaving a horrible aftertaste.

To add insult to injury, halfway through our mains, an acrid smell wafted out from the kitchen. Not sure what they were cooking in there but it definitely smelt as if something was burning, making us lose our appetites instantly. The irony of it all? We spent more time waiting outside the restaurant than actually eating inside of it.

The verdict – value-for-money set meals, but definitely not worth the wait. Pretty good service (can’t blame the waitresses/manager if it really is company policy) but extremely poor ambience. Food quality – mediocre. Perhaps only a few notches above Pasta Mania.