Seb's Bistro (Rochester Park Cafe)

Hello everyone! (: 

Am feeling unusually drained today because I did NS yesterday for the first time in my life & now I can empathise (to a very small extent) the tedium of doing guard duty and/ or admin for the entire day! Nevertheless, it was an experience that I am glad I got to partake in and I certainly did learn some things from it (:

Today I shall blog about a lovely cafe that belongs to the restaurants that reside at the Rochester area - Seb's Bistro! (: It's a restaurant that serves French/ Western food and it adopts an open-dining concept, which means that it'll be extremely HOT during the day because there's ONLY alfresco dining! Be prepared to drink up and perspire if you ever decide to dine at Seb's during the day! That's exactly what Jeffrey and I did when we visited it on a weekend afternoon for lunch!

Upon arrival, we were served a bread basket with slices of multigrain bread (if I'm not wrong) and a full container of butter (see bottom left).  The bread wasn't warm but it was soft and fresh enough so we were satiated.

For starters, we decided to go for the confit calamari ($16), which superceded my expectations: not only was it a novel dish (I've never eaten this before!), the squid were fresh and the flavours were subtly blended such that it wasn't too heavy a dish! Loved it! (:

We couldn't help but order a side portion of fries ($6) that day because I had a fries-attack the day before and it wasn't fully resolved so we decided to make sure that I got my share of fries! Personally, I don't like fries that are too fat like the ones served here because there's too much potato in each fry and it is difficult for the salt on the surface to sufficiently flavour the entire fry! Moreover, ingesting fat fries means that I get full faster and can therefore eat fewer fries! haha Bottomline is that you can give these fries a miss if you aren't really into fries or if you think there's another worthier sidedish!

Carbonara ($18). Not the French-iest of dishes but I just felt like having some linguine that day so that's what we had. The texture of the linguine was just right but I felt that there was just way too much cream sauce so the 'gelat' feeling kicked in a tad too early. The trick to finishing this dish is to share this dish with someone else so that you'll not get too sick of its taste! Thankfully Jeffrey helped me finish the last bits of it so I didn't feel like I'm wasting food! (:

Somehow I'm under the impression that duck confit ($28) is THE French dish to order because this dish never fails to be at least satisfactory when we order it at the few French restaurants that we've dined at and true enough, Seb's rendition of the duck confit was no exception! Jeffrey commented that the meat was extremely tender and it slid right off the bone! It was also very well-marinated and the meat tasted divine! (: If you're at a loss as to what to order, please go along with this and you won't be (too) disappointed.

Alright that's all I've to share for today! (: The weather's been great so far and I hope that your Sunday is going well! (:

Will update this space again soon (: Have a great week ahead everyone!