Dunes Café is one of the newly-opened eatery located in one of the buildings near the big roundabout in Gadong. It is just opposite the soon-to-be-opened Excapade Sushi branch. This part of "new" Kiulap is called Regent Square, which somehow reminds me of Regent Street in London. So anyway, my friend and I decided to give the place a try at lunch time.
The menu was just quite mediocre, the usual kind a café had to offer. The interior of the café was quite small but cosy, the concept you envisaged yourself lounging about or surfing on your laptop (yes there's WiFi) whilst waiting for your meal to be served. And boy, we sure did wait for our food, try 45 minutes later! The service was extremely slow. Not the place to go if you have an hour for lunch break. I ordered the Fried Bee Hoon and Iced Lemon Tea while my friend had the Fettucine Carbonara and Iced Latte. I’m no expert in cooking, but surely our order shouldn't take that long to prepare?
Even the drinks took awhile to arrive at our table. Had the cafe been full house at that time, we would have been quite understandable, but the place wasn’t even fully packed. It was only us and a few other customers. And that is not the worst part yet, both of our food tasted rather bland. I reckon the chef had gone a little too far with the adding of MSG, either that or the chef couldn’t be bothered tasting it at all before serving it. Both our food was salty, Bee Hoon too oily and the Pasta too creamy. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish half of it.
With the slow service and bad cooking, my appetite was completely gone by then. I’m sorry to say Dunes Café is certainly not to my liking. I'm guessing they only have one chef to handle the orders. But that is still no excuse. So perhaps we came at the wrong time or day but for sure, our dining experience was very disappointing. The only benefit of the doubt I could give to the lousy service is that they are still new, but again that is no excuse for customers to leave unhappy, when you're new, you need to leave a good impression. The café obviously could use a big uplift in the service quality (hire another chef?) and food department. Perhaps your take could be different from ours, who knows.
Submitted by: FNAN
