Yellow Brick Road

By Cindy Low • 09 Jun 2015 in Venues

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Not a Fairytale Gimmick
Here’s a café where the team behind it has made a conscious decision to deviate from the mistaken ‘cosiness’ of a confined setting and the dreary, minimalist colour of the wood and steel furnishing so emblematic of cafés today. Yellow Brick Road – as you can imagine – has a majorly sunny disposition to its interior, which can not only be attributed to the obvious colour scheme but most importantly, the true sense of relaxation is derived from the spacious area that they’ve wisely benefitted from a corner lot location.

The café is a venture between a husband and wife team and two other friends, each of them has their own distinct roles when running a bustling new business. Having just opened its doors in the beginning of April, there was an unusually high head count of staff, be it the kitchen crew uniformed in white or the denim-clad wait staff—there were many of them, all eagerly providing their best service. Co-founder and head designer of the café, Lin Lee, took some whimsy and playful design inspiration from what one could actually find when travelling down a yellow brick road; there were fractured yellow tiles arranged in a winding fashion to mimic the pathway from the children’s novel its namesake was derived from, and there were plenty of fresh chrysanthemums on the tables as well as a tree assembled from planks of wood.

While they are currently expanding their menu to accommodate their latest venture Wicked Pancake Parlour, located upstairs, its current offerings are a fusion of eastern and western flavours presented on dishes such as ‘I Wanna Be Kaya’, which is a play on traditional French toast with poached pears, coconut mascarpone cheese, and caramel kaya sauce. Entirely sinful but who cares, really? Then, there were also the cross-cultural influences of the ‘Triple C Baked Eggs’ and ‘Hooked’. The first being a Mexican-Indian dish, a pot of chilli corn carne serving as the bed for two eggs that’s concealed by a coat of melted cheese. The naan bread is tucked on the side, urging you to use it as a utensil. The latter, ‘Hooked’, comes as a piece of crisp battered barramundi lay atop a mound of mushy peas and two potato quinoa rösti. Despite the fish being deep-fried and enveloped in batter, the meat still retained a flaky succulence.

We won’t humour you with quaint references to L. Frank Baum’s classic because we believe that the café and what it has to offer are more than capable of drawing patrons on its own without any novelty.