au chocolat, town (take 2)

decent-okay food, and even better desserts. I promised you more photos – and here I deliver. just look at that last photo of the innards of a lemon-meringue tart: how gorgeous is that! it is so gratifying (as both a foodie and a budding photographer) to be in a place that allows for great photography and tasty enough food – and au chocolat definitely fulfills both criteria. before you slobber all over your screens, let’s get onto the food, shall we?

I told you on my last post that the desserts here were pretty good, and this visit didn’t disappoint. I must say qualitatively though that this place pushes out sweet foods of consistently higher standards than its savouries, which fall quickly into the recesses of your probably-won’t-get-it-again list.

the same girlfriend who visited this place on my last visit helped forcibly cajole a few more friends to join us at this meal so we could go through even more of their menu. incidentally this was also at the intersection of brunch and lunch, so we got an array of dishes that included duck confit, aebleskivers, a burger and eggs benedict. I’m going to run through these quickly because I’m far more excited about the desserts(!) so 1. the duck confit was tasty if a little dry, 2. the aebleskivers were decent, tiny pancakes with an apple compote on the side – not too heavy but not entirely spectacular (though I might get this again), 3. the burger was possibly the weakest main – with a thin, overcooked patty and far-too-stodgy buns, even if the fries were decent; and 4. chocolate eggs benedict. possibly the strangest-sounding thing on the menu (chocolate with eggs?!), I don’t really remember how this tasted at all, so I’m striking it off into obscurity. it probably wasn’t bad though, so have a go if you’d like and remind me how it was.

okay, dessert time. I have an incurable sweet tooth, so mains always feel to me a prelude – filler, if I’m being honest – to what is the entire reason for the meal. we were pretty stuffed by this time, and so we only managed to get a slice of chocolate praline cake and a calamansi tart between the four of us. the chocolate praline was in the same class of firm-mousse-terrine as the chocolate-orange rendition we had managed on the last visit, and even better than that already-pretty-good confection – creamy and chocolatey and nutty and textured, this was very nice.

the calamansi tart is a local riff on the ever-popular lemon meringue pie, with a sweet pastry crust, a tart calamansi curd and a huge mound of fluffy meringue. this came slightly torched, not enough for a s’more-type flavour so that torching seemed mostly aesthetic – not a bad thing, and probably not one you’d notice if you haven’t had a well-torched meringue before. this was rather spectacularly tasty, with a lovely balance between tart and sweet flavours.

I don’t really know how to end this post – I find myself wanting to exclaim rather a lot about the desserts to the point of incoherence, so I will say that you will have a great meal if you had lunch at pizzeria mozza, and then finished with dessert here. probably end up with a carb-and-sugar coma after that, but that’s not a bad thing at all, is it?