Q Café by Q Concept Store

As this place is owned by the people behind Q Concept store, we could visualize the décor before we even walked through the door: quirky, cute and offbeat with a touch of Victoriana inspired vintage thrown in for good measure. Funky chandeliers, check, bold wallpaper, check, mix and match of chairs, cutlery and plates, check. To be fair, Q Concept certainly does it better than most, for starters we’d quite like to pinch the glasses and granny style plates. Trouble is, Q Café falls into the same trap of many other Thonglor eateries—worrying so much about the décor that the food gets lost in concerns over where to put that picture of a chimpanzee wearing a uniform. That’s not to say it’s downright bad, just that you can’t help feeling that most of the dishes came from a packet or box rather than a chef sweating over a stove. Take the country style potato skins, they’re perfectly pleasant but we would wager money that we’ve had them before elsewhere. The baked US scallop also feels a little samey and rubbery, though the Caesar salad is better, and does at least come with real bacon and parmesan. This slightly flat feeling wasn’t helped last time by the fact that they didn’t have the recommended 72-hour slow-cooked beef stew. We settled for the beef rigatoni pasta instead and wished we hadn’t. They certainly didn’t scrimp on the beef but they didn’t hold back on the seasoning either, giving it an overpoweringly salty aftertaste. As you would expect for a café, the desserts fare better, though you do have to get up and go to the counter to see what’s available. (Not that service is bad just not very dynamic.) The apple crumble has a suitably crunchy topping and comes with a pleasant vanilla sauce, served in a super cute little pot. Which brings us back to where we started: everything in Q Café looks very pretty, but scratch beneath the surface and the reality is a place serving generic unexciting food that is really a little too bland to justify these prices. Corkage B300. Service charge 10%.