Mia's Review: Poulet - Amazing French Roast Chicken

Yup, apart from going to Bangkok Jam while YS was back in town last two weeks, we also had a small gathering with the rest at Poulet located at Bugis+.

The restaurant was pretty small and hence, rather packed when we reached there at 7pm on a weekday. Nevertheless, we still managed to get a table for 7 (at one 'private' corner to ourselves) without much hassle.

Just a few selection of the menu. (Ron asked if I'm planning to open my own restaurant hence taking pictures of the menu) Prices are really affordable, nothing ridiculously overpriced.

My favourite soup flavour, mushroom soup! It's priced at $6.80 for a relatively large bowl.

The soup is relatively thick and creamy, with a strong fragrance of my favourite mushroom! It tasted like the cook has dumped a good load of mushroom into the blender, topped it up with cream and blended away!

Even though tiny bits of mushroom (the brownish specks) are visible, the soup is smooth and creamy, not lumpy at all. It's neither too runny (which will make me feel rip-off) nor too thick (which makes me sick of it easily), just nice to my liking. The soup is flavourful on its own (no additional salt and pepper required), with a brilliant tinge of mushroom fragrance to it. I'm using fragrance here because let's face it, mushrooms hardly have any taste.

The soup is also topped up with nicely toasted croutons cut in generous sizes, and 7 of them! I love how these croutons are toasted to perfect crispiness, just falling short of the bitter "overtoast".

As the soup is not too runny, it'll take a good while for the soup to thoroughly seep into the croutons, thus it's a plus point for me as I dislike soggy croutons. I ate up all the croutons, coated in the creamy goodness of mushroom yet not soggy from being seeped through, before finishing up the rest of the soup.

 And here's my Poulet Roti, priced at $15 dollars for half chicken. It's a pity they're not flexible enough to give quarters, because I couldn't finish half a chicken!

The chicken comes originally with creamy mushroom sauce, and they recently have a new addition of cranberry sauce. Being a mushroom fanatic, I didn't need to think twice to go for the mushroom sauce (which I regretted).

As you can see from the picture, the creamy mushroom sauce is obviously very creamy, albeit falling short of being mushroomy. It reminded me very much of a white cream sauce for pasta, and topped up with just one pathetic piece of mushroom (that was hidden by the chicken), which added absoutely no mushroom taste to the sauce. So why name it the creamy mushroom sauce?

The sauce was way too creamy for my liking, didn't like it one bit. In fact, it made me sick with the overpowering creaminess that very much covered up the fragrant sweetness of the roast chicken. I ended up painstakingly slicing the chicken in a manner that will allow the minimal amount of sauce getting onto it. I wasn't the only one at the table that hated the sauce, but I got to be fair and admit that there are others who literally wiped their plates clean. So I guess it's a definite hit or miss, you either love it or hate it.

For me, sauces are supposed to enhance, not to overpower or worse, contradicts the taste of the actual main. In my humble opinion, this sauce has tipped over the line of "contradicting" the taste of the roast chicken. I hated the combination of it at the very first bite. There's just this face-scrunching moment that I couldn't really put the experience of the taste into words. You really got to try it to know how much you love it or hate it.

Note: Sa later on told me on IG that their cranberry sauce is much better. So for my readers who already dislike creamy sauces, you might want to go for the cranberry instead.

Now on to the roast chicken. I love it! The chicken was well marinated and roasted to just how I like it. The meat is flavourful yet tender and not "overly-juicy".

I know many love those extremely juicy meat but not me, I call them slimy.

I could easily poke my fork into the meat, give it a quick slice with my knife and pull the entire chunk of meat out from the body of the chicken. Being well roasted, the chicken skin is also not oily, slightly crispy (when I say crispy here, it's the roast chicken kind of crispy, please don't expect KFC style crispy skin) and infused with the "roasted fragrance". Hence, it was a rare sight of me gobbling up the skin and all. In more common cases, I'll remove the skin and push them to the side of the plate. Not a health freak, just not a big fan of skins.

So for those girls out on a date, there's no fear of showing your date the less than demure sight of you battling with a half roasted chicken, trying to tear chunks of meat of the body and then ending up with the most unslightly sheen of oil on your lips. *rofl*

To conclude, I'll definitely revisit Poulet to try out their cranberry sauce before I decide if this Amazing French Roast Chicken is a go or no go.

For those who have tried, please tell me how was it.

Till then,

Mia