The Jalan Besar area continue to be flourishing with many new openings, including Phat Chic Forever, Kushiboy, Prince Noodles 王子面, Sweets Craftsman, Obsessive Chocolat Desire (OCD) Ice Cream Café and For The People.
I spotted another new minimalist greyish-white cake café LA VIE within a row of shophouses, right next to the another relatively new Chuan Seng Claypot Kway Chap.
It is also of short walking distance from favourite supper place Swee Choon Tim Sum Restaurant and Johore Ye Zhi Mei Handmade Bao.
LA VIE is conceptualised on the idea of providing people with a place to enjoy fine pastries, drinks, art appreciations – you will see hanging paintings of rotating local artists on sale.
The business was previously known as Reverie Patisserie, an online patisserie shop specialising in various French pastries and butter cookies.
The name means “life” in French (minus the predictable ”en Rose”. One of the reasons for adopting this French name is because the Head Pastry Chef and founder was trained in the famed Le Cordon Bleu academy specialised in French pastry.
Chef also formerly worked at the now-defunct local French patisserie Antionette.
Some of the signature dessert items include Chloe ($8.50) – a lychee rose entremet, Kaiser ($9) – a mango and passionfruit entremets, Alfie ($9) – a chocolate banana entremets, and Trio Chocolate Cake ($10) – the other one without the fancy name.
I went with the striking-looking Watermelon Strawberry Cake ($9.50), with fresh sliced watermelon sandwiched between layers of rose chantilly and nutty almond dacquoise.
The cake was further decorated with fresh strawberries, blueberries and grapes.
Interestingly, my favourite component happened to be the base of the cake, with the dacquoise giving me faint reminders of having a macaron.
But does this match up to Black Star in Sydney?
I had the original and thought maybe it lacked the floral sweet fragrance and the watermelon could be more neatly cut. But all-in-all, a light, fluffy and not too sweet rendition worth a try.
The lychee rose entremet named Chloe ($8.50) was made with light lychee mousse, rose genoise sponge, lychee flesh, and lychee bursting boba.
This time I enjoyed the top of the cake – the ‘boba’ pearls which had light touches of citrus within.
Teas and coffees are sourced from local suppliers, with drinks such as Café Latte ($5.50), Flat White ($5.50), Hazelnut Latte ($6.50) and Vanilla Latte ($6.50) served.
There was also the well… the La Vie en Rose ($6.00), a cup of chocolate rose.
Perhaps it still needed minor tweaking to make both strong flavours more complementary, and I reckon an iced version would have work better in this case.
By the way, the complimentary cookie provided with the coffee, was melt-in-the-mouth buttery delicious.
Oh yah, do ‘pay a visit’ to the back of the café towards to the toilet for a funky little surprise.
LA VIE
204 Jalan Besar Singapore 208890
Opening Hours: 11:30am – 7:30pm (Mon – Thurs), 11:30am – 10pm (Fri), 11am – 10pm (Sat), 11am – 8:30pm (Sun)
Other Related Entries
Sweets Craftsman (Jalan Besar)
Drips Bakery Café (Ngee Ann City)
Bakers’ Brew (Great World)
Tarte by Cheryl Koh (Raffles City)
The Fabulous Baker Boy (Aliwal Street)
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