Egg3 Patisserie

What's it like: A little off the beaten path, Mountbatten Centre takes quite a bit of navigating to find despite its address (if you're driving, you'll have to enter via Guillemard Crescent, rather than Mountbatten Road itself) but offers a quiet respite, with tea and cakes for the nurturing parents who've enrolled their kids in the Centre's enrichment classes.

Egg3 Patisserie is a revamp in concept from the previous Italian cuisine Egg3 Café by the same people of the Erskine Road multilabel retailer, yet falls short of what we've come to expect from the tight edit of their retail offerings and lifestyle slant of the company.

Aiming to give customers the feel of stepping into a pal's living room, this fashion pop-up store and pastry café is echoey, with furniture and goods haphazardly and sparsely situated in the classroom-sized space. Price tags for products like the Komono and Void watches were nowhere to be found, and $400-$600 leather and syntheticleather bags were slumped sloppily on odd mannequins and ladders that hardly showed off how unique they really were.

The food and drink: Ordering caused a bit of confusion, as we weren't presented with a menu and the pastry display was mostly empty. A chalkboard displayed randomly on a side wall was the only sign displaying their high tea set for two ($15.90), which includes six tarlets (chocolate, macadamia and peach), two mini raisin scones and two iced peach teas.

We would have been better off without it: each tarlet had its own set of flaws – the chocolate was not quite as rich as it looked, the macadamia came with just the empty tart shell and carmelised nuts stacked on, and the peach (the most promising-looking of the lot) tasted bland with its thin cream filling and fell apart immediately upon cutting. Its only saving grace was the two glasses of iced peach teas, which provided a refreshing, sweet salve.

Aside from the set, their specialty citron meringue tart ($4.50) fared only marginally better with a crunchy crumb outer, but the metallic tinge that laced the lemon curd didn’t get any help from the tasteless meringue. It’s all a bit hard to swallow overall, and certainly not helped by the watered-down, bitter coffee ($3.20), arguably no better than what you’d get at a kopitiam for less than half the price.

The verdict It’s certainly not worth a trip out to Mountbatten to seek out Egg3 – but if you do happen to find yourself there, order anything else besides the iced peach tea at your own peril. Natasha Hong

Cost: Pastries from $2.20, drinks from $2