Hill Street Coffee Shop

This retro themed coffee shop, located in the heart of the Gardens by the Bay aims to bring you back to the 1960s Hill Street Coffee Shop with the decor (such as the wooden tables and chairs, coffee cups and saucers) mimicking elements of the past coffee shop. They do serve decent main courses here too. We had their nasi lemak which wasn't too bad. Of course a trip here won't be complete without a cup of hot piping coffee and though slightly pricey (as expected for food from a tourist attraction) the coffee was really potent and had a nice faint smoky aftertaste which I enjoyed.

I visited the Gardens by the Bay quite recently and decided to have lunch at the air conditioned coffeeshop at Supertree Dining. The entire restaurant was very well decorated with wooden stools and ceramic tables, even the menus were printed in the form of newspapers! Although i agree the prices of the food are quite pricey, I enjoyed the ambience of sitting in the restaurant, felt like I was brought back to the olden days. There were also pieces of olden kitchen ware that were displayed on the shelves as part of the decoration.

That day, a few of the items on the menu were not available, so I settled for a bowl of laksa. The laksa bowl was in a unique oval shape and it was quite a whole portion of laksa gravy and ingredients. The laksa gravy was very thick with very strong coconut milk flavour. It was not very spicy as the coconut milk overwhelmed the chili paste flavour. There were very huge cockles in the laksa which were fresh and juicy! We also had fried chicken wings which were fried with very strong prawn paste. They were crispy and flavourful but a little bit too oily. Their variety of drinks were similar to that of those in normal coffee shops, from hot coffee to plum juice drink and barley. Again, some of the drinks like barley were unavailable which I was quite disappointed but the plum juice I ordered was not too bad. It was very refreshing!

The food took some time to come because it was quite crowded but when it came, it came all at once, so it really satisfied our appetites. Overall, it was a pleasant dining experience in the well-created olden coffee shop ambience but it was definitely a little too pricey to have local fare at these prices because they are nothing very special from those you can find at a normal kopitiam. However, I guess it's the uniqueness of the place that continues to draw visitors to dine at the restaurant.