The Vault

I was exhausted today, the kind of tiredness where you're devoid of energy, it's all you can do to stop yourself from blacking out in a meeting and falling off your chair in an unruly mess of limbs. I don't think I added much value today.

Even getting out the house had been a struggle. I just kept eating breakfast instead, to put off the dread moment when I'd leave the house; a bowl of yoghurt, a banana, an apple, some toast, another banana... I'll probably discover tomorrow that I've put on five pounds.

Still, I chugged my way through the day. After lunch I felt a bit better, but I was so hungry that I'd had my lunch at 11:30, so by three in the afternoon I was ravenous and sleepy again. Perhaps I've got tapeworm.

Thus by 6:30, leaving the office and walking down to meet my wife in Chinatown, I was bent out of shape with hunger, desperate for a proper dinner. I was so enraged I even took offence when I saw a man out jogging who didn't have his shoes colour-coordinated with his vest. Never mind. I had dinner ahead of me, that would cheer me up.

When you're hungry, food tastes better, which is a good thing, because otherwise the "pizza" of instant cheese and greasy mushroom slices on a crust of finest cardboard would have been inedible. My drink was a cocktail glass filled mostly with ice, and I don't mean either large cubes of ice or a frozen-margharita-style body of crushed ice. No, one enormous cube of solid water with a gelatinous coating of something that was very close to chilled washing-up liquid. With a glace cherry on top.

My wife ordered buffalo wings, which are something that requires getting sauce all over your face and fingers. Hence they also provided her with a single paper napkin. We looked a bit askance at this, but worst was our friend, who ordered the wagyu burger.
She stressed to the server that she wanted it well done. Not pink in the middle, brown all the way through. Now, I'd always have my beef bloody, but what you ask for should be what you get, not a burger that was brown on the outside and pink all the way through. Annoyed, she sent it back, and although they promised to see to it in 10 minutes, it was twenty before the burger came back out.

It was 7 on a quiet Thursday. The bar wasn't packed, so the kitchen was either in a different time zone or completely incompetent. We sat in the bar and I looked at the decor, a confused attempt to make something look funky and different, by turning the lights down a bit, and installing Ikea shelving along the walls. No, really, that was the extent of it. There were occasional objects on some of the shelves, just as if we'd stepped into the part of the Ikea showroom for bars and drinking establishments, but the whole thing was devoid of character, like a theme pub where the theme was 'soullessness'. And Singapore doesn't do existentialism.

At least the staff were ... forgettable. Somehow I don't think it will merit a return trip. Between that and the Christian Breakfast joint, I'm given pause to wonder if anyone in Singapore knows what a restaurant even is.