If you are ever in the Fort Canning area and have hungry teenagers in your dining party, you may be glad to know that there is a good value buffet lunch available at Cafe Lodge YWCA. The cafe offers a fairly typical eat-all-you-can buffet spread – from appetisers, mains and desserts to specialty items and free flow of drinks – at a price that will not cause indigestion.
Fort Canning Lodge, owned and managed by YWCA Singapore, is located in the lush surroundings of Fort Canning Park and has 175 guest rooms. Located on the lobby of the Fort Canning Lodge, Café Lodge offers all day dining facilities. The cafe is simply decorated and functional. It is unlikely to be featured in interior decor magazines but the atmosphere is casual, comfortable and more than acceptable if your main purpose there is to eat.
The lunch buffet has different Asian themes on different days – Singaporean, Malaysian, Indonesian, Thai and Hong Kong. The themes are rotated day to day but there is no fixed pattern to the rotation. Perhaps bets can be placed on the theme for the day and the winner gets a free lunch – not that I think YWCA encourages betting. Well, you can always call ahead on the day to check what is for lunch.
We were there on a day when the theme was Singaporean. The standard salad and soup stations were available. The mains included items like braised tofu, mushrooms, prawn paste fried chicken, oyster sauce vegetables, steamed prawns and BBQ fish.
The Singaporean highlights were the chicken rice stall and the do-it-yourself laksa booth. The chicken rice was good – as good as what you would get in the more popular chicken rice restaurants of Singapore. All the laksa ingredients were of fairly good standard and the gravy was tasty.
There were also stations for DIY rojak and gado-gado; and there was a section for Teochew porridge.
The buffet spread also had non-local food items like pasta, fish & chips and pizzas.
The dessert spread might not be laid out in the most attractive way but it was quite extensive. There was a good range of cakes, tarts and pastries as well as nyonya kuehs. Pulot hitam, ice kachang, pineapple drink and ice cream were also available.
There was quite a good variety of food. The items we particularly liked were the fried carrot cake, the chicken rice and the interesting dessert of pulot hitam with red bean stew.
The lunch buffet spread at Cafe Lodge offers more than an adequate selection of food and even a growing teenager with voracious appetite should be able to have a satisfying lunch there. The quality of the food is not bad and some of the items are actually very delicious. Free flow of juices, tea and coffee is part of the buffet deal. All that at $28++; and if there are 3 adults, the third dines free. We think that is surely a very good value buffet.
Ratings:
Food: 3
Service: 3
Value: 5
Atmosphere: 2
Overall Rating: 3TOPs
Café Lodge
Fort Canning Lodge
6 Fort Canning Road
Singapore 179494
Tel : +65 6333 0487
Opening Hours :
Sun-Thu: 7 am to 9 pm
Fri & Sat: 7 am – 9.30 pm
Nearby MRT Station: Dhoby Ghaut
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The Ordinary Patrons | Real Dining Experience of Ordinary People
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Forget about the swiss rolls. ; many buffet of this range usually serve these swiss rolls, i wonder which brand it is. Sometimes I suspect it to be a Malaysian brand of frozen cakes.
The fish & chips in the buffet seems to be a regular item all year round.
Thanks, Lily for your insightful comments!
Honestly, it was disappointing. The spread was so limited and it’s not worth the price. This will be the first and last time I will go to Cafe Lodge YWCA for buffet.