Hello there!
After a busy week at work, we decided it was high time to unwind. For our day off together, we chose to visit Wan Wan Thai Café, a café situated in the heart of Bugis. Situated right beside Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) Campus 3, the café is sandwiched conveniently between many MRT stations. You can get there quite easily. The nearest MRT station is Bencoolen (blue line), but Bugis (green and blue line) and Rochor (blue line) are quite near as well.
The quaint café is located directly above Aroy-Dee Thai Kitchen, and we later heard that both Kitchen and Café are connected – they belong to the same owner.
Ambience
There isn’t a large signboard announcing the café or anything of that sort – it’s pretty nondescript and plain. Once we walked up the stairs, however, we were both blown away.
It felt like we were transported to another world. Since we couldn’t travel because of COVID-19, visiting this café felt like we were overseas in Bangkok or Hong Kong. Upon entering, we scanned our Safe Entries and were directed to choose our seats. We chose to sit by the window because we wanted to people-watch at the same time.
It was especially nice looking at the pedestrians hurrying about their day below us while we luxuriated in the air-conditioned café with its plush seats. All in all, the café’s unassuming exterior greatly contrasts its amazing interior. Just look at it! Doesn’t seem like Singapore at all.
Desserts
The selection that the café offers is rather extensive – they offer a wide variety of desserts and drinks to complement the full meals that their sister Kitchen offers. They have different flavours for their toasts, which ranges from $8.90 to $13.90. What immediately caught our eye was the Milk Tea Toast, which was the first thing we saw when flipping the menu open.
Apart from toast, they offer shaved-ice dessert, much like Ice-Kachang, Bingsu, or Kakigori. They have a lot of flavours for their Bingsu as well, which ranges from $9.90 to $14.90.
Other desserts they offer include Mini Toast, which ranges from $2.50 to $5.90, Waffles, which go for $6 per piece and Thai Desserts, which range from $2.90 to $5.90. Since we’d just had a pretty heavy lunch, we went ahead and ordered the Strawberry Bingsu (S$13.90) and Milk Tea Toast ($9.90).
Perhaps it’s because we both love our heavily flavoured Bingsu, the Strawberry Bingsu didn’t really impress us. There’s a faint milky taste to the shaved ice, which otherwise tasted like… shaved… ice. Even when we poured the condensed milk given over the ice, the ice somehow still tasted like… ice. Even the vanilla ice cream topped on it didn’t help – the creaminess of the ice cream was somewhat jarring when eaten in combination with the watery shaved ice.
It tasted like Bandung to me, as well, but my friend disagrees. She says there’s an artificial taste to the Bingsu that’s somewhat off-putting (we later spied Redman’s strawberry syrup on their shelves – and then she commented that there’s the childhood nostalgia of asking for strawberry milk tea from neighbourhood bubble tea shops; the taste is similar).
Both of us agreed that we wouldn’t specifically come to this café for their shaved-ice dessert (pssst, Nunsongyee might be closed, but O’ma Spoon is still open!) – we felt like that the price we paid was not worth what we got. The portion’s kind of tiny… or maybe the both of us are just big eaters.
The Milk Tea Toast, on the other hand – we were quite impressed with it.
It came slightly warm, and when we put it in our mouths, the outside was perfectly toasty and slightly crispy while the inside was melt-in-your mouth soft. It’s on the sweeter side because it’s loaded up with nuts and is topped off with a hefty scoop of Thai Milk Tea ice cream.
They even give you a generous portion of honey to drizzle over the top of the ice cream and toast (we say try the ice cream and toast by itself first – it came off a tad bit too sweet for us).
Because it’s milk tea, they even added some bubble tea pearls to the toast, which was slightly off-putting because the texture’s weird when put all together.
The ice cream serves as a perfect compliment to the warm toast and they were awesome when paired together. The only downside to this dessert was that we dug into it for a good 5 minutes before laying down our cutlery and admitting defeat to its jelak-ness. The taste became overwhelmingly rich after a while.
Final Thoughts
We love the service here at Wan Wan Thai Café and were thoroughly impressed with how attentive the waitresses were. They saw us rabidly snapping photos of everything and anything that fell into our line of vision and immediately whisked away the cutlery for a thorough cleaning so that the cutlery would shine in our photographs.
Some complaints that we have would be of the plating – the wooden plates are Instagram-worthy, but because they’re built with a rounded bottom, they would wobble all over the place whenever we tried scooping the Bingsu or cutting into the toast. As my friend cut into the toast and it began wobbling all over the place, she started singing “Row, Row, Row your Boat” softly under her breath and we somehow couldn’t stop laughing after.
Overall, Wan Wan Thai Café’s worth a visit. Both the decor and the food’s gorgeous and extremely Instagram-worthy. The café even has several OOTD-worthy walls for you to pose in front of. Boys, if your girlfriend’s an Instagram nut and must have gorgeous photos on her feed, this is the place to bring her to for a date. She’ll love you long long deep deep if you bring her here and help her take photos, my dude.
Overall rating for Wan Wan Thai Café? My friend gave it 3 out of 5 stars. She later dropped it to a 2.5 because of the wobbly plates. For me, the glutton, where food is the focus over photos and experience? I’d give it a solid 3 for the Milk Tea Toast, because good golly, that is some lovely toast.
Wan Wan Thai Cafe
Address: 127A Bencoolen Street, Singapore 189637 (2nd floor)
Opening Hours: 12.30pm to 3am (Mon to Sun)
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