Cakes and pastries (and coffee) not being my thing, I tried to decline Noreen’s invitation to Giuseppe Café, the patisserie wing of my old alma mater’s training restaurant. But she insisted as only a lifelong friend could, i.e., she nagged Jenny and me into going. “Show some support, why don’t you,” she said. “And don’t be too hard on the food.”
Among the five people in our party, we ordered brownies, lava cake (with ice cream), banana cupcakes, and pineapple pie. For beverage, a different flavored frappé for each. It took ten minutes for the sweets to arrive, and another ten for the first of the frappés. Curious, I craned for a better view of the prep area. There was only one blender.
Meanwhile we were all parched and more than a little cloyed-out from the sugar overload. Where was the water? I see this kind of thing in a lot more restaurants these days. Expect it, even. But certainly not in one serviced by HRM students; you don’t make a customer wait almost half an hour for his ordered beverage and leave them parched in the meantime. We went the day after the grand opening; how come these issues weren’t addressed (if they were raised at all) during the soft-opening phase?
As for the sweets, the lava cake oozed like it should and was not too sweet, while the brownies were okay, I guess (I like them dense and chewy; these were cake-y). On the other hand, I felt the banana cupcakes had been left to sit out too long, and the icing thick, hard, and much too sweet. I tried the pineapple pie last, but with one bite of the crust — hard bread, anyone? — decided not to bother with the filling.
The last of our frappés arrived as we were just about to leave… and it was the wrong order. Not that that mattered: those glorified milkshakes were absolutely horrible. On that point we were all in agreement, and Jenny and I had a bum stomach from the little that we had of ours. If you must drink anything, stick to H₂O — at least it’s free, if only upon request. Everything else is sweet, anyway.
Am I being hard on Giuseppe’s? Blame my Josephinian education. This was the same school that imposed upon us the likes of Ma’am Macul, small but terrible, inspiring terror in our tender hearts. I remember her fondly. Sister Anthony, too. Who could forget the sight of her, in habit and trademark sneakers, wielding scissors as she chased after high-school boys who wore their hair too long? And then there was Ma’am Guerrero, whose near-monomaniacal obsession to drum trigonometry into our coconuts I would later appreciate for making college-level math a breeze. And I’m to go easy on dessert? Not likely.
Giuseppe CaféSaint Joseph College HRM Lobby
Tunga-tunga, Maasin City, Southern Leyte
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