PS Cafe (Dempsey)

Mention PS Cafe and not many people would associate it with quality food especially when the chain is owned and operated by Project Shop Blood Brothers, an Australian fashion label. After all, what has food got to do with fashion? Interestingly though, PS Cafe has made a name for itself with its repertoire of seemingly quality desserts.

PS cafe @ Dempsey is set amidst the hip enclave of Dempsey where thousands throng the multitude of restaurants and bars in the evenings and weekends. The interior boasts full length glass windows that offers a view of the lush greenery that surrounds it complete with wooden flooring and a nice al fresco area for days when the heat and mosquitoes take a vacation. The only downside to this pretty little place is the lack of a good noise dispersion system. When I was there for dinner, the place was packed withthe decibel level ridiculously high from all the chatter, very much like your typical hawker centre.

Chicken Rossa Penne - The penne tasted like it came straight out of the pasta packet you can find at any supermarket. But to their credit, it was done al dente. The chicken pieces were rather generous while the sauce was just bottled tomato sauce at the very best. All in all a flat and uninspiring pasta dish.

Miso Cod - The fish was a joke. It was definitely the worst dish of the evening. For starters, it wasn't fresh and had a gross fishy aftertaste. There was no taste of miso whatsoever. It didn't help that portions were tiny for the rather hefty price tag ($35) as well.

Banana Mango Crumble - Desserts were highly recommended at PS Cafe and the banana mango crumble is apparently one of the best. I wasn't too wowed by it though. Sure, the crumble was nice with the scoop of vanilla bean ice cream but I just thought that the flavours of the mango and banana could have been more pronounced. Everything tasted like a soft mashed up mixture with no distinct taste.

Flourless Orange Cake - I didn't have the stomach to try much of the orange cake but it tasted quite decent with its mild orangey and nutty taste. I'm sure the sauce had a part to play as well.

Blowing almost close to $98 for 2 disappointing mains and 2 average desserts hardly qualifies as reasonable. On the contrary, I thought that my money was well spent during a desserts only visit to the Palais outlet (See my pictures below). Service at Dempsey was spotty as the place seemed rather short handed due to the large crowd, but definitely better then its Palais counterpart. Bottomline is, go to the Palais branch and stick to desserts.

See all my pictures here.

I have heard so much of this place in dempsey that i told my friend she has to bring me there. So i manage to convince my friend and we drove to Dempsey Road.. With my first encounter there about a year ago.. i remember PS Cafe was somewhere in a corner among the bushes. We couldnt find it and had to go round and round for nearly 45 mins from day light became night time. Finally we made our way there.. we sat outside blending in with the trees and the grass. The experience is good.

My advice to future diners are, please bring along a torch light if you are going there for dinner, cos if u sit outside the candle light doesnt help you to see the menu and the prices well. The waiter(s) were kind enough to rattle on with the specials for the day. And as we cant see the menu well, we trusted him and he took our orders that he recommended.

Ordered 1 caesar salad to share, my friend ordered Beef Steak Special, and i had Cod fish, also the special for the day. I must say it tasted really good and filling despite the size.

We went on to dessert even, i ordered the chocolate pudding and my friend had the tea cake or something. Too much and we couldn't finish. Sharing is advised for ladies.

The surprise comes when the bill comes.! It was a whopping $200 (nearly) and on our way out we striked out this as our future dining place. Desserts maybe but not for meals.

Something which i didnt enjoy was the waiters were paying ounce of attention to my friend, keep asking her if the steak was alright,. if dessert was ok blahblah... while they didnt ask me at all! Gosh.. what kind of basic customer service and courtesy.

Been here for Brunch and dinner but only going to review the brunch since I can't remember the dinner but it was also good.

This place has a nice lively atmosphere ... it's a revamped army barracks and has kept a little of that feel. It is by no means luxury, far from it, the tables and chairs are functional at best, but that's the feel of the place - no frills!

The service is prompt, when you catch one of them hahaha ... it can be pretty busy on a week-end from about 11 to 3 so be prepared to wave your arms to get noticed.

The food is delish though, again simple stuff, but cooked well and it really hits the spot. My favourite dish is the poached egg portobello stack ... a magnificent combo of two poached eggs sitting on top of two Portobello mushrooms. Nestled beside them on the plate come two tomato halves, with a little fresh basil pesto and in the center, a bed of spinich, topped with cheesey potatoes and bacon. A little forkfull of heaven on a Sunday lunchtime =)

If you're starving go for the big breakfast sandwich - it's as advertised and most people will have a hard time finishing it ...

Juices and coffees are standard although the roast of bean is very good and I don't miss an opportunity to grab a decent cappucino here.

Overall fun, boisterous little place for a nice brunch, have and do recommend to friends.

Being tucked in the secluded top of Dempsey Road, I finally found my way to PS Café for a dinner. A café it might be, it is housed in a standalone pretty colonial bungalow away from the main thoroughfare.

PS, which stands for Project Shop - a local mid-market casual clothing chain, attracts a surprisingly upmarket crowd. It is perhaps the glass façade and high ceiling that adds a touch of grandeur to the already nice ambience you get whilst sitting inside the restaurant. The staffs were also friendly and approachable.

However, the food did not seek to impress me that very night. The starter of salad was merely greens and some roasted eggplants that were zealously drizzled in olive oil – straightforward, nothing fanciful, nothing captivating.

The Thick Fries were surprisingly the best dish for the night. Crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, it went well with the 2 dips that came with it – a BBQ flavour and the other, I perceived to be Sour Cream based.

The Tubular Pasta though was the letdown of the night. It seriously lacked flavour and was under-cooked – a couple more minutes would have achieved the Al-dente texture. However I would admit that I am beginning to like the idea of having snow peas in my pasta dish.

The dessert was also tortuously too rich for me. Profiteroles, or Small Cream Puffs filled with Ice Cream; served with Thick, Dark, Chocolate Syrup, is just not my kind of dessert after a heavy dinner.

Overall, a nice place to go for a first date, but skipped the pasta if you have to and go for the seafood and their famous brownie for dessert instead.

You can view the photos and other reviews @ His Food Blog.

just back from this 'heard place' awhile ago....

been there for a drink and some desserts with friend. the ambience is good though kinda noisy. like the exterior where u can relax and chit chat with friends.........brush aside all those smokers.

if only the place could be quieter and more privacy assured, then this place is definitely an ideal place for couples to visit for dinner or others. like the trees which some are lited up to create that 'ump' atmosphere.

shall be back there maybe sometime later - would recommend to friend.

I came here a while back when it was new, because everyone was going on and on about what a nice place it was. I reached there in the evening and the only table they could fit us into was outside, right under a small tree.

Since the weather was cooling, i thought it would be nice to sit outside for a change. Unfortunately, i didn't reckon with the insects! Mosquitos constantly bit me and my date, and funny things came from that small tree. It totally ruined my meal. Can't say I remember much of the food there, except that it was relatively pricey. 

I imagine if we had a seat inside it would have been a totally different experience.  6 stars for the overall experience, but i will be going back again to give it another chance

after reading so many horror reviews about this place, we were wondering whether we should go ahead and visit it anyway.which we did in the end, since we hardly drop in around dempsey. it's quite an experience walking through the 'forest' to ps cafe-they have a mini boardwalk and it's quite authentic in the sense that there's some degree of uneven-ness. so if u bring some elderly folks there or u're wearing heels, please be careful! and nearer to the entrance, they lined a row of frangipani at the side of the boardwalk. quite a pretty sight!

it was a lazy sunday evening. they have 2 seating times. one at 0630, the other at 0830. surprisingly, the service was not as bad as i thought it would be. there were many many waiters and waitresses around. i thought it was very considerate of them to kneel on one leg when they took our orders, so we didn't have to crane our necks while talking to them.+1star. while waiting for our orders to arrive, it was getting darker and the waitress started lighting up the candles, which gave the cafe a more cosy and warm ambience. BUT, she missed our table.

looking at the menu and our budget, we didn't have much of a choice. we couldn't order anything that was written on the 'brown-board' - where the specials of the day are written in chalk. moreover, having read the bad reviews about certain dishes, we were only left with about 5 choices for mains. in the end, we had moussaka, veal pasta and beef with mushroom stew.

i had veal pasta. the meat was tender, but had a slight weird taste to it. perhaps it's because of my first time tasting veal. but as you dig in, the weird taste disappears. and i liked the tomato base for this dish. i was very hungry, so i just digged in and finished my meal very quickly. yumm..

the beef with mushroom stew came in very weird proportions for 2 of my friends. one had lots of onion and very little meat. the other had lots of meat, and very little onion. but both had lots of veggie sides. one of my friends mentioned that she liked the fresh greens. not bad, but kinda overpriced..hmm..

the one who had moussaka-eggplant casserole got quite sick of eating it towards the end. luckily it was just a small bowl of it.

deserts! whoo! we tried 4 of their cakes! we had chocolate cappucino cheese cake which i thought was the best of all. we also tried their famous sticky dates pudding with ice cream and caramel sauce. it's nice because of the nuts. yumm..but the caramel made it quite sweet. duh! then we had a super sinful chocolate fudge-looking cake -"blackout" chocolate cake. then i understood why it's named blackout, cos it really looks very black. it came with a scoop of ice cream too. woah..that was super chocolatey. another one was chocolate brownie with marshmellows. With generously huge marshmellows atop, i could nearly feel my cavities surrendering. sweeeeeettt! couldn't finish the chocolatey ones..we're not very huge fans of chocolate.

well, overall, it was a good experience. not as bad as i thought it would be. it's really a cosy and nice place to chill. we were seated inside, so didn't have a chance to try the al fresco dining. nice deco, nice ambience - ps cafe scores at this aspect. very cosy and comfy. the chairs were very comfortable. i wish we could stay in there longer though. had a feeling of being chased out at 0815 - 'could we have the table back by 0830?' sigh.

Lost count of the number of visits. Love the location, ambience, food esp. the dessert. Service could be of a higher standard though.

I would stay away from anything on the menu that has any vegetable in it. The last I went there, they included raw beansprouts and barely any salad dressing! How horrible! I gave a girlfriend of mine the advice of ordering only meat and/or cake. Their desserts are decent enough, though the steamed pudding with earl grey creme anglaise is a little suspect. It is a beautiful place though, hidden among greenery with floor to ceiling glass panels.

Yes. There were so many rave reviews about this place but when I went there with my sister recently, I felt that everything was indeed overpriced. The food was only fair.

Before going there, my friends have been telling me that it's "nice" and I should definitely go there when I get the chance. Finally I did, but I don't get what's so nice about it... everything was whatever... so-so overpriced food.

I am biased. I admit. But for a restaurant of such repute, I expected more. And was left bitterly disappointed.

Ill mouth off first on the service, which is the reason I am so peeved at them anyway. We had earlier made a reservation for a party of 8, only to have another friend want to come along. When we arrived, we asked to have another place set up for our ninth friend. Understandably, they were unable to provide us another table because the restaurant was packed, and they offered us a stool. A STOOL mind you. We had no complaints about not getting another table - after all it was our fault for not getting the numbers right- but without even bothering to check if they had any spare chairs, they offered us (as if to be so incredibly generous) a stool, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Since it was our fault for screwing up the numbers, we took up their offer, although I was privately miffed that they hadn't bothered to look for a chair first.

True enough, at the end of our meal, I went to the toilet and lo and behold! an unused chair (same as those in the dining room) sat forlornly in a corner, calling out to be sat upon. I summoned the manager to question him about it, and he was without apology. My friend had sat on a stool the whole evening, yet the manager was not even sorry about their pathetic service.


Earlier on, it took the wait staff 15 minutes to get our orders from the time they gave us the menus, this despite our numerous efforts to get their attention.

I dont have much to bitch about on the food, for it was fair and well. Not utterly delectable, but good enough to complement the pretty decor and breezy atmosphere. That's right, I said the food complements the decor and not vice versa, because the food was just that.

Pretty place, fair food, poor service (when I was there). No apologies from the staff despite my making my feelings clear. Won't go back again.

Had dinner there on Sunday, 18th March 2007.

I thought the food was overpriced - solid presentation, but it didn't taste great. For example, the pasta my girlfriend had (flambed prawns) was not much better than a student meal in college. prawns were fresh, but the delicacy of flavour and intensity of the italian pasta experience was lacking. my order of fish cakes turned out to be so-so, 'cos they tasted more like supermarket scotch eggs made with fish.

the dessert wasn't too bad though the service levels could be improved. our sticky date cake with ice cream came half melted because some server had left it sitting on the counter melting before bringing it to us. maybe its intentional, but we didn't like it that way.

best dish of the night? probably my friend's steak sandwich with fries - 'cos the portion is quite hearty and the fries come with a yummy dip (aioli).

i'd really rather spend my money at whitebait&kale just down the road, or at da paolo's @ chip bee. heck, i'd rather go to the XO fish bee hoon at holland drive blk 46. ps cafe's a nice place to see and be seen - just don't expect to get great food.