Dare 1 on Little Londales Street

Every time we walked past, Dare 1 was always packed. On some nights, you may find a queue snaking out the door, which means if you've not made a booking, chances are you wouldn't be able to secure a table.

My SIL and I have both been eyeing the dessert - watermelon with milky shaved ice - that gets everyone going WOW! when walking past. I mean it looks impressive and sure does make you go "Let's try that!"

So I put us down for a table one Friday evening and we all arrived respectively after work. We arrived 15 minutes ahead of time at 6.15pm and were told "Sorry we cannot seat you until 6.30pm," and they shut the door in our face, and strolled back in.

It wasn't even packed yet during that hour, so why not? There were a lot of empty tables, surely you can put us down at one of the empty tables for four? I don't understand!

Service was atrocious, and it did not get any better throughout the night. Plates were placed down relentlessly, none of the waitstaff smiled at us, in fact they all wore a straight face.

Each time we rang the buzzer for some assistance, someone would appear giving us the "what else do you want" kind of face. It was like they didn't want to be there.

We felt a little bit better after we were served with a complimentary corn cheese - a snack we all really love. The melted cheese was blow-torched to perfection and tasted fantastic, we thought great, never mind the service, we were in for a treat!

The eomukguk (fish cake soup) wasn't bad, but neither was it impressive. It was just mediocre, and as I often make eomukguk at home using the traditional recipe (boiled kombu and radish broth) I felt like it was crazily overpriced.

Things started going downhill from hereon, as the egg roll with cheese was really really bland. All I could taste was mayo and tomato sauce. Joomak's version wins hands down!

As for the spicy fried chicken with melted cheese... Man, it does looks good when it arrived at our table, all of us were going "oooh, yummy!" But one bite was all it took to change our minds.

It wasn't great, the batter was soggy, the sauce was bland, and the chicken pieces were so small we felt like we were all eating just the batter alone.

And onto dessert, the finale which we were looking forward to - watermelon with milky shaved ice. This was the main reason why we were enticed by Dare 1 and whilst it was refreshing (duh! watermelon!), it did not taste great nor impressive to say the least.

It really is just watermelon, scooped into balls, topped with shaved ice and drizzled with milk. And for $20, that's a killer!

I really don't mean to bring restaurants down, but this place is definitely a big no-no for us all. At the end of the dinner, all four of us vowed never to return again.

The place was set up well with good ambience and Kpop rocking in the background; it'd be perfect for dinner dates or catch up meals with friends, but the food was unfortunately just not up to par.

At least not for us.

Oh, we were let down so terribly bad, we walked out the door saying "Should we go to Gami to make it up to ourselves?"