R Burger: Novelty Factor

SCENARIO: 2pm in the afternoon...TIRED and STARVING from traipsing around the shops in Ion Orchard...No energy to walk to Ippudo at Mandarin Gallery which was lunch Plan A...

PLAN B: Check out R Burger at Ion Orchard's food section. Actually I was quite curious to check out the R Burger (confession: I quite like MOS Burger's rice burgers) despite that huge thumbs-down from Tan Hsueh Yun in the Sunday Times the day before.

Bravely, I got the R-burger combo set (at SGD8.80) comprising the burger, potato wedges, a raw veggie salad wrapped in rice paper, and a drink. The R-burger comprised a beef patty with a sweet miso-like sauce accompanied with shiso leaf and pickled daikon, all sandwiched between steamed white buns which purportedly had 1000mg of marine collagen (and is supposed to miraculously beautify the consumer). The bun texture was curiously gelatinous and it had a irritating quirk of sticking to the roof of my mouth while the beef patty was small but luckily somewhat juicy and not grilled to death. The veggie salad was horrible and tasteless - it came with a mayonnaise dip which i avoided - and had evidently been sitting around for a while since the rice paper was starting to dry out.

On the whole, this still was an edible and serviceable meal, and I did feel somewhat virtuous for having taken a healthy meal, but this is not a place that I would choose to frequent in future unless I have no other choices.