Photos by Claire Zheng
Sure, you have a lot of great ideas when you start a new project, but it can be tough to balance the need to be original and true to your vision with the need for profitable business. Perhaps over the space of a few years you start falling into a lot of the traps that slowly kill dreams.
Located adjacent to the Xingsheng Lu stretch, somewhat in the area but not quite, sits Recall. It’s hard to miss, as owners Kelvin and Kevin have pumped in some cold, hard cash to create something visually stunning. The entrance beckons you into the colossal letter R, housing a mammoth screen for televised games and music videos. Walk in through monochromatic doors and to your left, strangely enough, you’ll find a pizza oven, a clear sign of what the menu holds.
The highpoint, though, is the circular stage in the middle of the bar under silver moonlight baubles, where instruments wait to be stroked, setting the scene for what you think is going to be an extravagance of karaoke, open mic nights and a slew of independent artistes. Think again.
We arrived around 9pm on a Tuesday, hoping for some live jiggin’ and jammin, only to find a lone ranger and his guitar melancholically warbling away in Mandarin. Underwhelming, to say the least, and also surprising, since we had been told English music plays four times a week – perhaps it just wasn’t our night.
The menu is conscientious in serving up the regulars: pizza, pasta, salads, soups and steaks. We settled on the sirloin (RMB78), but were served something vaguely resembling a cheap slab of rubbery overdone beef. We blamed it on our lack of Chinese skills – mea culpa! – and moved on to another favorite, spicy seafood pasta (RMB45). Much better than the tire we had just ingested, it woke up our enthusiasm once more with a nice peppery kick.
That alone, however, is not enough to sate a healthy appetite, so we opted for a mushroom soup (RMB28) and a seafood pizza (RMB39/55), cooked in a deep dish with gratifying handfuls of cheese right in front of our eyes. The soup, however, is more like a few dollops of heavy cream, with a solidified layer of fat and some canned champignon mushrooms sliced on top for good measure.
Overloaded with calories, we figured it was time for some digestifs and settled on Tomorrow, the bar’s signature, a concoction of white liquors, including baijiu, and a hit of blue Curacao. Tomorrow is apparently meant to make you forget today, and by the end of the evening we were sort of hoping that would happen.
// No. 120, Poly Xinyu Garden, 31 Xingguo Lu, Zhujiang Xincheng, Tianhe District 天河区珠江新城兴国路31号保利心语花园120号铺
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