Provence

This is a little Japanese bakery tucked into a corner of Holland Village, so hidden that I've actually walked past many times and not even know that it existed. It's opposite Subway, and it's quite hard to notice if you dont look out for it.

The Japanese are fascinated by bread - look at the manga/anime Yakitate Japan (at the end of each vol of manga, there will be a bread recipe, there's even one where they teach you how to cook bread in a rice cooker), Melon Bun (i like those with the real melon inside, not the empty one), and there's so many Japanese bakeries. For example, Sun Moulin at Iseatan basement, they have Strawberry and Cream Sandwiches, Blueberry Swiss rolls (very nice!), Liang Court has a few Japanese bakeries too with an interesting variety of breads.

The bread from Provence is really fresh and unique - they only come out at certain times, and if you really want to get the popular ones, you'll have to wait quite a while once they're sold out. It caters to the Japanese - each bread label has katakana and alot of the signs are in Japanese.

It also has a variety of sandwiches - from bento boxes to brunch and tea time sandwich sets which you can consume in house, within the bakery itself or alfresco.

This blogpost was made possible by Yilin, our chauffer for the day.

And since there was a carpark attendent hovering around, we decided that we had to put the exact time on the carpark coupon, and no cheating - not even 5 min.

To get my appetite going for brunch, I shared a Milk Bun with fish. The picture of the whole milk bun is a bit blurred (probably cos I was hypoglycaemic and couldn't hold my phone properly)
Milk bun is my favourite bun from Provence. It's a milk custard, and tastes vaguely like philidelphia cream cheese, but it's more custardy and lighter than the cream cheese. The bun is very soft, fresh and light. In fact, when we were eating it, we realised that the milk custard filling was still warm. Delicious! Oiishi!
This is the cinnamon bun.
Ham toast brunch set. Comes with coffee/tea. $4
Bacon Toast Brunch Set - $5
This is the one that i ate - it's toast with fried egg, bacon, japanese cucumbers, tomatoes and a generous helping of tomato sauce (which i didn't quite like). I ordered it because it came with a salad, which I wanted. The salad is great, with corn, tomato, cabbage and Japanese Cucumbers, in a Japanese Salad dressing.There are 2 choices for tea - English Breakfast Tea or Earl Grey

I decided to buy something to eat for later cos the lectures were so long. So i got an easy to eat seaseme cream cheese bun - but it's not very good. It has a really strong taste of sesame.
Sesame Cream Cheese Buns - $2.40 for 4
Another thing worth trying is the crossaints (sp?) it's $5 for 10 and each crossaint has a bit of egg custard and is slightly sweet. And of course, they're really fresh.


Yilin is sadly tearing a coupon.