Finally cake, but only in little slices
Soon after my disappointing experience at Cooper's, I started to seek out a new cake place near my grandma's. King's came to mind immediately, but the problem with them used to be their Banani location. Now they seem to have expanded all over the capital, and I was happy to discover that they had a branch in nearby Wari. Wari, by the way, seems to have everything now and it’s about bloody time! I'd been to King's a few times before and generally their cakes were better than Cooper's.
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| Displays like this always make me happy |
I needed an excuse to go, so I told my grandma I was getting us a cake to celebrate the birthdays that she had missed while I was away for university. King's, like Coopers, is not a sit-and-eat kind of place. They sell pastries, biscuits, breads and a range of savoury snacks on top the their cakes, and they have a counter with stools in the shop. But this counter is squashed into a corner of the store, opposite the tills you see in the picture below. It's also right next to one of their storerooms, the door to which wasn't closed when we visited. This meant you could sit, eat and look at cleaning equipment. Not a great dimension to add to the atmosphere of your establishment. Otherwise the interior was fine, with a lot of room to wander around looking at the various displays of cakes and pastries. The staff were polite and helpful. They explained what the various foods were and let us take our time picking out what we wanted. Apologies for the poor quality of the images in this review - this was an unexpected trip and I didn't have my usual camera/phone with me.
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| More of the store |
I got myself a 500 g chocolate cake for TK 600, which was better value than Coopers. Also, l did make them write a birthday message on it for me! They boxed it up and we took it home, pretended to have a birthday party and split it amongst the family. Unfortunately, the cake (which was meant to be the life of the party) turned out be pretty disappointing. Think cheap, greasy chocolate in the same vein as Cooper's, with a slight improvement on the moistness. But all in all, not enough of an improvement to recommend.
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| The |
I wish I could leave it at that - another straightforward, negative review. But life's never that simple. Not everyone in the house liked chocolate, and so I'd bought some of the cream cheese blueberry slices in the photo below. These turned out be absolutely delicious, and left me very confused about King's. The slices cost TK 185 a pop versus the TK 600 for a cake. Easy to see why they would taste better - there's a huge price mark up. But there wasn't a marked up version of cakes on sale, just bigger versions of the same cake I bought. It seems like King's strategy is to sell mediocre, value-for-money cakes and delicious but expensive pastries. I'm not entirely sure how this works, and why they can't also sell delicious but expensive cakes.
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| Pastries |
It's probably a business decision of some kind - perhaps they shift a lot of pastries daily and are happy to make them more expensive. But if leaves me with no options for special occasion cakes. They do special order cakes though, something I haven't tried. If I ever do, I'll update the review accordingly. In the meantime, my quest for cake remains only partially fulfilled.
Service: 6/10
Atmosphere: 5/10
Value: 5/10
Final Score: 5/10
Contact Information
A: Rankin Street, Wari, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
W: www.kingsbd.com (their website seems to be down unfortunately)
NB. The final score, while influenced by the sub-scores, is a qualitative reflection of my overall impression of the establishment.
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