Orchard Central: Shopping and sushi with the littles

How often do you manage to do an outing that includes boutique-browsing for mama, gourmet nosh shopping for foodies and a family sushi lunch involving space ships? Here’s the scoop.

This Saturday I found myself in the usual mama dilemma: errands needed doing and the kids were craving entertainment. Call me old-fashioned but I believe a family outing needs to work for the whole family, not just the under-5’s. My childhood weekends most certainly were not spent in soft playrooms or at amusement parks. No, they were spent joining my parents in whatever they fancied doing (or needed to do for that matter!). As long as it involved a café lunch or ice cream my brother and I were on board.

Strengthened by these memories and determined to avoid spending my Saturday morning surrounded by other people’s screaming kids, I packed my boys into my double stroller and left the house at 10 am. I was headed for Orchard Central, a nice shopping mall somewhat ‘hidden’ between Orchard and Somerset MRT (however you manage to seem hidden when you’re located right in the centre of town).

My first mission was to hit up the lovely NY gourmet shop Dean & Deluca on level four to pick out some gifts for friends and goodies for myself. If you walk into any nice boutique here, you will find there is an abundance of staff and Dean & Deluca is no exception. They want you to relax and shop but at the same time they worry that your kids might break something. This turns their staff into highly motivated spontaneous baby sitters, voila! Mama spent a good half hour browsing through the shelves of jars and bottles while the boys played hide-and-seek with the staff and stuffed their faces with the bread and fruit samples available. Given the prices of D & D’s fresh produce I actually think my boys managed to grab free “snacks” worth about $5 each, well done guys!

I did actually buy a few goodies (I’m not that rude) and left the relieved staff at Dean & Deluca and headed to check out some of the nice clothes’ boutiques. Most of them are multi-label stores offering goodies of Singaporean origin, which is kind of fun! I checked out CMYK, Tag-Style and MIYOC to mention just a few. By the way, the Converse store in OC has the best collection of children sizes I’ve seen so far. Unfortunately they were irresistible and two pairs set me back $80…

All the shopping made us hungry and we decided to go to Genki on level three for some sushi. Quite a few sushi places offer sushi that travels around on a belt but there aren’t that many that send the sushi out on a high-speed space ship straight to your table. Needless to say the boys were in heaven and as you can probably imagine, anything that comes delivered on a space ship will be eaten! We spent a good hour eating and throwing sushi and by the time our spaceship landed with the last batch, my youngest could hardly keep his eyes open. I left Orchard with my Saturday errands successfully completed and with both boys soundly asleep in the stroller. Mama power!

Orchard Central, 181 Orchard Rd, Singapore 238896
Tel: (+65) 6238 1051
Website