Bread Pudding Challenge, Week 2: Café Eau

Happy Wednesday! How are you doing on this lovely (and freezing) morning? I’m doing really well, and a lot of it has to do with this:

I’m one of the Riverfront Times’ nominees for Best Food Blog! I found out the news yesterday; the winners will be announced on January 24th. Am I excited? You better believe it! I’m also nervous/scared/intimidated/etc. The competition is stiff! My fingers (and toes) are crossed.

On to bread pudding! As you know, Jess and I are doing a challenge; we’re setting out to find the best bread pudding in St. Louis! Two girls on a dessert-eating mission. Who wouldn’t love that?

This week’s adventure brought me to Café Eau. This cozy café is nestled in the Chase Park Plaza in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis. I had dinner here as well (I’ll review that another day, I promise!), but the focus of today’s review is their bread pudding.

Café Eau has gooey butter bread pudding on their menu. I was really excited to try it, since I’m a huge fan of gooey butter cake.

It looks pretty gorgeous, right? It was served with a generous scoop of french vanilla ice cream, and rested in a pool of chocolate syrup, a bit of caramel, and a side of strawberries. Picture perfect.

Too bad it was pretty awful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fan of this bread pudding at all. While it was piping hot (a plus), it was totally wrong, texture-wise. The outside was crispy, and the inside was, well…gooey. It was almost custard-like. Bread pudding this was not.

Aside from the horrendous texture, the flavor of this bread pudding was almost bitter. I almost had to pair each bite of the bread pudding with sweet ice cream and chocolate sauce to mask the bitter flavor of the dessert. It was bad. I could only manage to down a few bites before I decided I had had enough.

I’ll address the other aspects of Café Eau (my entrée, the service, the prices, etc.) during another review. However, based on bread pudding alone, Café Eau will now be named Café No in my book. No bueno.

Can’t win em all, right? Hopefully the next bread pudding spot will be better!