The first thing we did was dart over to Chinatown to get any souvenirs we wanted, as we wouldn't be devoting any attention to that later in the day. I got two rhino figurines (I collect them when traveling, it's a family thing) and bargained hard enough to basically get the less expensive one as a freebie for buying the more expensive one (20% off).
Lunch was the second order of business for this day, and our dining destination was FiftyThree, a molecular gastronomy restaurant founded by a chef who trained at El Bulli*. It pretty consistently shows up in reviews as a place you should be sure to eat in Singapore so we really wanted to try it but not to pay their dinner prices, which probably would have set us back $500US with wine. Originally our reservation was for a day prior, but they'd apparently accidentally overbooked and contacted us with great contrition to see if another day might work for us. It really didn't matter much to our schedule and so we moved our reservation up.
The first thing we noticed was that this was the kind of place that would be easy to overbook, since it has about six tables. I'll try to keep the following culinary discussion at a reasonable level. We didn't feel like being the rubes taking pictures, so I've posted links to someone's photos on Flikr.
Ultra-thin potato chips dusted with yogurt powder: I was most impressed by how thin they'd been able to slice the potato. Not bad, liked the sour tang.
Chips
Two kinds of very fresh buckwheat rolls : one normal looking one and one dark earthy brown colored one that they had added ground charcoal to. Very interesting and surprising flavor, something I would like to experiment with. The butter they told us was imported from England but the fun part was that it had roasted barley in it which added crunch and more earthy flavor. Another thing I would never have thought of that I'd be willing to try to duplicate. The bread course was delightful for being so damn unusual but also really good.
Bread in a bag
Butter with roast barley
After that we each picked a three-course lunch menu, but we selected from the possible ways to create a lunch menu such that we had no overlap between orders, so we both ate half of six dishes. Let's see if I can remember all of them.
Before I really get going, I'm going to say that if there were distinguishing features that tied everything together, they would be subtlety and complexity. Every dish had about six things going on, none of which dominated. Also, the ingredients used were truly unimpeachable.
Seared scallops and chicken bits with carrot reduction sauce and greens salad: Perfect scallops. I stress complexity again, because this had several flavors in it that I couldn't identify except that I liked them.
Scallop and Chicken App
Fresh peas and beans salad with coconut cream foam: The peas and beans were good enough to eat plain by the bucketful, and their bitterness and strong vegetable flavors were softened by the sweet coconut cream.
Broad Bean Salad
Seared monkfish on lentils: This was really good too. The fish was wonderful and fatty and flavorful enough to stand up to the lentils. Can't find a picture - was a substitute dish due to scarcity of the fish they usually use.
Lamb with thin-sliced root vegetables: Possibly the best lamb I have ever had. Sublimely flavorful and perfectly tender. The thin-sliced roots had soaked up the excess fat and were wonderfully lamb-flavored too.
Really Good Lamb
Molecular gastronomy strawberries, ice cream, pistachio emulsion, chocolate, etc: This was probably the weakest dish of the lot but not bad. Basically all the stuff in the title was kind of laid across the plate. The waiter said it was new, asked what I thought about it, and may have gotten a bit more of a reply than he expected as I verbally disassembled it and suggested alternative configurations with more visual interest and elegance for the same ingredients. Still it was interesting and tasty once I manually mushed everything together myself. I don't see pictures of it on Flikr.
Dark chocolate cake: Ana ate most of this one; it was too dark and rich for me. I think she was happy not to have to share too much.
Cake
Apple gummy: You were supposed to let it dissolve on your tongue and savor the apple flavor. It was good but nothing terribly exciting.
Gummy Thing
Another pleasant surprise came with the check. They gave us one of our two lunches free for the bad booking and asking us to change our schedule. That brought the cost of business right down to not a heck of a lot more than we paid for pizza for two the day before. Frankly, that was an excessive gesture - giving us some of the upgrades to dishes that we'd ordered for free (some courses in the sets had if-you-want-this-one-it's-extra going on) would have been quite sufficient but we didn't protest too much because hey, free money. If we're ever back in Singapore we'll happily make it up to them.
Lunch was filling but not so big as to leave us feeling low in the water, which was good because after leaving it was time to catch a bus to the zoo and wander around in blazing sunlight. Like the Night Zoo, the really remarkable aspect of the Singapore Zoo is the design of the enclosures. They all look very natural and well integrated into the jungle. Also as before, they have species you don't see so much in the US.
Note the complete lack of a fence that matters
Nifty sign
The orangutans were hanging out on vines above the road
This one had a fence, thankfully
We got a good couple of hours in, but about the time we were beginning to think about catching a bus back to the city the sky opened up and it rained like crazy. I'd packed my small portable umbrella but Ana's was still in Kanazawa so we did the best we could with mine but both got quite wet. We scurried from roofed area to roofed area working our way back across the entire zoo as we had been at the furthest point from the main gate when it started raining. By the time we were back in the city the rain had passed, and we changed into slightly more upscale clothing (carried in the backpack all day) in remarkably clean subway bathrooms prior to heading to our time-sensitive dinner reservation.
The reason the reservation was time-sensitive was that we'd signed up for dinner on the Singapore Flyer, which is basically an extraordinarily large (actually the largest in the world) Ferris Wheel with gondolas big enough to park a minivan in and still have room to open the doors. All day long they sell tickets to go up and see Singapore laid out before you at about $20US per person per revolution, and each revolution lasts half an hour. In the evening you can book a table in one specific gondola that they outfit as a flying restaurant, which feeds you while you orbit twice above the city. It's best to be on time for it because if you're not ready when the restaurant is in position to take on diners, you've pretty much missed your one 45-second window to get on board. Yeah, it's a touristy thing to do, and we figured it to not have the best food, but then again we were in fact tourists and it sounded fun in a cheesy way so we signed up.
The Flyer isn't easy to get to from the subway (again, if we were back in 2011 there would be a subway station right beneath it - they are for sure putting the new ones in helpful places) and we sweated a little bit as we had to tack back and forth to get to it, but arrived and boarded with at least five or seven minutes to spare. They made a big show of having a (fairly luxurious) VIP lounge for the diners to wait in while the riff-raff who were just riding the Flyer waited in lines outside.
Boarding was a fun experience, as the car never actually stops moving and it is a looong way down beneath it, albeit with nets to mitigate that fatal falling sensation. While we boarded from one side wait staff stampeded through the door on the opposite side of the gondola, bringing the food and beverages on board and laying out the various tables.
Especially after discussing the FiftyThree meal in this post I don't want to go through what they served, but it could at best be called competent, and not all of it would score that high. I'd settle around the level of "edible", the kind of thing you'd get served at a wedding at a low-end country club on the chef's day off**, except they started with pretty expensive ingredients before doing bad things to them. Also, we're 99% sure they accidentally replaced the Champagne our menu called for with a different white called for by another menu, but we didn't complain because it was actually a pretty interesting and went well with the asparagus salad. It just was certainly not normal Champagne and we wish we knew what it actually was.
That's not Champagne
Another interesting quirk was the music being played in the background. They had a little monitor in the corner of the gondola showing the names of the songs, and it was clear to us that most if not all of the music being played had been illegally downloaded by how the names of the songs were written. Also, the music that had been stolen was very much the 80's and hilariously so. Since when is "Beat It" the background music for an elegant dinner? Other selections included "Staying Alive" (actually the 70's), "Like a Prayer", and "Billie Jean". Also, the background music definitely started playing the same songs again after about 40 minutes.
This silliness wouldn't have been fun if it hadn't been to the pure absurdity of the whole thing and the views, which were really pretty special.
Downtown Singapore from our dinner table
They gave us a survey at the end asking if our waiter had been any good. I'm not sure I usually see that kind of thing at any place higher-end than maybe Chili's? Dessert in the VIP lounge was passable. Overall, we were happier than you might expect to have paid them the entirely too much for this experience, but it's the kind of thing we'll only ever need to do once.
It still wasn't that late in the evening and we were in the mood to keep the party alive, so we walked up to Raffles, which is unequivocally the most famous hotel and bar in Singapore. It's been there since 1887 in various forms and they invented the Singapore Sling (signature beverage of Singapore) there. The prices on the board outside almost warded us off, but this being our last night before going back to Japan we said screw it and went in. The drinks were outrageously priced but at least for that you got some pleasing eccentricity in the layout and style of the bar, and the drinks themselves were pretty good. Ana got the original Singapore Sling and our investigations determined that it was undeniably superior to the ones served by Singapore Airlines, to no one's surprise. I had a gin and tonic to keep up the Britian-in-the-tropics theme and it was pretty generic for costing $25US, though it came as separate gin and tonic so the mixture could be adjusted to customer's taste which was an upscale touch. We had a lot of fun eating peanuts and throwing the shells on the floor like you're supposed to. Ana has a video showing the bar and the interesting fans built into it up on Flikr, or will soon.
Authentic Singapore Sling, in Singapore
Peanut shells on the floor, where they belong
And with our departure from Raffles, the international leg of this trip was pretty much over. Next I'll be filling you in on our prior-to-the-crack-of-dawn flight and either part or all of our time in Tokyo depending on how much mileage I'm getting out of it.
*Five-time #1 restaurant in the world, winning more times than any other restaurant. It's in Spain and has two million attempted reservations for 8,000 seats each year.
**There may be a slight case of hyperbole here. The food wasn't bad, it just wasn't notably good or interesting. We regularly do better in our own kitchen.
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