Out to lunch

How gorgeous is this?

The lovely C recently had the temerity to suggest that the main theme of this blog is food.  While I am hesitant to add credence to this scurrilous suggestion in any way, I feel compelled to share my observations  on Singapore's recent Restaurant Week in this post.  


We first became aware of this annual event last year, but TLC was away on business at the time and I was working like a demon, so it rather passed us by.  It would have passed us by again this year, had not our bank manager, the lovely Sharin, mentioned it en passant, halfway through the week itself.  She was very keen that we try a restaurant called Absinthe, which does indeed look marvellous, but sadly we were too late and all the places had been taken.  Another time. This is the way that Restaurant Week works:


Over a hundred of Singapore's restaurants - including some of the very best - put together a special menu to be served for a set price of SGD25 for lunch and SGD35 for dinner, with a premium of an extra SGD15 for the top restaurants.  We found out about RW on the Wednesday and were already engaged for lunch on Thursday.  Nothing daunted, we headed straight for the website and booked lunch for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Two of the restaurants were new to both of us, although I had visited our Friday lunch spot before.  This was Il Lido, an Italian restaurant on Sentosa, the island just off the southern coast of Singapore, home to one of Singapore's two casinos as well as many delicious dining opportunities.  This lunch was, for us, the best experience of Restaurant Week.  We sat outside, with a view of the golf course and the sea beyond.  The service was impeccable and the food was just delicious.  We started with a couple of amuse-bouche - a cold melon soup, decorated with a port wine reduction in the form of a spider's web and a truffle flavoured rice ball that was so good I wanted to ambush the waiter, grab his tray and wolf the entire contents before he managed to serve the other diners.  


Fortunately, the first (of four) courses was equally delicious.  This dish was so beautiful to look at that I had to take a photograph, above left.  It was a little salad of tiger prawns,  perched on top of an aubergine puree and presented on a blue glass plate which, as you will see, I have cunningly managed to photograph so that it looks as if the salad is sitting in the middle of a calm blue sea.  And it tasted just as good as it looked.

The wonderfully shaped Fullerton Boathouse 

The whole meal was just gorgeous and we finished off with a complimentary glass of limoncello courtesy of the manager.  While the dessert at Il Lido (tiramisu, of course) was very nice, my favourite dessert of Restaurant Week was the "Valrhona chocolate bar" at the Fullerton Boathouse.  As you can see from the picture on the right, this is an old art deco building, which has been restored and now houses three different eateries and drinkeries.  Frankly, I'd like to rip them all out and live there myself, but I suspect that is not to be, so I'll just tell you about them instead.  On the ground floor is the very upmarket St Julien, a French restaurant that I have been fortunate enough to sample when someone else was paying.  The Boathouse restaurant, where we had lunch, is on the next level and finally there is a rooftop bar - on the roof naturally enough.  The Boathouse is decorated with lots of historical artifacts, which is all very interesting, but we are here to talk about food, so on with the show.  The dessert reminded me of the pudding we used to call Death by Chocolate for which, by the way, I used to have a recipe, but have since lost, so if any of my readers can help me out here, that would be great.  

Small but awesome!

I could barely control myself for long enough to take the picture before starting to eat this.  My expectations were higher than the rooftop bar and I was not disappointed.  In fact, I'm tempted to hang about outside the restaurant until one of the chefs comes out for a cigarette break and bribe him with a carton of Benson & Hedges to get him to give me the recipe.  That's how desperate I am, dear readers, so please pony up the Death by Chocolate recipe if you have it.

Jeg elsker Danmark

My regular readers will recently have become aware of my addiction to the Scandivegian police thriller called The Killing.  What I had not anticipated when Chris and I sat down one evening and ended up watching 6 episodes in a row was how quickly I would be seduced into a love with all things Danish.  Well, I say “all things Danish”, but to be fair, I don’t believe I would love the food, given that one of their favourite sandwich fillings is something called leverpostej, which is a pâté made with pig’s liver.  Apparently, it was introduced to Denmark in 1847 by the French and was, at the time, an expensive luxury item. I don't share the Danish view of luxury, apparently.......


I don't believe I would love the weather either, as it seems to rain a lot, but that may just be a function of the fact that my main experience of the country comes from watching crime thrillers where rain and darkness are doubtless a metaphor for the bleakness of the murderer’s soul. 

The Danes have wonderful taste – apart from the murderers, of course - and the police detectives who spend all their time chasing them so that they never have time to go shopping for as much as a kilo of leverpostej for the fridge never mind a new sofa or a nice silver jug from Georg Jensen’s latest collection.  Strangely, the jumpers worn by Sarah Lund, the detective heroine of The Killing (see picture above), have become something of a design phenomenon.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, have a look at this link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/mar/10/the-killing-sophie-grabol-sarah-lund.

Much as the lovely C and I enjoyed the first season of The Killing - all 24 episodes - we loved the second season (thankfully considerably shorter or we would be seriously sleep deprived by now) even more.  Interestingly, the black and white Faroe Islands jumper has a starring role again.......

When I mentioned my fondness for the series to three different sets of friends in the UK, they all told me I just had to watch Borgen, also set in Denmark, but this time a political drama.  It seems that BBC 4 (oh how I wish we could get proper UK television channels in Singapore) has taken to showing European TV drama shows on a Saturday night.  I needed no persuasion.   

Denmark is a pretty small country and that seems to be reflected in the acting population as well.  The serial killer from the second season of The Killing is reincarnated as the Prime Minister’s husband in Borgen, and Sarah Lund’s partner from the first season has a new career as the manager of a TV station.  The change of job was obviously good for him  - he looks much better in pastel coloured jumpers than he ever did in plain clothes. 

The series is in Danish, sub-titled in English, with occasional sections of dialogue entirely in English, which creates the impression when watching that you can actually speak Danish.  We have managed to ration ourselves to one episode of Borgen a day; just three more episodes to go, after which we will need another addiction.  Justified and Montalbano are already on the list – all new suggestions welcome………