Absinthe Makes The Heart Grow Fonder?

The past month has been a whirlwind of dinners as Sander’s sisters (and their plus ones) have been in town.  My waistline can’t wait to wave them off at the airport tonight, but my taste buds will be very sad to see them go.  It will definitely be time to get stuck in training for a 10km run I signed myself up for in September.

Tuesday night’s treat was a 30^th birthday dinner at Absinthe, a French restaurant in Chinatown.

Image from Absinthe website

All good birthdays should involve champagne, and we got the night off to an excellent start.  I thought it was interesting we weren’t offered a choice in the bottle, but it was dry, tingly and delicious.

Having decided we weren’t hungry enough for the degustation menu, I settled on an entrée of yellow-fin tuna, olive tapenade and diced ratatouille.  The tuna was lovely and fresh, and I thought the presentation of the finely-diced ratatouille on the smear of tapenade was visually interesting, but there was just a little something missing from my first bite… something to make my mouth zing a little…  a touch of chilli perhaps?

My main was a delicious and delicate catch of the day.  Nestled beneath my barramundi fillet were tiny ravioli parcels and small slices of baby potatoes, and the butter sauce was surprisingly light.

I think the highlight for me was the cheese.  An old wooden cheese trolley is trundled around the restaurant and one by one we popped up to choose from a large and varied selection.  I choose some livarot, a hard ewe’s milk cheese and a creamy blue.  I’m secretly coveting the cheese trolley for when I have a larger house (ie not an apartment), although it was a bit of a hindrance for patrons going to the bathroom.   

Chock-a-block after cheese, we decided to share dessert.  The chocolate fondant was incredibly rich (luckily we only had enough for a mouth full or two) and perfectly cooked, oozing dark chocolatey goodness from the center.  The birthday girl’s had a candle and a few extra scoops of sorbet (raspberry one was great – cut through a chocolate-lined mouth).

So, should you go to Absinthe?  Yes, if you have a special occasion to celebrate and want to make an evening of it.  Mains (excluding wagu) are around $46 and don't forget the ++.  Book the private dining room in the wine cellar, drive up and valet park your car for $5, sink into the suitably dimmed and formal French interior and save some room for a drink at the jazz club next door.  The only catch, make sure you go to the bathroom before you arrive.  The bathrooms look smart, but the eco-flush toilets don’t have enough flushing power so all were blocked up with paper (even after three attempts).  Not a good look.

Private dining in the wine cellar
(image from Absinthe website)

A Few Things... To Love About Melbourne

I was a very lucky girl turning 29 this year (shhhh!!).  Not only was I spoilt rotten with some beautiful, thoughtful gifts (some of which were waiting for me at home) and a multitude with phone calls, emails and text messages from friends and family all over the word, but I was in Melbourne - one of the coolest cities I have been to, and most definitely my favourite Australian city.  Sorry Sydney-siders, but it’s true.  How lucky am I being able to tack on a quick visit on the side of a work trip?  And to be wined and dined by some fabulous friends!

Here are a few reasons I love Melbourne:

1.  Coffee so good it can respark any flat battery... and for $3.50

2.  Vintage shopping – really, it basically doesn’t exist in Singapore and especially in my considerably-larger-than-devastatingly-petite-non-Asian size

3.  Graffiti street art – it’s around every brick-lined corner

Just one of the many graffiti art works around Melbourne - Flinders Lane is famous for it

4.  Terraced housing – so gorgeously cute

Row after row of gorgeous terraced housing - and so many renovation opportunities!

5.  Heidi Museum of Modern Art

My friend Kate and I (note warm winter clothing)

This piece hit a farm-girl soft spot - a cow, and corrogated iron

6.  Books for Cooks – mecca for anyone who likes to cook, think floor to ceiling and wall to wall shelves of culinary bliss (a thought: what’s the appropriate abbreviation for the cross between culinary and literary? Cliterary? Culiterary? Lickerary?!)

And here are a few things I love about winter (something I sorely miss in Singapore)

• Stepping outside to a crisp winter blue-sky day and seeing your breath fog
• Sitting outside enjoying a cafe lunch in the sunshine without breaking into a sweat

Smoked beans from De Clieu cafe, tastes even better in the chilly sunshine

• Drinking red wine which doesn’t need to be refrigerated to be enjoyed
• Actually feeling like a red wine
• Winter dressing – not many reasons to wear my leather jacket, a scarf, hat and boots in the tropics

In parting, you know you’re in Australia when a ‘warm winter’ male street style can be interpreted as shorts and jandals with longish socks pulled up (socks are the ‘warm winter’ part).

The Quay that Laid the Snow Egg

“Around the rugged rocks, the ragged rascal ran”

-- a line well-used by my Poppa Ted --

Well, Rebecca would run around the not-at-all-rugged Rocks until she was ragged if it meant she could go back to Quay for the Snow Egg.

In all it's glory, the Snow Egg

(image from Quay's website)

(I’ll stop talking about myself fin the third person now – it just sounded better with the rhyme... all those Rrrrrrr’s...)

This week in Sydney I was fortunate to be treated to a meal at Quay.  Actually, the word ‘meal’ is a bit inadequate when describing the culinary treat that is an evening at Quay.  Each of the four dishes (hey, they’re small!) was exquisite.  Visually, each dish was a feast with fantastic attention to detail in colour.  Each bite was a mouthful of contrasting textures and a delicious combination of flavours. 

 Images from Quay's website

Please, do me a favour.  Go there, just to try the Snow Egg for dessert.  This small piece of culinary utopia is not to be missed.

Here’s how Quay describes the Snow Egg:

“One of Quay’s most heavenly desserts, the Snow Egg is a poached meringue egg, with a “yolk” of custard apple ice-cream, coated in a crunchy golden praline maltose shell, sitting on a bed of guava granita and a slick of guava fool.”

Shooting to popular fame when featured on MasterChef Australia, contestants apparently tried for over three hours to mimic the Snow Egg... to no avail.  Click here to read more and here to see the egg-laying (no, not literally) process.

If you have a special occasion, celebrate it there.  If you don’t have a special occasion, invent one, please.

The book - visual feast, definitely beyond my culinary capabilities



The Golden Peony - A Bit Wilted

The Golden Peony website says “sophisticated and intimate”, and “tranquil atmosphere”.  Respectfully, are they talking about the same restaurant as I went to last night?  If so, they clearly haven’t visited for a while.

Let’s rewind.

Dinner there was a night out for Sander and I before I left for Australia for work.  We started with a pre-dinner drink at wild oats and then jumped in a cab to the Conrad Hotel’s ‘award-winning’ Golden Peony Cantonese restaurant.  Really we should have turned around as soon as we walked in, but we had some meal vouchers for the Conrad Hotel, so we decided to stick it out and see what happened.

Relatively intimate table for two?  We were seated right between the service area and the payment counter.  You be the judge.

The Golden Peony
-- image from their website --

The Golden Peony started off well (Sander realised they hadn’t made a mistake with their name – it really was Peony and not Pony).  We selected a set menu, and although this was a lunch menu (in our defence, it didn’t say so anywhere on the menu) they agreed to make it for us.  The first course was a trio of dumplings and was definitely the highlight of the entire experience, especially the bean curd-wrapped mango and prawn – a wonderful sweet surprise mid-bite. 

The second course was a disappointing soup – two chunks of fatty pork with lots of bones.  I wondered whether I had missed something culturally, or was it really just pork stock in a bowl.  Neither of us finished it.  Course three was shredded duck and sugar snap peas.  This would have been the second highlight of the meal for me – delicious duck morsels and perfectly steamed peas – but Sander’s was full of bones (again) and my unfinished dish (I was mid-mouthful) was cleared away from under me at lightning speed and before I realised it I was mourning the loss of the three sugar snap peas I’d been saving for last. 

Dish four was my first experience with congee – ubiquitous in Singapore.  Ours was chicken congee – two lumps of chicken and some slightly salty, fine-ground porridge.  Sander thought it was what cornflour porridge would taste and feel like if anyone was mad enough to make it.  I had two spoons of congee and one of my chicken lumps.  If that was representative of congee then it was my first and last experience.  I was anticipating dessert with trepidation, but when the fruity thin custard soup arrived I was pleasantly surprised by its freshness.  I’m a big fan of custard and I certainly wouldn’t have made it so thin, but it was definitely tasty.  Thankfully.

Needless to say we didn’t want to linger in the ‘tranquil atmosphere’ and hot footed it out of there, still having paid nearly $100 despite our $70 of vouchers.

TripAdvisor has it ranked #68 out of over 1,000 restaurants in Singapore.  This dining experience has seriously made me question the validity of TripAdvisor’s recommendations as I know the quality of the Singaporean dining landscape is much better than this.

Oh, and one smile from our waitress wouldn’t have gone astray.

Drink Your Wild Oats - Bar on the Hill

"we distrust camels or anyone who can go a week without a drink"

Any place with a statement like that is bound to be good in my books!



wild oats during the day

Image from wild oats website



I've been meaning to go to wild oats (no capitalisation please) for a while now - it is literally just up the hill from my house in Singapore.  We stumbled upon it walking home from dinner (wo's sister restaurant Wild Rocket, also good, is also just up the hill) and thought it looked great but hadn't made it back until last night.



Sander and I headed out for dinner last night before my work trip to Australia ('technical difficulties' mean I'm writing this now in the airport as opposed to somewhere in the air over Java) takes me away for a week and we decided to start our evening with a drink at wild oats.

I love the setting: an old Colonial-style white house, a wooden deck dotted with rattan chairs and surrounded by some great music filtering through the rainforest-esque foliage. 



The drinks menu is great - the wine list is extensive (including lots of New Zealand sav and pinot - yes!) and the cocktail list has a great mix of classics and clever combinations.  I was tempted by a blueberry and lemongrass margarita, and also a kiwi whisky sour but in the end Sander had his usual mojito (if it ain't broke...) and I tried a lime, ginger and sake gimlet.  What a fabulous combination!  Little flakes of ginger injected a touch of spice, the lime added a tang, and I love sake.  It was very strong, but really no complaints from me, I could drink these all night.

See what I mean about lush foliage?

We were a bit peckish and the food menu looked interesting (although very 'bar snack'ish therefore lots of deep fried bits).  I had a little giggle to myself when I was reading about their Hot Bitches - wo's take on hot dogs - but we decided to get wasabi prawns.  I wasn't expecting deep fried (possibly I mis-read the menu) but I have to say they were delicious.  The wasabi mayonnaise was very creamy with a hint of that familiar horseradish tang.  Sander would have preferred more wasabi, but I thought it was fine.

Sadly, there were two downsides.  Getting the attention of the majority of the waitstaff was near to impossible.  They have a very unprofessional habit of delivering their drinks from the bar inside and then disappearing without taking a look around the deck to see if anyone else wanted service.  We had to wait for about six different people to come and go before someone looked up and saw the now several tables where someone was trying to get some attention.  Secondly they bought out Sander's mojito about 10 minutes before my gimlet came out (and delivered about four other drinks in between to other patrons).  This is a giant no-no in my book.  It's really not that difficult to wait until both drinks are ready before delivering to the table.  You get no brownie points for speedy service if said service is only partially complete.

At the end of the day, I will most certainly be back. wild oats (feels very uncomfortable not capitalising the start of that sentence) has a great atmosphere, tasty drinks and is just up the hill.

Super Sashimi

Looking for a quick and healthy lunch?  It’s hard to go passed sashimi. 

We’re fortunate enough to have some great Japanese restaurants near to the office.  Not surprisingly, the place right underneath me is my most frequented.  They have a fabulous sashimi salad, generously proportioned with salmon and tuna sashimi, crab meat and loaded with salad leaves and veges.  The sesame dressing is dangerously addictive, but if you have it on the side it’s easier to refrain from eating it all.  Rounded off with a miso soup and you have a super light, protein-packed, omega-3 loaded lunch that will see you through until dinner.

If sashimi hasn't hit the spot, the sushi train keeps on coming and coming...

If only I could curb that sweet treat craving I always seem to get after the salty soy sauce…

Some sashimi ‘did you know’?

1.       The word ‘sashimi’ means ‘pierced body’ – probably due to the practice of sticking the fish’s tail and fin into the meat to identify it

2.       Traditionally it is the first course in a Japanese meal due to its subtle flavours

3.       Wasabi (usually served with sashimi) purists say you should never mix your wasabi into your soy sauce because it dilutes the tang of the wasabi (I think that’s a good thing personally).  Instead you should make a mound of wasabi in your dish and pour the soy sauce over the top and allow to infuse naturally.

4.       Always choose salt-water fish as fresh-water fish may contain parasites

5.       Due to the rise in popularity of tuna sashimi, the bluefin tuna has been hunted until near extinction

6.       Sashimi is high in protein, omega-3 fatty acids, selenium, niacin, vitamin B12, phosphorous, magnesium and vitamin B6 (that’s a whole lot of health in each slice)

On Thursday I'm heading to Melbourne for a long weekend.  I'm looking forward to soaking up the cool Melbourne vibe, drinking some decent coffee and some fabulous Australian wine (almost as good as NZ wine... almost), and celebrating my birthday (not telling how old!) in style with good friends, good conversation and good food. 

Stay tuned...

Ladies Who Brunch: At The Barracks

Yesterday was a lovely combination of food and activity.  Laura and I kicked off with brunch at The Barracks on Dempsey Hill and then stretched our legs at The First Tee, the 9-hole pitch and putt down the road.

The Barracks is well worth a visit, although it's not the easiest of places to find.  It's tucked around the back of the main Dempsey Hill cluster of bars/cafes and borders the forest.  We arrived shortly after opening, but after an hour the place was humming so clearly not everyone had the same location difficulties I had!

The menu looks great, it's styled as a newspaper with a bit of background on the front and a huge array of choice on the inside.  Things which caught my eye: Very Berry Stuffed French Toast, Ahi Taki Salad and 3 Berry Ahi Sandwich (both tuna), and a couple of delicious smoothie options. 

I was craving eggs however, so I went with poached eggs.  They came with bene-dressing, mushrooms, crumbed tomatoes, sausages and raisin toast.  A big tick for The Barracks - they let me switch out the sausages for asparagus spears (I was eyeing them up in another meal) for no extra charge.  This sounds pretty obvious right?  Believe me, in Singapore menu flexibility is not always easy to accomplish.

In the end, I had supreme food envy for Laura's Ahi Taki Salad.  Small things (eggs a little too over done, raisin toast - odd combination) were outweighed by the mouth full of vinegar water I received when I bit into my eggs.  Luckily I had a delicious mango and banana smoothie to wash away the taste.  And my double shot macchiato was pretty good.

They were advertising a vintage high tea which looked amazing, but unfortunately it's only available Thursdays and Fridays from 3 - 5.30pm.  Definitely targeting the ladies who lunch, rather than the ladies who brunch.

All in all, I'm not against going back, but I'll probably spend some time investigating other Dempsey Hill hideaways first.

Happy Feet

At a loose end in Singapore?  Get a foot massage!  I am a complete convert to the wonders of foot reflexology.  Is there anything more indulgent?

The soles of your feet are a road map for the rest of your body and applying pressure on certain areas is supposed to help with circulation, relieve tension and help with pain.  Medical benefits haven’t been proven, but it’s amazing how often the ‘liver’ area of my feet seems to be tender on a Sunday… indicative of too much wine the night before? 

My favourite place to go is Health Step Foot Reflexology Centre in Holland Village (Ph 64682655).

Whatever you believe, a foot massage is a wonderful end to a day of wandering around Singapore – be it as a tourist or a resident and at the end of a day’s sightseeing, shopping or simply running errands.  Bliss!

Dim Sum Fun at Din Tai Fung

I love dim sum – I could eat those little parcels of goodness all day, every day (although fortunately for my hips I don’t).  You’d think that a nation with a lot of Chinese influence and a big Chinatown area would be swimming in dim sum and yum cha options, but my earlier forays have left me disappointed.  To this day, the best yum cha and dim sum I have had has been Grand Harbour in Auckland – do not forgo a chance to try it.

Fortunately we were introduced to Din Tai Fung by our friends Sophie and Dean.  It doesn’t serve yum cha, but it does have consistently delicious dumplings and some of the best fried rice I have tasted.  There is always a queue (testament to how good this place is) but I don’t mind because the wait is fascinating.  They’ve walled the kitchen areas in glass so you can watch the team at work as they prepare the dumplings.  It’s meticulous work – each stage of the dumpling process is executed to perfection: rolling out the wrappers, filling and sealing the parcels.  Each is done by one person and they even have trainee tables where junior staff learn the perfect rolling method.  You can see them practicing first without a rolling pin or wrapper (just to get the motion right), then with a pin and finally with the wrapper itself.  They also have quality control where occasional dumplings are weighed to ensure consistency of filling.  I’ve never seen anything like it!

As consistent as ever, Sunday’s lunch was delicious.  Dumplings, pillow-y pork buns, dan-dan noodles, vegetarian delight, hot and sour soup and egg-fried rice.  Let’s not forget the jasmine tea to wash it all down.

Spicy dumplings



A mountain of dumpling goodness



Pillow-soft pork buns

Vegetarian delight is... delightful

Always a queue

The Banana Leaf Restaurant

We live a short five-minute walk from Little India in Singapore.  It’s a wonderful melting pot of sights, smells and sounds, all of which intensify on Sundays when people pour into the streets en masse, and pedestrians rule the roads. 

Colourful buildings everywhere - this one used to be a sweet shop

The sweet sweet smell of flowers

Road-side vegetable stalls

Sander’s cousin is visiting from Holland and as she’d never had Indian food before, it seemed a ripe opportunity to introduce her.  We spent an hour wandering the streets, walking up a bit of an appetite, and then dropped into the Banana Leaf restaurant.   We started a bit of a tradition when we first arrived here of taking visitors to the Banana Leaf for dinner and getting a snap of them eating with their fingers – the photos (not always very flattering, but fun none-the-less) are pegged above our desk in the office.  A fun reminder of our visitors over the past year.

The Banana Leaf has always been pretty touristy, but this time I noticed a few changes, and not for the better.  One of the things I love about the Banana Leaf is that you literally eat off banana leaves.  This time we were surprised to see green rectangular plates on all the tables, lined with a banana leaf.  We promptly removed ours, stacking them neatly to one side, which was noticed with clear amusement by one of the waiters.  He handed us a comments card and told us to leave a note to the managers – apparently we were not the only ones who preferred the previous arrangement.

The full complement

Palak paneer, channa masala and garlic naan

Post-meal herbal breath freshener

Despite this small (but significant to me) change, the meal was still the delicious, generously-proportioned experience I remember.  I only ever seem to leave the Banana Leaf on the point of a food coma, stuffed to the brim with palak paneer, channa masala, chicken tikka and briyani rice.  And try as I might, I still haven’t mastered eating tidily with my fingers.  Something to work on I suppose.