S and I both love good restaurants. We love all aspects that contribute to a great place to dine, including delicious food, top-notch service, well thought-out menu and collateral designs, chic uniforms, gorgeous interiors, a good wine list and an equally yummy cocktail list, a sexy and soothing soundtrack, smart lighting, a great and unique location, and a chic and attractive clientele. Of course, not all restaurants are able to offer all of the above. Some succeed by being outstanding in just a couple areas, like having a super-sexy crowd and awesome cocktails for example. Some can even get by with amazing food and nothing else. But when all the elements come together, that’s restaurant magic.

For the past few years, S and I have had the enormous pleasure of helping clients create new restaurants. Our latest project, The White Rabbit, opens this week. The White Rabbit, owned by the very cool cats behind Loof, is situated in the very beautiful, old Ebenezer Chapel on Harding Road, in the very trendy Dempsey Road area in Singapore. The chapel has been gorgeously restored. A new roof has been put in (to replace the old asbestos roof that was threatening to cave in); a large wooden deck has been built out back; new stained glass windows have been commissioned for the space; and new grass has been put down around the building.

Super-cool architects Takenouchi Webb have really done a marvelous job designing the interiors of the restaurant. It’s classy, sexy, cool, hip, retro and yet also excitingly modern. It’s the kind of space that works equally well for a hot date, a boisterous birthday party, a fun family meal, and even a very cool client dinner. I especially love the banquette tables along the wall. They’re perfect for people-watching while maintaining a certain amount of privacy.

The main dining hall seats around 90 diners plus another 20-30 at the indoor bar. In addition, there is a lovely, air-conditioned, sunlit, all white room off the main hall. We’ve taken to calling it the “Sunday Room”. I’m predicting that it will soon become a fan favourite. We’ve already had one gorgeous gal book the room for a baby shower. Out back (past the Sunday Room) is a wooden deck that houses the outdoor bar. Dubbed “The Rabbit Hole”, this cool space can seat another 40 persons comfortably.

The food is very good. The White Rabbit’s Executive Chef is Daniel Sia. Chef Sia was most recently working with Chef Justin Quek at Le Platane in Shanghai. Before that he ran the kitchens at the restaurant in Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong. Previous to that, he was one of the two head chefs that opened Marmalade and was in charge of Marmalade Pantry when it first opened. Chef Sia has also trained briefly under England’s original badboy celebrity chef, Marco-Pierre White. The food, like the restaurant’s interior, is cool and classic. The menu is a goldmine of classic European comfort foods, plus some slightly fancier fare. Some of the standout dishes on the menu include Oysters (Rockefeller, Au Gratin or Natural); Steak Tartare; Chicken and Duck Liver Parfait; Chef Sia’s Salad Printemps (served with mangoes, asparagus, and black truffles); Slightly Spiced Prawn Bisque (topped with a coconut and laksa souffle); Chicken a la King; Oxtail Stew; Lobster Thermidor; Tournedos Rossini; and The White Rabbit Mac and Cheese (served with black truffles and a truffle sauce). The desserts are also pretty nifty. I really like Chef Sia’s Mars Bar Souffle, Strawberries Romanoff, and Baked Alaska. The White Rabbit Black Forest Cake is really fun too; it is a deconstructed and totally modern take on the classic dessert.

One of the things we’re really hoping to encourage at The White Rabbit is the idea of pre-dinner and post-dinner drinks. Our bartenders have worked with a consultant to create a pretty great cocktail menu. We will be offering a good selection of classic drinks, made traditionally and properly, plus a selection of brand new, totally modern creations inspired by these famous drinks.

The White Rabbit officially opens 25 June 2008. That said, a small number of tables are being made available over the next few days (please call for a reservation if you want to come in during this preview period). Drop by, have a drink and enjoy a good meal. Please remember that every good restaurant takes a bit of time to hit its stride. So, have a bit of patience and please give our managers your honest feedback. We’re going to try our best to make The White Rabbit a great restaurant. But all great things take a bit of time.

See you at The White Rabbit.

The White Rabbit
39C Harding Road
Singapore
Tel: +65 6473 9965
Open Tuesday - Sunday lunch and dinner

My greedy but gorgeous wife S and I have wanted to try El Bulli for almost a decade. We first heard about this exciting Spanish restaurant in the late 90s/early naughties. In 2001, at Tasting Australia, we were lucky enough to attend an incredible two-hour long private demonstration during which Ferran Adria showed off some of his more innovative cooking techniques to a room full of journalists. Later that day, we were given a few minutes to interview this revolutionary artist-philosopher-cook.

While theoretically we’ve wanted to dine at El Bulli, I have to admit we never really did anything about it. We never tried making reservations or tried planning a trip. We just assumed that we’d get around to it one day. Of course, as the years passed by and booking a table went from hard-to-get to almost impossible, we started to wonder if maybe we’d been waiting too long. So, when a good friend — a restaurateur who is friends with Ferran — called me two months ago and said, “Hey, I’ve decided to swing by El Bulli on the way to the States in May. I have a table for 6 and am calling you first. Do you want to go? But…um… I need to know right now,” S and I jumped at it. And even though we had just decided to postpone a trip to Italy that we had been planning for September 08 to sometime in 2009 because we weren’t sure we could afford it, we said, “what the halibut” and have put ourselves into even greater credit card debt than we already are.

We totally lucked out. The day we visited El Bulli was gorgeous. It had been sunny and warm all day. Our friends, who had gotten the table for us, drove into Roses that morning. Six of us (we had been travelling in Catalonia with two other friends) had a wonderful, lazy seafood lunch at a local tapas restaurant in town and then spent the rest of the afternoon chilling out. Two more friends arrived in the afternoon. They had flown in from Geneva just for dinner. We were able to increase the table to 8 for them; our dinner date just happened to fall on their 13th wedding anniversary.

El Bulli is beautifully situated. It rests on at the end of a lonely road, across beautiful, green hills and right by the water. The building itself is rustic, charming and casual. Not the kind of place that you’d expect to find the world’s most innovative cuisine. After meeting Ferran Adria and Juli Soler, we sat in the restaurant’s courtyard for a while, enjoying Yuzu-sake-tonic cocktails chased with a bottle of Comtesse Marie de France 1998 by Paul Bara and some really exciting nibbles. We enjoyed cream filled nori snacks, shiso jellies, an edible “passion orchid”, tomato biscuits, pinenut and chocolate bon bons, and “Pekin crepes”.

We then moved to our table in the main dining room and had what can only be described as one of the most unique dining experiences of my life. We had 24 more courses, not counting a quartet of post-dessert items called “Morphings”. Below is the menu (as written by El Bulli) with some short comments on some of the dishes: Mint leaf with coconut - this came in two bites. Beetroot coral. Black sesame sponge cake with miso. Gorgonzola moshi — I assume they meant “mochi”; this was a version of Adria’s liquid ravioli.

Grilled strawberry. LYO-Cream — this was a combination of a cream puff served with a spoon of carbonara cream. Razor clam / Laurencia — this was a gorgeously cooked bamboo clam served with an “El Bulli clam” of ponzu jelly. Haricot bean with Joselito’s Iberian pork fat — this was my favourite course of the whole dinner; the super delicious and savoury bean explodes in your mouth.

Mandarine flower/pumpkin oil with mandarine seeds (my photo of this really stunk so I left it out). Almond jellies with cocktail of fresh almonds “Umeboshi”. Mushroom canape. Black garlic ravioli. Lychee — this was a light dashi broth with daikon carved to look like lychees. Water lily — this was a cold tea soup that S loved. Game meat canape. Peas 2008 — the peas on the right are real peas; the ones on the left are Adria’s liquid raviolis filled with pea soup. Asparagus with miso.

Gnocchi of polenta with coffee and safran yuba — these gnocchi also explode in your mouths; yum! “Negrito” 2008 — this was a lovely seared local fish covered with a sweet foam. Abalone. Hare juise with apple-jelly with black currant marinated — I have to admit, this dish was not my favourite.

Pistachio honey — this was beautiful. “Trufitas” — amazing chocolate truffles. Bubble — in the middle of the mound of bubbles was a chocolate ganache. There were four different petit fours, or “Morphings”. With dinner, we had three great white wines: Weingut A Christmann VDP Riesling Konigsbacher Idig 2002; Rafael Palacios As Sortes 2005; and Chateau Smith Haut-Lafite 2001.

This dinner was definitely one of the most amazing I have ever enjoyed. It was less “out of the box” than I expected and much more Japanese-influenced than I had imagined. The food, while amazingly innovative was also witty and I think that more than anything else made the meal great fun, for me and for all of my dining companions. I am sure some of you want to ask if I think El Bulli deserves to be called the world’s number one restaurant. I am actually not going to answer that. I will say that I think Ferran Adria is a genius and I think there is no other restaurant in the world that offers the kind of experience that El Bulli provides. Some dishes you will love. Some will puzzle you. And some you won’t like. But the space is great - homey and brilliant at the same time. And the service is perfect. This is certainly one meal I will not forget anytime soon.

One of the things that friends (and even strangers) often ask me and my wife S about is if we get jaded or bored when dining out. I guess the assumption here is that since we’ve eaten so widely and so well, there has to be some point at which we would become disenchanted with food and cooking. And some times, we do. Especially when we go to a dozen restaurants over the course of the month or two and see the same 3 or 4 items on every single menu. It’s even worse when one of those items is a molten chocolate cake and the others all have some element of espuma in them.

But the truth is, because we’re able to travel, and because we make a point to save up for gourmet-centric holidays, we’re able to continuously re-awaken our love for great food, be it simple or spectacular. Trips to places like Japan or France can easily cancel out any sense of culinary ennui. Simply said, eating abroad is the best possible way to press “reset”.

What is especially wonderful is visiting a place that has fantastic extremes of cooking. This recent visit to Catalonia, for example, has really renewed our love for and outlook on food. It’s been really quite amazing to experience the extremes that make Spain one of the world’s top culinary destinations. What we loved most about this trip (which I will cover in-depth in a couple of up-coming posts) was witnessing the respect and appreciation for traditional classic cuisine (and tasting these dishes of course) contrasted with the extraordinary innovations in cooking that are pushing the boundaries of gastronomy.

(Of course, many of you who follow the food world know about the storm now brewing between Santi Santamaria and Ferran Adria. But I think these two different — I hate to use the term “opposing” — perspectives on food are what make Spain, for an outsider like me, particularly exciting.)

Eating here the past week has been amazing. Tasting freshly grilled, sweet, succulent prawns in Costa Brava; slurping down a hot plate of fried eggs topped with baby squid in La Boqueria in Barcelona; tucking into an addictively delicious (and my first ever) fideua negro; tasting a truly artistic dessert inspired by a perfume at El Celler de Can Roca; and the entire meal at El Bulli were all things that I won’t forget anytime soon. All were experiences I wouldn’t want to give up and wouldn’t have missed for the world. Individually, they were all superb. Together, they have helped renew my love for food and have, perhaps more importantly, also opened my eyes to new ways to look at this thing I love so much.

Greetings from Catalonia! S and I have been in Spain for 3 days. We spent the first two in Barcelona. Today, we drove to Girona for lunch and are currently spending the night at a cool bio-organic farm stay in Joanetes. Tomorrow, we’ll be heading to Rosas, where we’ll spend the night and dine with friends at El Bulli. After that, we have one last night in Barcelona before heading back home.

It’s been a crazy trip so far. We’ve been stuffing ourselves silly. Once we get back from the trip, I’ll post a full report. For now though, I thought I’d just post a little appetizer. Enjoy.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a project that S and I — with loads of help from a fantastic and hard-working team — have been working on for several months. I’ll be the first to admit that The Miele Guide is an ambitious project. Our goal with this publication is to launch the first really independent and credible guide to Asia’s best restaurants. It is something that S and I have been talking about for years and are thrilled to finally get off the ground.

In simple terms, what we are hoping to do, through The Miele Guide, is raise the profile of Asias top restaurants and to make them as well known as their counterparts overseas. If successful, The Miele Guide should be able to draw attention to the culinary richness of Asia as a region. At present, there is no credible Asia-wide restaurant guide which Asian food lovers consider a benchmark reflective of our regions taste, culture and collective culinary standards. Our hope and goal is that The Miele Guide can set that standard.

In order to put together the best possible list of Asia’s best restaurants, we are conducting four rounds of evaluation. In the first, a panel made up of 84 of Asia’s top restaurant critics have created a shortlist of what they believe are the best restaurants in their the region. Now, it’s your turn. Our second round of evaluations, which has just started, depends upon your participation. We’ve launched a public vote on our site, www.mieleguide.com.

Please take some time to click over and vote. You’ll need to register — this will take all of a minute and a half — before you can vote. And when you do, you’ll stand a chance to win one of three pretty cool prizes. We’re giving away dinner for 2 at the top-ranked restaurants in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo (respectively), plus a 2-night stay at a five-star hotel in each city. Voting should also take just a few minutes. Visa is our Official Credit Card. In order to vote, you’ll need to key in a few digits from your Visa card number — just a few, i.e. just enough to register you as a unique voter.

Once registered, you’ll have 10 votes. If you live in one of the 16 countries in Asia that we’re covering, you’ll only be allowed to vote for a maximum of 3 restaurants in your home-country. Voting is simple. Just choose the country whose restaurants you want to see and a shortlist appears on screen. To select, just click on the restaurant’s name. If there is a restaurant that isn’t on the shortlist that you want to vote for, no problem. We’ve made allowances for you to be able to write in your own nominations.

Voting is open from now until 31 July at www.mieleguide.com.

So far on this blog, I’ve avoided running pictures of myself. But the one I have included I actually kind of like. Pictured from right to left is me, The Miele Guide’s Associate Publisher Ms Pauline Ooi, and S. And of course, The Miele Guide is holding court centre-stage. The photo was taken by superstar fashion photographer Geoff Ang, whom I’ve known and whose work I have admired for almost a decade. I was told by the PR firm who is helping us publicize The Miele Guide, after seeing the rather scary pictures that the Straits Times ran of S and me a couple weeks back, that we had to have proper press portraits taken. Which we did.

Thank you again for your support. Please tell your friends about The Miele Guide.