Hot in the City

Here's an article from NY Times, that was sent to me by Springlily.

Being the hip Miss Mo, I have been to some of these places. I shall talk briefly about them in my blog.
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THE People’s Action Party of Singapore won its 10th straight election in May, yielding only two seats in Parliament to the opposition. But it is now headed by Lee Hsien Loong, a very different sort of prime minister from his father, Lee Kwan Yew, who made the island state synonymous with order, efficiency and intolerance of the slightest breath of political dissent (to say nothing of ill-placed chewing gum).

With the country’s basic manufacturing jobs shifting to China, the younger Mr. Lee wants to turn the painfully strait-laced Singapore into a relaxed, appealing target for tourists. The primary lure will be a $3 billion resort and casino, to be built on a waterfront site downtown by Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which runs the Venetian in Nevada. It will offer not only extensive facilities for gambling, an activity dear to Chinese hearts, but also, like Las Vegas, a wide array of top-end dining spots, in a nation where good eating is a national pastime.

The developers have promised that restaurants will be opened in the resort by culinary names in neon from around the world — Charlie Trotter from Chicago, Tetsuya Wakuda from Sydney, Pierre Gagnaire from Paris, Hiroyuki Hiramatsu from Tokyo and Thomas Keller from the Napa Valley. They won’t all materialize, of course; they never do.

But Singapore already has gastronomic attractions aplenty. Start with its unmatched street food — chili crabs and chicken rice, laksa and satay and fish head curry — served in hundreds of hawkers’ stalls. Fast, cheap and delicious, its hygiene is certified by the ever-vigilant Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources. (K. F. Seetoh’s exhaustive guidebook, Makansutra, will lead you to the top practitioners.)

No need to stop there, however; in the last decade and especially the last four or five years, elegant restaurants serving inventive cuisine have sprung up all over town.

The best of these may be the least well known — Iggy’s, a windowless, dark-paneled, 28-seat nook on the third floor of the Regent Hotel. I first heard about it in Australia and Hong Kong, where its owner, Ignatius Chan, 43, has fervent followings, and rightly so. Presiding behind the L-shaped wooden counter at which most customers are seated, he proposes a series of dishes for lunch or dinner, each a careful blend of East and West, based on immaculate ingredients, imported as well as local.

Sounds like fusion food, you say with a grimace. So it is, but Iggy and his German chef, Dorin Schuster, 37, know how to tame that unruly beast. Try the freshwater fish known as marbled goby, tempura-fried, with a sauce of Meaux mustard, watercress and tarragon butter. Or a raw, plump sashimi-grade sea scallop, topped with foie gras purée and the juice of yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit. Or cappellini tossed with scampi oil and Sakura prawns.

Turf after all that surf? Mr. Schuster’s Wagyu (Kobe) beef cheeks in a honeyed pinot noir sauce are a small, savory masterpiece. Dessert? A terrine of jackfruit, coconut and mango with coconut sorbet, light as a zephyr, puts the tastes of the tropics squarely on your plate. And all this is accompanied by wines chosen in Europe by the boss, an accomplished sommelier, with Burgundy white and red, Girardin and Ampeau and Dujac and Bertagna, front and center. “Just things that appeal to me, a Singapore boy,” says Mr. Chan with a laugh.

Singapore has produced a raft of gifted chefs of Chinese or Malay background. One of the best is Jereme Leung, an apostle of updated Cantonese cooking, now at the celebrated Whampoa Club in Shanghai; another is Jimmy Chok, currently doing private catering between public engagements. He cooked lunch for my wife, Betsey, and me at a friend’s apartment, and we tasted nothing better on that visit than his hot seared scallops with prawn ravioli and clam laksa leaf nage, a subtle melody of marine flavors.

Sam Leong, the son of a Malaysian chef called the “King of Shark’s Fin,” is the genius overseeing, through executive chefs, two elegant restaurants owned by the Tung Lok Group. At Jade, a bamboo-filled, high-ceilinged room in the Fullerton Hotel (once the General Post Office), we ate a trio of delicate dim sum flavored with chili, ginger and coriander. That was just the beginning of a pretty parade of treats, including crab with pink peppercorns; the most meltingly delicious homemade tofu you could imagine, served with spinach; a shimmering lemongrass gelée; sweet-potato pudding, deep-fried into finger shapes, and exquisite chrysanthemum tea.

At My Humble House, a misnomer if ever there was one, Mr. Leong pursues his passion for ever-lighter, ever-fresher versions of Chinese classics. A glamorous space within the Esplanade, Singapore’s new performing arts center — popular name, “the Durian,” after the smelly fruit — it combines high-backed chairs, floating fabric panels and dazzling lighting effects. A platter of crisp duck skin came with tiny crepes and a spicy dipping sauce: a leaner, meaner Peking duck. Another memorable dish, labeled “Dancing With the Wind,” a steaming soup containing crab, prawns, scallops, mushrooms and (surprise!) red dates in a gentle coconut broth, arrived in a young coconut. “Drifting Clouds of the Autumn Sky” turned out to be fried green tea dumplings.

Just as poetic and even more fun was a fire-breathing dessert, powered by dry ice, that contained almond cream, purple rice and black sesame ice cream. It was called “Sunset to Remember.” Don’t worry. No chance that we will forget it.

Anderson Ho’s casual, clean-lined new restaurant, Le Papillon, is less French than its name. Multiple influences are at work here, also including Japanese, Italian and modern Spanish. A starter of marinated goat cheese is enlivened with pesto sauce, a crisp slice of watermelon and a bright sherry reduction, a combination that tasted almost as good as it looked. In keeping with the current European fondness for ultra-slow cooking, Mr. Ho bakes his confit of pork belly for more than 10 hours at 90 degrees and he braises his oxtail for more than six hours. The results are well worth the effort.

At the New Majestic Hotel, which opened in March in a shop-house building dating from 1928, Yong Bing Ngen, a star in local hotel kitchens for years, joins the ranks of the modernizers with dishes like lamb in Chinese honey paired with pan-fried carrot cake, a traditional Singaporean specialty. And in the Rochester Park neighborhood, colonial bungalows have been turned into restaurants and bars, attracting a young, hip crowd.

Graze, typical of the genre, is well worth a visit, if only for the king prawns three ways and soy-lacquered Wagyu ox cheeks.

At the golf club on the good-times island of Sentosa, reachable by bridge, by cable car and (soon) by light rail, Il Lido offers not only splendid views but perhaps the city-state’s best Italian food. This is the creation of Michele Pavanello, a Venetian-born chef, and Beppe de Vito, an entrepreneur who came to Singapore a decade ago to open the local branch of the Milanese restaurant Bice. Both the pasta with creamy sea urchins and the tiramisù are exemplary.

Il Lido is a favorite of Mr. Seetoh, the guidebook maven, as is almost anything bearing the hallmark of Yoshio Nogawa, Singapore’s leading Japanese chef. He has a 40-seat place at the golf club as well as another at the Meridien Hotel in town. But they say he does his finest work (I have not sampled it) at the Japanese Club. His kaiseki meals, including delicacies like chawanmushi egg custard with salmon roe, are the talk of the town.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Iggy’s, Regent Singapore Hotel, 1 Cuscaden Road, Level Three, (65) 6732-2234; dinner for two without wine, 300 Singapore dollars (about $193 at 1.55 Singapore dollars to $1). All prices below are for dinner for two without wine.

In addition to private catering, Jimmy Chok has been cooking lunch, Monday through Friday, and dinner Friday only, at the Academy Bistro in the Singapore Academy of Law, 1 Supreme Court Lane, Level Six, (65) 6332-4388; 75 Singapore dollars.

Jade, Fullerton Hotel, 1 Fullerton Square, Lobby Level, (65) 6877-8188; 100 Singapore dollars.

My Humble House, 2-27 Esplanade Mall, 8 Raffles Avenue, (65) 6423-1881; 130 Singapore dollars.

Le Papillon, Red Dot Traffic Building, 28 Maxwell Road, (65) 6327-4177; 160 Singapore dollars.

Majestic, 3137 Bukit Pasoh Road, (65) 6511-4718; 160 Singapore dollars.

Graze, 4 Rochester Park, (65) 6775-9000; 150 Singapore dollars.

Il Lido, Sentosa Golf Club, Sentosa Island, (65) 6866-1977; 180 Singapore dollars.

Nogawa, Le Meridien Hotel, 100 Orchard Road, (65) 6733-8855; 200 Singapore dollars.

Additional information about some of these restaurants may be found at www.chubbyhubby.net, a useful independent Web site.