PaiGu

Thai Thai is a gorgeous, classy restaurant tucked away in the Mandarin Gallery that I discovered one day entirely by accident. It is adorned in regal purple, with colourful pillows and elegant chandeliers.

Adorned in soft pastel tones, comfy high-backed seats, crisp white tablecloths, and with a warm light descending from ornate chandeliers, this intimate restaurant is more akin to a king’s palatial tearoom. Source: Time Out

I couldn’t have described it better myself. Service is extremely attentive, among the best I’ve experienced in Singapore. They also happen to have delicious Thai food, the kind that will be featured in recurring dreams afterward (I should know).

Pandan chicken is well-seasoned and very tender. Fantastic with the sweet Thai sauce.

The menu called this “Shrimp with coconut strips” but it did not prepare us for what came out. It was more like shrimp cake, with coconut strands in the batter, but after frying, there was no fragrance from the coconut at all, which was a little disappointing. The shrimp cake was executed well but the batter itself was just average.

Traditional duck in red curry is the dish that I dreamed about after my first visit, and was the object of my return visit. The first time we had it, the duck was tender and succulent. There were also many ingredients in the curry that surprised and delighted us, like pineapples and grapes for a sweet taste. The second time we ordered this dish, the duck was tough to chew and the vegetables in the curry were under-cooked. The curry paste itself was good, but overall the dish was a bit disappointing.

Pad thai came with truly enormous prawns, that were less appetizing in real life than in photos. The pad thai itself was very well executed though, with a harmonious blend of sweet and sour.

Custard with roasted pumpkin and ice cream was a unique dessert that initially surprised my taste buds, but after I got used to the custard-pumpkin combination, I really liked it. The ice cream, on the other hand, was supposedly vanilla but had a very bizarre after taste that made me think there had been an herb of some sort mixed into the vanilla.

Thai iced tea here is the best I’ve ever had. It is vaguely like bubble tea in that it’s black tea with milk and sugar syrup, but it is so much better than that.

This is a rather pricey joint if you have frequent Thai cravings like me, but I would definitely want to come back to try more of their menu. In future, I might only come for dinners as I have reason to suspect their chef skills are better for dinner than for lunch.

Rating:

Le Bon Marché is situated on the first floor of an apartment building in Bukit Timah. It’s a family-run French bistro, headed by a chef who actually hails from France. The ambiance is surprisingly plain, given the steep prices – a true French experience.

The wine selection was all-French, categorized by region, and I was very happy that we settled on the Gewurtzraminer.

To start, we had oysters and foie gras. It was my first time trying oyster, and I have to say, I did not like the experience. My companions told me that oysters were an acquired taste. I suspected it was a taste I would never acquire.

The foie gras was unexceptional, perhaps because I had had the best foie gras of my life at Stella. Their superiority remained unchallenged.

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Despite the huge variety of food in hawker centres, sometimes it’s nice to take a break from food-court cuisine in the form of more upscale dining. Here’s a different look at eating in Singapore.

Lunch at a Chinese restaurant near work.

I didn’t get pictures of our first dinner, which was at Jumbo Seafood Restaurant and included such memorable dishes as the jumbo chili crab, deep-fried beancurd, steamed fish, liang ban jellyfish, prawns with cabbage, and seafood fried rice.

Dinner at Otto, an upscale Italian restaurant, the next night.

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