Singapore Restaurant Week 2016 Taste-Test – A Look At Some Participating Restaurants

We were invited to a private tasting to have a sneak taste of some of the dishes that would be on offer at Singapore Restaurant Week, and here’s what we thought! A skewer of grilled seafood was dunked in what seemed to be a tom yum sauce and was topped with a prawn cracker and a bundle of guava salad. The tom yum espuma was well balanced and had a vibrancy about it which helped to balance the other flavors of the dish.

Rating: 6.5/10 Alati Coining themselves as the producers of “divine” greek cuisine, Alati is already making waves in the Singapore food trade despite them only opening in September last year. For Singapore Restaurant Week, Alati is bringing the flavors of Attica to your table. However what made this dish spectacular wasn’t how well the Taramosalata was prepared, it was the balance of all the elements, and how they sang in perfect harmony.

The walnut biscuit was the cherry on the cake, it gave the whole dish texture and a nutty savouriness which was brilliant. This one spoonful of Taramosalata was enough to convince me that Alati meant business and was definitely on the right track to reinventing Greek cuisine in Singapore.

From the procurement of the freshest catch of prawns, to the care taken in preparation it to absolute perfection. A lot of texture and bite was lost from cutting the prawn and it affected my impression of the dish as a whole.

The chilli jam on the other hand, was well balanced and enhanced the sweetness of the prawn, I just wish there was a little more of it in the portion. The sauce was impeccably done, it was smooth, silky and had just the right amount of tang to it.

The flavors of the sauce were robust and reminded me of late night kebab runs in Melbourne, except this was prepared with much more care and finesse. The pita bread which held the pork and sauce was wonderfully light and airy, it was the perfect accompaniment to the lovely sauce which was resting atop of it. There was far too little pork in each portion, and as a result the flavors of the meat were completely dwarfed by the tzatziki.

Even so, I’m just nitpicking at this point, the dish as a whole is great and is definitely deserving of its spot in FYR’s menu. The fish was well cooked, it was fork tender but it could have been more moist, even so, I attributed this to the plating time of the canapes.

The dish as a whole was well executed, however it did not surprise me like some of the other dishes. The flavors were not as daring or adventurous as the rest and it lacked star quality, even so it was still a great bite of food.

Rating: 7.5/10 Singapore Restaurant Week March 2016 Portico Prime, Alati and FYR aren’t the only restaurants strutting their stuff during Singapore Restaurant Week.