Odette - Singapore
No indication that we are in a museum
Rating: 18/20
Where: Singapore
When: Dinner for 3 on 12 November 2022
Cost: Tasting menu 328-448 SGD, Wine Pairing 285 SGD
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars, #36 on Top 50 Restaurants list (2022)
Why: Great modern French cuisine, using some local ingredients; good wine pairing
Odette is located in the National Gallery of Singapore, near the city's Marina. Having a three-star Michelin restaurant inside a museum is not as unique as one might think, just this year I visited others in Antwerp and Milan. Part of me wonders why - there is probably no direct synergistic effect, since the museums tend to be closed by the time one arrives for dinner. So perhaps it's just a welcome income stream for the museum? Well, whatever the rationale, Singapore's National Gallery is special in that it houses not just one, but several "fancy" restaurants, possibly reflecting the role that good food plays in Singaporean society? Luckily, all these questions quickly take a backseat once one enters Odette: at that point it feels like any other fine-dining restaurant, with nothing reflecting the building's other raison d'être. The decor has a modern, but formal elegance. Fittingly, there is no open kitchen, but it is still visible behind glass sliding doors through which the sequence of courses arrives.
There were two choices for our dinner, a regular and a vegetarian tasting menu. We had both at our table, but I only tried the regular one. In addition, there were two optional courses. One was a seasonal truffle course (replacing one of the “normal” courses), the other a cheese cart before the desserts. A wine pairing was offered as well, with surprisingly good wines that for the most part cost about $60 per bottle - a happy "surprise" for someone used to US wine pairings that often pour $20 bottles for a $200 wine pairing.
Our dinner started with a trio of amuse bouches. First, a cigar-shaped gougere was filled with Comte cheese. The gougere was pretty soft in texture, and the cheese quite mild, leading to an unspectacular first impression 14. A crunchy tart was filled with roasted (hence sweet) onions and topped by foam. The overall taste was close to a tarte flambée (due to the onions and cream), and the tarte's crunch was lovely 17. The best came last: a saba (mackerel) taco. With its very thin taco shell, a nicely marinated fish and avocado, this tasted like a very good ceviche 18.
Next came another amuse bouche. A cep mushroom sabayon contained buckwheat and mushrooms, and was finished with shaved black truffles and a mushroom tea. Next to it was a small mushroom brioche topped with more shavings of black truffle. The sabayon ended up being more like a soup, pretty light and not very creamy, and surprisingly not too mushroomy either. The brioche was light in taste as well, not greasy but also missing a pronounced mushroom flavor. Not too exciting overall, maybe some salt would have helped 15.
Two kinds of bread were served: a truffle brioche and a slice of sourdough bread, both arriving cold. The brioche was nice and buttery (but not particularly truffley), and the sourdough had a good crunch. The accompanying olive oil and butter were both excellent 18.
Our first course was a seafood dish. Prawn tartare was topped with uni, green apples, finger limes, mussels and caviar, all presented in a sea urchin half-shell. A small toast with uni was served on the side. The different components of this dish went very well together, leading to a fresh and pretty light dish overall. The caviar (from Paris) was exceptionally good. A winner 19.
Brown crab was steamed and served with pear cubes and a sorbet of apple and celery. The dish was topped by a jelly layer also made of apple and celery. The PTSD regarding our meal at Piazza Duomo was not justified - this remained the only use of jelly in this dinner. All the components of the dish were pretty well hidden by the jelly, so it looked simpler than it was. Similar to the first course, this dish was on the fresh and light side, verging on "too light". The crab was a tiny bit mayonnaisey, but the overall dish was still pleasant 17.
The next dish was served in a dramatic fashion with dry ice creating lots of smoke. It wasn't entirely clear what the culinary purpose of the dry ice was, maybe it cooled the liquid eggs that came in open egg shells? These eggs were poured into a bowl containing mashed potatoes, buckwheat, brown butter and chorizo. Again, a dish that felt a bit too light in flavor, with the chorizo providing most of the taste. Maybe a tad more salt would have helped 17. (Reportedly, the vegetarian version was even blander since it missed the chorizo.)
Optionally, it was possible to receive a truffle course instead of this egg dish. Truffle courses usually have a poor ROI, the shaved truffles imparting little flavor of their own after being dropped on top of an otherwise unremarkable dish. Thankfully, that was not the case here. A single huge ravioli was filled with langoustine, and served with a sauce of yellow wine, a leek fondue and yes, shaved truffles on top. This dish would have been amazing even without the truffles: the langoustine was cooked perfectly and was very flavorful, and the sauce great as well. But the truffles were a wonderful addition, imparting a great truffley flavor to the dish. Excellent 20.
A hand-dived Scottish scallop was served with kombu (seaweed) and pickled daikon, apples and cucumbers. The whole was surrounded by a “pearl sauce”: a buttery sauce containing ikura, finger limes, tapioca pearls and scallop skirt. This sauce was fantastic, to wit: the different textures of ikura and tapioca, the seafood flavor from the scallop, the acidity from the finger limes, and the butteriness from the, well, butter. In short, a sauce that we would have happily eaten all by itself. The scallop was very light in flavor, but went very nicely with copious amounts of sauce 19. My dining companion said that she would have preferred a fried, rather than steamed, scallop, and would have given this a 17.
Japanese kinki fish was also served steamed, and came with kombu, turnips, squid, a prawn and prawn consomme with chive oil. I've generally encountered kinki fish fried, but even steamed it was melt-in-your-mouth fatty goodness. The soup that surrounded it was great as well, savory and full of flavor 19.
The main savory dish was a Brittany squab, served in three different ways. A squab breast was coated with kampot pepper. The pigeon's leg had a small message tied to it (mentioning its producer's name). Finally, a fried ravioli was filled with pigeon meet. Also on the plate were a fig, hazelnuts, beet puree and pigeon jus. To be honest, I'm not the greatest fan of pigeon, but this one was pretty good. I loved the pepper crust that added a tiny bit of spice. The ravioli was good as well, and the beets and fig made this a fall/winter kind of dish. Overall not my thing, but very well executed for what it was 17 (a more objective person might have said 18).
We ordered the optional cheese course and asked for "bold and stinky" cheeses. The result was truly excellent, all five cheese were as good as what one might get in France. Given the mediocrity of US cheese courses, having the Singaporean variety to be so superior was a welcome surprise to me. Unrated since this course varies so wildly with the choice of cheeses, but our selection would have been a 18 or 19.
A pre-dessert palate cleanser followed. Kyoho grape granita was topped with aloe, verjus, Sauternes ice cream, oolong tea foam and a raspberry sugar tuile in the shape of a maple leaf, representing the current fall season. This was an excellent light dish, where all components went very well together 19+.
The main dessert was a buckwheat tarte with pear crumbles, hazelnut pralines, sunchoke ice cream and a caramel sauce. It's interesting to see sunchoke in a dessert, but in this case it was only minimally savory; I wouldn't have been able to guess that it was an ingredient. A very fall-like dessert, sweet and delicious 19.
A quartet of petit fours concluded our dinner. An ice cream lolly was flavored with apricots, lavender and thyme. The resulting taste was mostly of dried apricots. Nice enough, but not too exciting 17.
Three kinds of fruit had been minimally prepared: fuji apples, musk melon and black honey persimmons. Good fruit, but hard to rate since they were served as-is 17.
A small cannele was flavored with vanilla and rum. It was very crispy and crunchy on the outside, but (maybe due to its size) there was (too) little dough on the inside. Still pretty good, though 18.
Finally, a small chocolate tarte topped with tonka bean dust was crunchy, but not very chocolaty 17.
Overall: An excellent French restaurant that uses a small amount of regional ingredients, but otherwise does not give any nods to local spices or culinary techniques. If you served the same dinner in Paris, nobody would bat an eyelid. While I was disappointed by the lack of a "sense of place", I cannot fault the result on a taste-level. This was a consistently very delicious, assuredly prepared meal. Maybe less exciting than our meal at Zén the day before, but probably more tasty overall 18.
