A restaurant not foreign to all Singaporean foodie is Andre, named after its chef Andre Chiang himself. Equipped with a stellar resume which include stints with Joel Robuchon and Pierre Gagnaire, chef Andre Chiang brought Jaan restaurant, a fine dining place located in Swissotel Stamford, to fame when he arrived in Singapore.
Following this success, he moved on to open his own restaurant located in the shophouse area in China Town Singapore. This restaurant too did not fall short of recognition; it was awarded the 38th position in the Wold’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2012.
An interesting thing happened during my restaurant reservation. When I was certain I needed to travel to Singapore for the weekend in a month’s time, a Singaporean friend of mine immediately tried to make a booking at Andre, but found that they were already full.
The respondent requested that we tried a later date. Lucky for me, after my Singaporean friend generously explained that I will be in Singapore on for very limited days and slightly exaggerated how much I wanted to try the restaurant, we were delightfully surprised to find out the next day that someone had just cancelled their reservation.
Coincidence?
Walking into the converted shophouse, the interior was very intimate and modern. We were offered Andre’s unique wine selection which features wine from less popular and smaller wineries of France.
Andre only offers gastronomy course for dinner, which features his signature Octaphilosophy 8 course meal, though in actuality you get 10-15 courses considering the snacks in between the courses.
Andre’s Octaphilosophy contains 8 elements: unique, pure, texture, memory, salt, south, artisan and terroir.
The courses that made the most impression on me had to be Andre’s salt, artisan elements and its dessert: a deconstructed Snickers bar. The salt course resembles an underwater garden. Despite its salty taste, no salt was involved in the creation of this dish.
Before the artisan course, the waiter made us munch on a strand of plant and made us guess what the next course was (which we naturally failed to do). It turned out to be a Taiwanese (still green) baby corn. Its texture and taste was fascinating and memorable.
Unfortunately for me, instead of having chef Andre’s highly sought after foei gras gelee with black truffle coulis (memory element) as I was trying to keep my cholesterol in check, they substituted it with buckwheat spaghetti with truffles.
No complains there as the spaghetti gave a delicious strong flavour which forms a nice transition from the previous subtle seafood courses to the heavy red meat course that follows.
Overall, the courses had too much seafood for my taste which made the gastronomy lack flavor variety. Although its food presentation was picturesque and there’s no doubt that they serve very fresh produce, I was almost craving for red meat by the end of the 7th course and was relieved when we were served lamb at the 8th.
If you are allergic to seafood, then maybe this restaurant is not for you. Even though they are able to substitute the seafood with other proteins, I would suspect that the recreated dishes would probably fall short of Andre’s original version of Octaphilosophy.
Towards the end of the dinner Chef Andre himself approached every table and made conversations, which added a personal touch to the meal. The service at Andre is what you should expect in a fine dining restaurant.
However, given my preference for Japanese’ interpretation of seafood, plus Andre’s hefty price tag of over SG$300 on the food alone (normal for Singapore fine dine dining places), I would perhaps only come back when the Rupiah reverses its downtrend.
Food: |*** | Ambience: |*** | Price: |$$$$ |
Opening hours: Tue-Sun noon-2pm, 7-11pm
Location: 41 Bukit Pasoh Road, Singapore
Contact: +65 6534 8880
Posted by PrincessFiona
Leave a Reply