Our picks: Singapore

As we mentioned a few months ago, we are always sharing our favorite restaurants from every city we know with the hundreds of customers we meet in Cuca every week in search of the tastiest food around the world. People seem to trust chefs’ favorites when choosing food and since everyone asks our humble opinion, we decided some time ago to start a proper “Our Picks” section where we give you our recommendations on where and what to eat.

We have covered Bali and Madrid already and today’s blog entry is about Singapore. Singapore was our home for 4 years and a place we keep close to our hearts and our tummies! The city is full of great restaurants. Some of the best simple tasty dining is done in the “Singapore Hawker Centers”. If you pass by one, just look for the stalls with a queue and get in line. Anybody in line will be happy to tell you what you should order and why. 

The list of restaurants below are our favorites for price and value. Singapore is very expensive, but these ones became our must-eat regular spots. Get hungry and enjoy!

F.O.C.
This place serves great modern Spanish style small plate dining. Hip, funky and delicious. One of our absolute Singapore favorites. It sits beside 28 Hong Kong Street Bar (see below) which makes a great combo of drink and dinner.
Price: ***
What to order: something cooked in their specialty Josper oven.

Tiong Bahru Bakery
With a few locations, this place has outstanding French pastry, bread and café-style food.
Price: *
What to order: Kouign Amann which means “cake butter” and it is ridiculous.

Din Tai Fung
A Taiwanese chain restaurant that always seems to get a Michelin star for their well-made classic dumplings. We find the Din Tai Fung branches in Singapore even better than the original one in Taipei! Lunch is easier than dinner to grab a table and experience what they are famous for.
Price: **
What to order: Xiao Long Bao and seaweed salad. This salad sells out fast so be early!

Garibaldi
This is a top tier “fine dining” Italian restaurant with a very casual and relaxed, unpretentious vibe. With 1 Michelin star, the food is very good. A very well kept secret is they do a weekend brunch that is very good value and very, very delicious. A must!
Price: ****
What to order: Brunch. Despite all the tempting dishes offered at the beginning, save room for the pastas!!

Mustard
This place serves lesser known Indian Bengali and Punjabi dishes. It’s less coconut and more flavorful. The restaurant is very simple but the food is made fresh and tastes delicious.
Price: **
What to order: Choose everything you don’t know and have never had. Meat dishes are better than seafood.

Jade at Fullerton
The place serves a secret unassumingly great weekend dim sum brunch called Jade's Dim Sum Treasures. The venue is an icon and the food is fantastic. Make sure to book ahead. Some of the best classic style Chinese Yum Cha.
Price: ***
What to order: Weekend brunch.

Itacho Sushi
This place is a chain of Japanese sushi style restaurants throughout Asia. It is very cheap but very good. The menu is all photos and what you see is what you get. Great sushi at a ridiculous price for Singapore. Other hot dishes are average so stick to the fish!
Price: *
What to order: The rolled sushi.

Otto
This place is real Italian food with slick service. No frills or gimmicks, they do very little very well. Do reserve as the place is small and order the set lunch for a hard-to-come-by great deal in Singapore.
Price: ***
What to order: Risotto is a specialty

Long Beach@Dempsey
This place serves live seafood, cooked Chinese style. Quality is brilliant and dishes come fast and hot.
Price: ****
What to order: Don’t miss the Chili or Black Pepper crab, they are worth the flight to Singapore alone! Ask what is the largest they have. 1kg size is oceanic caveman comfort food. For a gluttonous seafood feast, add on the razor clams.

28 Hong Kong Street
Don’t judge a book by its cover. This unassuming entrance becomes one of the world’s best classic bars. Go for a pre-dinner drink as later on it gets busy and tables are hard to come by.
Price: **
What to order: Stick to the classics. They are perfect!

Our picks: Madrid

As we mentioned a few months ago, we are always sharing our favorite restaurants from every city we know with the hundreds of customers we meet in Cuca every week in search of the tastiest food around the world. People seem to trust chefs’ favorites when choosing food and since everyone asks our humble opinion, we have decided to start a proper “Our Picks” section where we give you our recommendations on where and what to eat.

We covered Bali already and today’s blog entry is about Madrid, the capital of Spain and by far the capital of deliciousness within the country. You will find great restaurants everywhere in Spain, but Madrid has a huge concentration of brilliant places to eat and a unique opportunity to experience traditional food from all over the country. For its variety and consistently delicious food, there is nowhere else like Madrid!

San Gines
A must for breakfast, this place serves the best hot chocolate and churros in the world since 1894. Just across from the main entrance and the big queue of people waiting, there is a second store. Same product, same taste without the wait.
Price: *
What to order: of course Hot Chocolate and Churros. Do try the Porra: it is bigger and thicker than a churro with a slight yeasty taste, our favorite.

La Mallorquina
This place serves basically cakes, pastry and coffee. The main difference is many of the items they serve they have created and the rest of Spain now calls them "a tradition". Hustle in through the small doors into the cramped space filled with sugar-crazed zombies. Watch how others order and follow the organized chaos to sweet deliciousness.
Price: *
What to order: the one and only Napolitana de Chocolate.

Mallorca
Brilliant breakfast venue or if you are just looking for a snack between meals. Service is brilliantly professional and the whole experience is superb. It is truly a high-class coffee shop that serves well-crafted food.
Price: *
What to order: Tortel. Visually a badly made bagel and really nothing special but ironically one of the best pastries we have ever eaten. Don’t judge a book by its cover here. The Tortel is a wonderful fine soft almond paste wrapped in flaky soft bread pastry.

Las tortillas de Gabino
The Spanish tortilla in Spain is a big deal. Everyone has their favorite and the dish has become its own religion with people all worshipping a different standard. Some like it runny, some overcooked, some more potato, some less. We have tried them all but the ones served here are different, delicious and worth worshipping.
Price:***
What to order: The classic Valazqueña. The portions are big so don’t get excited.

La Tasquería
Listen, we don’t love eating liver, kidney, hearts and weird bits but…there are exceptions. This place crafts absolutely delicious luxurious dishes from the less glamorous parts. Unexpected, unrivaled. It hooked a Michelin star for how well things are done.
Price:***
What to order: Try the #heart #duck # raspberry dish. Best version of duck you will ever try.

La Barraca
This place specializes in rice dishes like Paella. They are absolutely brilliant at it and have been serving perfect rice for more than 80 years. Nothing modern or trendy here and that’s what we love about it.
Price:****
What to order: Queen shellfish Paella. Get them to put it right on the table and not serve it up for you in the back. The experience of eating right out of the hot pan is magic.

Punto MX
Holding one Michelin star. this place serves small bites of deep, earthy, smoky, unctuous modern Mexican food. Taste takes center stage and the time usually wasted on fancy decoration is spent on proper cooking.
Price:****
What to order: go for the Long Tasting menu.

La Bien Aparecida
Traditional grandma style comfort food with brilliant seasonal products, this restaurant showcases some of Spain's classic dishes done very very well. Slick simple modern dining room provides the space to enjoy the best of what’s in season.
Price:*****
What to order: our favorites are the Flores de alcachofas con migas de rabo de toro (artichokes with oxtail), the egg croquettes (their specialty and a must to try!) and their steak tartar with mustard ice cream.

Pazo a Coruña
This is a Galician restaurant and Galicia is world famous for seafood and that’s what this place does very well. A grown-up establishment that serves extraordinary fresh seafood cooked perfectly. What you order is what you get, no surprises, no messing about. Old school proper cooking that everyone would love. 
Price:****
What to order: A star of the menu is the Merluza a la Gallega. Order some appetizers like clams, mussels or grilled squid to start and then the merluza for main. Order only one portion to share between two unless you’re a Viking!

La huerta de Tudela
Where age-old tradition and timeless cooking is devoured in clean and modern comfort. Out of dozens and dozens of proper meals eaten in Madrid this was the most delicious, period. What else can be said.
Price:****
What to order: with their own vegetable garden, ironically the star of the menu are the veggie dishes. The Potato Duquesa may be the best dish we have ever eaten. Seriously!

La Tasquita de Enfrente
Spain’s timeless classics are here honored and lifted using the absolute best seasonal products. The food is very simple but reflects purely on the quality of each ingredient. Service is incredible and the entire experience with only a few tables for the restaurant is like dining in the chefs home.
Price:****
What to order: take the tasting menu and be careful with ordering the “specials” that are not listed, the price may surprise you…

Castelados

A cold renovated sterile white dining room and bar may not look like the best place to eat well but in this case, they are. Michelin has awarded them a Bib Gourmand distinction for delicious food and their rustic perfectly cooked seafood is some of the best. 

Price:****

What to order: Milhojas de Ventresca is a must and try the prawns from Huelva. Unbelievably good!

A story to be told

A late-night dinner between chefs never ends well and as proof, this is what we got ourselves into last time I met my chef friend the great Will Meyrick.

High from feasting on his delicious curries and over excited to have found someone equally mad about food, we somehow agreed and committed to something damn near impossible. We would travel to a place we had never been before, eat through the streets, coffee shops and simple restaurants to discover as much traditional food as possible. We would meet the people who cook the food and understand their story and the dishes they serve. All this information would be taken back to our kitchens and together like best friends we would craft new dishes completely inspired by those we ate and by the methods used to prepare them. The idea at the time sounded genius: to tell the story of our journey through food. But, having never worked together before and coming from completely different culinary backgrounds, telling a story in two different languages was going to need some translation.

So, with fingers crossed and the location selected, we were off to one of Indonesia’s thousand islands: Southern Kalimantan.

To really learn you must be seen as a curious student, not an arrogant teacher, a big challenge with a TV crew and their daunting cameras following every step we took. To sum up the 6 day trip, we devoured everything we came across: smoky char-grilled wild duck, boiling rich herbal chicken soup, crunchy fried river fish dusted in roasted rice dust, Arabic-influenced slow cooking, fermented exotic fruit jams, rustic fish and rice cooked on the jungle floor in young bamboo over open fire and so much more. Indeed we ate Kalimantan and discovered powerful full-flavored hearty comfort food squeezed directly from bustling local markets and cooked by proud locals. A week full of those magical moments when someone gives you their food and curiously watches for a reaction as you try something for the very first time. All that was left was to now try and figure out how to put that into a dinner that gives every guest that experience not just as it was, but the way we would like to translate it.

With a 12 course menu of new dishes modeled from those old traditional molds, ceramics hand-crafted precisely for each dish, a dining room set like a jungle with the echoing sound of the forest, weeks of cooking, tuning and testing, the stage is set and our story of Southern Kalimantan ready to be told.

Tickets still available for May 11, 7pm at Som Chai restaurant in Seminyak. Book yours here.