While dishes at a fine dining establishment can impress with beautiful plating or bold flavours, one course speaks volumes without all the fanfare. Bread, a household staple, gets elevated in the kitchens of these restaurants and easily becomes the highlight of the meal when paired with housemade spreads and condiments.
From dinner rolls of both the sweet and savoury variety to the only Italian naturally leavened bread awarded PDO (protected designation of origin), these eight restaurants and bars have surprised us with their bread courses. With as much thought and effort put into the rest of their offerings, they are testament to the versatility of one most understated dishes in the world.
Mod-Californian joint under the Jigger and Pony Group is plenty impressive for its spacious dining room that’s decorated in brass and wood accents in the 1920s former bank along Cecil Street. Tasty and produce-forward dishes which borrow from a range of Asian and Middle Eastern flavour profiles such as Chitose Farm Tomatoes in a bright citrus drizzle topped with crackling to a Wood-Fire Lamb Shoulder with Tahina and Pickle.
Among the highlights is pastry chef Elena Perez de Carrasco’s (formerly from Preludio) soft house rolls that’ll be available from the restaurant’s newly launched bakery (also available as an a la carte menu item). “We were looking for a bread that evoked positive memories of their childhood for people in Singapore,” she explained.
Prepared using the tangzhong method, where part of the batter is cooked before it’s combined with the rest of the ingredients, the soft and slightly chewy bread made with wheat flour from Masuda Milling Company from Kobe and glutinous rice flour is glazed with bourbon barrel aged maple syrup infused with kombu. Sweet and savoury, the bread rolls are cooked in the open hearth at the centre of the dining room. It’s served with butter that’s fermented and kneaded in-house.
Find out more: Rosemead
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Offering the first Irish fine dining experience in Singapore, Cure’s Nua tasting menu is a showcase of chef-owner Andrew Walsh’s memories of home. The dual-meaning word — meaning ‘Irish’ in Old Gaelic and ‘new’ in modern Irish — epitomises the new wave of modern Irish chefs who are giving a contemporary take on traditional recipes such as bacon and cabbage, and colcannon (mashed potatoes with cabbage or kale).
Both lunch and dinner menus begin with Walsh’s interpretation of soda bread, a brown bread where baking soda is used in the place of yeast as a leavening agent. Growing up in a big family, “sometimes money was tight so baking our bread to have as breakfast, lunch and dinner made economic sense for families in Ireland”.
Riffing off current reiterations of soda bread that’s made with Guinness, treacle, walnuts and herbs, Walsh’s recipe reduces the amount of stout to give the bread a richer taste accentuated by the sweetness of treacle. On its own, the bread has notes of caramel and is served with in-house bacon butter and a mini Guinness.
Find out more: Cure
A wine bar is not the first place you’d expect to find an unforgettable bread course but it’s one of the many surprises Fool has up its sleeves. A fun take on a staggering list of wines (natty or not) and great food, it’s opened by chef-owner Rishi Naleendra of Michelin-starred Cloudstreet and group beverage manager, Vinodhan Veloo.
One might be inclined to draw parallels to Naleendra’s sweet soda bread made with Sri Lankan stout and liquorice that he does over at the fine dining restaurant but, rest assured, the Dark Rye Rolls at Fool can hold its own.
Toeing the line between sweet and savoury, the airy bread rolls are made with American dark rye flour, French butter and yeast. It’s glazed with a vegemite caramel, an ode to Australia where Naleendra spent much of his time and a personal favourite condiment of the chef’s. On the side is more vegemite, this time in French butter whipped with ricotta for an extra punch of umami.
Find out more: Fool
An advocate for Nordic techniques and sensibility, executive chef Steve Lancaster’s solo venture has been winning over even the most hardened gourmands. Cooking to his strength, he dishes up iterations of Nordic-European cuisine using produce from Japan and Europe.
The bread course, as part of his lunch and dinner tasting menus, is an umami-laden brioche-based Parker Roll. The warm, golden mounds are coated with a mushroom garum comprising a mixture of Cep mushrooms, barley and salt that’s left for up to three months in 50 degrees Celsius then emulsified with chicken fat.
To top it off is a sprinkling of crispy chicken skin bits and thyme leaves. It’s then served with two kinds of butter: hand churned sea salt butter from France and butter infused with chicken fat. If you’ve the willpower to not finish it right away, we recommend using it to mop up any sauces from the rest of the courses.
Find out more: Poise
Related: The best gourmet sandwiches in Singapore to tuck into
The most casual spot out of the lot, this gastrobar at Palais Renaissance is one of the more recent F&B brands that have moved into the previously dated shopping mall. With an arched wall on one end and a patio overlooking Orchard Road on the other, this cosy joint might at first glance look like an after-hours watering hole for professionals. It helps too that wines by the bottle go for close to cost price here.
Binary’s fare constitutes a happy mix of east and west cuisines (read: not convoluted) with a wide enough selection to keep everyone satisfied. From Spanish Gambas Al Ajillo to Korean barbecue-inspired lettuce wrap, it’s their Yemenite Jewish bread rolls that you’ll be thinking about after you leave (available as an a la carte item and as part of the monthly brunch every first Sunday of the month).
Using a recipe the team chanced upon in the menu’s early stages of development, kubaneh bread has its origins from the Jewish community in Yemen. Unlike the traditional method of letting it bake overnight, Binary’s take on the roll involves two rounds of resting and two rounds of proofing. The soft, fluffy rolls are then served with in-house garlic butter and kombu butter.
Find out more: Binary
The grandfather of all bread trolleys can be found at none other than Les Amis, Singapore’s first fine dining restaurant. One of the few establishments awarded three Michelin stars in the country, it’s renowned for its impeccable French haute cuisine now led by director of culinary & operations, chef Sebastien Lepinoy.
No expense is spared when it comes to the bread selection here. Rolling up in a trolley before the lunch or dinner courses begin, the eight types of baked goods ranging from sourdough to Comté Cheese Rolls are a showcase of classic French bakes by head baker Alex Low and his team of three. The breads are baked twice daily before each service with 90 per cent of the ingredients hailing from France to ensure an authentic taste and texture.
All flour (aside from those used in the gluten-free Olive Bread) comes from Grands Moulins De Paris, a flour mill that was founded in 1919 and credited with opening the first bakery school in France. Its sourdough, in particular, uses three types of starter made from organic apples and the skin of organic grapes. Care is taken to avoid using regular apples that have been sprayed with pesticide to avoid killing off the bacteria required for the starter.
Find out more: Les Amis
Local chef Nicholas Tam’s first solo venture is a casual fine dining restaurant where he serves up genre-bending cuisine. Backed by the Ebb and Flow Group, Willow is run by a young team of chefs who’ve tenured under various fine dining establishments in Singapore including Tam himself.
Having honed a finesse on techniques from Michelin-starred kitchens such as Restaurant Zen and Robuchon, he showcases what he’s learnt with ease through produce from Japan and Europe. While the menu changes according to the ingredients he’s able to procure, it’s a good thing his bread course, Nori Pain Au Lait, remains the same.
Fermented overnight, the soft milk bun holds pockets of a nori blend comprising three kinds of seaweed — shio kombu, roasted nori and fresh ao nori. Their take on dashi reimagined as a bread, the seaweed’s natural umami is accentuated by the sabayon (an Italian egg-based sauce also called zabaglione) it comes with. Consisting of katsuoboshi or bonito, also a crucial component of dashi, the sabayon is made with clarified butter, egg yolks, shallot vinegar reduction and yuzu as well and brings a little acidity to the table.
Find out more: Willow
Holding onto its one Michelin star since 2017, this experimental kitchen for chef-owner Beppe De Vito proves that Italian fare is not all about home cooking. Born from his desire to dig deeper into his childhood growing up in Puglia, the fine dining restaurant in the shophouse along Boat Quay only seats 20 guests at once.
Like the other Italian restaurants under the ilLido Group such as Art and Amò, Braci benefits from De Vito’s personal network of farmers and producers in Italy and his family farm by getting exclusive access to top grade ingredients. Most of the dishes in the degustation menu are cooked at the open kitchen on a Shichirin grill or a Josper charcoal oven, living up to the name of the restaurant that means ‘embers’ in Italian.
The best example of all those elements coming together is in the bread course — naturally leavened, it is the only bread to be given PDO (protected designation of origin) title in Italy. Following strict criteria such as using locally produced re-milled durum wheat semolina, type of water used and a final crust of minimally three millimetres thick, the bread is par-cooked then air flown to Singapore twice a week where it’s finished in the Josper oven and served with EVOO from by De Vito’s family orchard.
Find out more: Braci
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