Food review: Bacchanalia

SINGAPORE — Bacchanalia’s new incarnation at Hong Kong Street is a vastly different encounter from its previous manifestation. Gone are the heavy drapes, corpulent armchairs and low lights. Quite the opposite, the new dining room, which opened late last month, is bright, airy and open, with no barrier between the kitchen and guests.

The focus now rests squarely on the food, and inadvertently, on the chefs who double as servers. They now present each course to diners with a spiel on the cooking process and ingredients’ provenance. If you are the sort who is interested in how your scrim of carrot jam was made or where the garoupa on your plate is sourced, then there is much to geek out over a meal here — not least the relatively inexpensive S$150 price tag for a seven-course meal, given the arduous amount of work that goes into each dish.

That ridiculously flavour-packed dribble of carrot jam in the first course? That was made by first cooking the carrots in house-made carrot vinegar before dehydrating them, and then finely chopping and folding them through a mix of carrot jus and caraway emulsion. It sits on a sage-hued plate with pieces of grilled carrot, carrot sponge, minced carrot, dukka (an Egyptian nut and spice mix), fresh cream cheese and hummus, all of which are made from scratch in equally laborious processes.

Remarkably, eating the grilled carrots with each different element of the dish changes the flavour of every mouthful. The carrots are almost candy-sweet when eaten with the carrot jam, yet taste earthy and deeply savoury when slicked with the hummus and dukka. It is a delicate portion of food, but in that plate alone is a journey of myriad flavours that evolves and changes with every bite.

This is not a new dish for head chef Ivan Brehm and his team, but it is one that has come to define the style of Bacchanalia’s food. The menu draws heavily from the restaurant’s farm in Cameron Highlands and produce sourced nearby, such as locally farmed garoupa and Balinese sea salt, so the dishes often feature familiar Asian flavours presented in modern European ways.

Brehm may have trained at restaurants such as the Fat Duck, where the accoutrements of modern cooking such as emulsifiers, stabilising powders and thickening agents are rife, but in his time at Bacchanalia, there has been an obvious shift towards distilling the science behind those modern techniques to coax and alter the textures and flavours of the natural produce without artificial help.

For instance, gruyere cheese is mixed with sodium citrate (in regular speak, citrus salt) and a refined corn starch, which renders the cheese malleable so that it can be turned into a smooth fondue-like puree. This is served with an exquisitely tender slice of chicken breast that was poached in butter and paired with the nutty appeal of browned butter solids.

There are few restaurants serving the sort of flavours and ingredients cooked at the level that Bacchanalia does, which makes the dining experience here one that is enjoyably unique. With an ever-changing five-course menu at S$115 and a seven-course menu at S$150, it is also a dining experience that does not leave you feeling like you’ve been fleeced. ANNETTE TAN

Bacchanalia

Where: 39 Hong Kong Street. Telephone: 6509 1453.

Opening hours: Mondays and Tuesdays, 6pm to 10.30pm; Wednesdays to Fridays, noon to 2.30pm, 6pm to 10.30pm; Saturdays, 6pm to 10.30pm. Closed on Sundays

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