A trip to The Tippling Club

I started Wednesday at an 8am breakfast meeting, drinking questionable coffee and picking at slightly grotty croissants. I ended Wednesday eating at one of the finest establishments in Singapore, drinking delicious wine, filled to the top with utterly amazing food, and understanding why the restaurant has one of the very best reputations in the city.

            The Tippling Club is one of those places that people talk about, but that you assume you’ll never actually go to unless the receipt is going to be run through your company’s expenses scheme. Or to be more precise, Nick’s company’s expenses scheme.

            With his top client and his wife to schmooze (and me in tow, more than thankful for an invitation but serving no actual purpose, unless you count the “Chief Cocktail Taster” role that I am still attempting to make my official title), we made our way to the 7:30 reservation with high expectations.

Bottles hanging from the ceiling 

I arrived early (standard) and so spent around half an hour entertaining myself at the bar, admiring the amazing layout and getting ready for an almighty dinner. By the time Nick, Phil and Nathalie arrived I had made it to the end of an interpretation of a Dark and Stormy, and was ready to see what else was on offer!

"Old man in the sea" / Dark and Stormy in a tin cup

Once we had tasted a couple of amazing cocktails at the bar we wandered through to the almost empty and heavily staffed restaurant where we would be having the gourmand tasting menu, complete with paired wines and cocktails. It sounds fancy, and it really was!

            There were ten set courses (and drinks) along with a selection of amuse bouche and sweet treats. Everything from quail eggs on straw through to ice-cream and meringue sandwiches served on bizarre metal contraptions. To say that it was excessive would be a major understatement, but it was an incredible dinner and a brilliant night out with friends.

            I’ve had to apologise to my sister for this already, but this was one of those dinners where I couldn’t help but take a stack of photos of the amazing food and drinks. It’s what you do in Asia, and when the food looks this good, why wouldn’t you?!

Thin sliver of sashimi on a fresh seaweed cracker with pea puree, served on a massive bed of salt!

Green curry mousse and puffed rice, served in a baby food jar 

Quails egg, straw and something a bit like seaweed but no idea what it actually was!

Cheesecake, in pill form 

Phil and Nathalie enjoying the ice-cream sandwiches

Fois gras and apple five-ways 

Myself and NB

Number 17 - Golf Lessons - Done!

So, I’m not claiming to be a pro just yet, but my golf lessons have come to an end, and my instructor seems to think that I am ready to be set free on the general public. I think he’s wrong, but the classes are finished and that means that I get to tick Number 17 off the list, which is handy, because my 28^th birthday is only a couple of days away and I still have a lot of work to do on the remaining 13 items on the 30-Before-30 List. Hopefully there will be one more done and dusted by the end of this week, but for now, I'm very pleased to have golf as ticked off as possible. 

            Once we’re back from our trip to the UK I am going to have to get Nick to agree to an attempt at 9 holes to see how I get on…we’ll have to wait and see how that goes!

A very British weekend

This weekend, whilst failing (standard) to pick an appropriate place for Saturday brunch, the rest of the weekend was filled with a selection of fabulous chilled out and occasionally super British activities.

            On Saturday, having spent most o the afternoon waiting around for the aircon men to come and run some checks, tests and basic cleaning tasks we headed out for a lovely dinner with a group of Nick’s work friends and industry buddies.        

            Nick’s main client (who we see quite a bit of) was the organiser of the event, so with him and his wife and three other couples, the ten of us gathered at a relaxed garden style bar called The Green Door for a couple of drinks in the setting sunlight, which was a lovely way to start off the evening.

            From there we took a five minute stroll over to a huge Thai place, which served amazing dinner, great cocktails and hosted some bizarre traditional Thai style dancing and musical entertainment on the side.

            Whilst at dinner we discovered that one of the couples present had actually signed their legally binding Singaporean marriage certificate during the afternoon. So whilst they had two other full weddings planned in their hometowns for the following year, this was actually their wedding day. It was a bizarre but fun discovery, and obviously called for a couple of extra toasts to be made throughout the evening, but otherwise it was just a totally normal dinner with relative strangers, as was expected.

            The evening ended fairly early and with general good behaviour in place, not least because I had to be up at the crack of dawn for yet another golf lesson (the final one!).

            The following morning I arrived at the driving range slightly worried by the massive grey clouds that were covering the skies, but impressed with the beautiful rainbow that seemed to touch the ground just in front of me!

Within about 15 minutes the skies opened and the rain that thundered down was like nothing I’ve ever seen before (made all the more impressive as I was three stories up and the rain was blowing in the open sides of the structure).

            The rain started, and it didn’t stop. It rained so much that even though I was mostly undercover, I ended the session soaked to the skin from the driving direction of the rain, the leaking roof and the soggy floor.

            As the class eventually drew to an end I stuck around for longer than normal, working through an extra 100 balls and hoping the rain would ease up. When it didn’t I spent ten minutes trying to get a taxi back. When that failed too, I put up my (leaking) umbrella and walked ten minutes to the MRT station. From the soggy warm outside, to the freezing cold air conditioned train, I then shivered all the way home, through three train swaps and a full hour-long journey.

            I arrived at our local MRT station feeling utterly miserable, looking like a drowned rat and starving hungry (it was definitely lunchtime). In an attempt to restore the joy to my Sunday, I trudged through driving rain to pick up bagels and bacon from ColdStorage, and then to Starbucks to pick up lazy-girl coffees, before going back to the flat to don pyjamas and cook bacon for brunch, having been welcome back by Nick doing laundry and tidying up – what a good boy!

            Having then dragged myself through the shower and into proper clothes, the final stop on our weekend was a giant roast dinner at Harriet and Jamie’s house on the East Coast.

            The taxi ride through the sludgy grey didn’t do much to comfort me, as by this point all I wanted was to curl up on the sofa, watching the gross weather from the warmth of the flat and never venturing out into the rain again.

Still, once the other eight people arrived, the red wine was poured and it was announced that there would be happy crumble and custard to follow a lunch of roast beef (complete with Yorkshire puddings), things started to look a whole lot more manageable! After eating an awful lot of food, and having made a couple of new friends, we were home by 7pm and there was still plenty of sofa time to be done.

 

Card from mummy

Less than two weeks until I go back home to see how much (or not) the Shire has changed in my absence. With the arrival of a card from Mamu, let the countdown begin!

 

Another food plan failure

Since moving to Singapore, I’ve been searching blogs and review sites to try and find fun new places to eat, drink and mooch around, with varying degrees of success.

            In London I was generally pretty good at scouting out fun new places to go, but maybe because over here is either ridiculously expensive, or ridiculously low-key Asian, or perhaps because Nick has been here for years and so has already tried out most of the low hanging fruit, but for whatever reason, whenever I try and find some where new and fun to try out, I fail. And this weekend was no exception.

            Having had a coffee meeting in a little shop just down the road from where I work during the week, and having eyed up some good looking French toast, scrambled eggs and sandwiches, I was sure that this was going to be a great weekend brunch spot, so it was duly added to the list.

            Purely by chance, the location of the café, whilst hidden from view of the road, was directly opposite a small gallery where we planned to take a picture of Nicks to get reframed, so when we rolled out of bed on Saturday morning we made a little plan to drop off the picture before scoffing some breakfast and heading back to the flat.

            In essence, it was a good plan. The coffee at the café was amazing, there was some great music playing and the ambience was brilliant too. Even when the food arrived we did pretty well – I had gone for scrambled eggs on toast with bacon and avocado, whilst egg-phobic Nick had opted for a hot chorizo sandwich.

            If he hadn’t found boiled eggs smuggled in the second small slice, it would have been my first restaurant / café success story. As it was, the sandwich was rejected and abandoned and I was left to work my way through a plate of eggs whilst Nick comforted himself with the dreads of his flat white.         Another attempt, another failure. I think I’m just about done with picking places to eat now. Well, it was fun while it lasted.