Staying classy at the Conrad

Golden Peony
3/F Conrad Centennial
2 Temasek Boulevard
Tel: +65 64327482

It is coming to almost ten months since I moved back to Singapore, and by all accounts I have well and truly settled back in to the land of my birth. I have, I think, regained some measure of familiarity with the local dining scene – sussed out enough old favourites and sampled enough new ones. But the one thing I still cannot get enough of is fine Cantonese cuisine.

If it falls to me to suggest a place to eat, my initial thoughts are always of Cantonese restaurants, be they humble tze char outlets or high-end restaurants. Luckily, there is no shortage of these places in Singapore, and there are some very, very fine ones on the list. I recently had the chance to sample Golden Peony at the Conrad Hotel, and left very, very impressed.

More so than in the Western world, the best restaurants in Asia are often located in hotels. The thinking here is that for any hotel worth its salt, it is almost imperative, as a point of reputation – to have a stellar in-house restaurant. It helps to build the hotel’s brand, and has become a prerequisite for the top hotels, which often spare no expense in recruiting star chefs. For the top chefs, it is a win-win situation: they have the backing of a larger organisation to handle all the HR, procurement and other support functions – so they can concentrate on the cooking.

Given how I talked about setting in my previous post, the one thing I have always found regrettable is how cookie-cutter the approach to setting is at fine Cantonese restaurants. After a while they all begin to look alike: light, muted colours like cream and ivory, starched white tablecloths, stiff-backed chairs and cutlery laced with gold. There are a few places that have unique settings (Summer Pavilion springs to mind) but by and large you could be in any one of these fine restaurants and not know the difference. The central challenge for the designers of these places is to keep the space classy without creating a caricature.

But if you have grown up going to these types of restaurants, then you don’t really mind, and sometimes it even provides the comfort of familiarity. (This is quite evident when you travel abroad to non-Asian cities, where a large part of the draw of Chinese restaurants is the ubiquitous setting. Speaking as a former Chinese diaspora, I can attest to how these places always made me feel at home despite the inevitably disappointing food. It is like a Frenchman stuck in a random Chinese city and frequenting what passes for a bistro because of the lacquered wood bartop.)

So despite its less than remarkable interior, it is the food at Golden Peony that is the main draw. The pickled vegetables set out as an amuse-bouche were excellent and very addictive – just the right blend of spice and tang to open your palate. Regrettably, we did not have the time (nor was anyone comfortable enough with everyone else) to deliberate and order a la carte, so we went with one of the set menus.

One of the key reasons I love going to Cantonese restaurants is the soups. The Cantonese love their soups, and despite how easy it is to make soup, it is one of those things that you definitely get what you pay for. It may be psychological, but I feel that for soups, cost is definitely correlated with quality. The more expensive the restaurant, the better the soup. And I would gladly pay top dollar for an individual serving of double-boiled goodness. At Golden Peony we had the good fortune of trying their shark cartilage soup. This is one of those standard soups you find in most good Cantonese restaurants, and is deceptively difficult to do well. Shark meat has high concentrations of urea, which turns into ammonia after the shark has died. So you pay a premium for the speed at which shark cartilage has to be processed, and you pay top dollar for fresh shark cartilage. Otherwise this ammonia taste has to be treated some way or another, and many places try but fail at pulling it off. Golden Peony’s version was just milky enough, had a clean, clear taste and the right consistency: not too thin and not too starchy.

The other dishes passed in a blur – partly because we were having a serious conversation, partly because they were so good that I gulped down whatever they put in front of me in double-quick time. I am quite a quick eater, and even more so when the food is good – but when I looked around, everyone else was wolfing down their plates at the same speed as me. They must have really enjoyed it because their faces had that look of muted wonderment, as if they were on the verge of breaking out into wide smiles because they were surprised at how good the food was. Golden Peony is technically very impressive – flavours are refined to razor-sharpness, ensembles are carefully thought through. At the same time the heartiness of the dishes was not compromised, creating that rare class of food that both stimulates the palate and satisfies the stomach.

Right before the dessert course we were served a shotglass of kalamansi juice as a palate-cleanser. This was a nice touch, for you do not often see this in Chinese restaurants. Their thoughtfulness in no way prepared us for the dessert, which I thought was absolutely stellar – an aloe vera mint jelly that did everything you would expect of dessert. It satisfied your sweet tooth, cleansed and rounded off your taste-buds, and filled whatever space you still had in your stomach after the meal.

Let me just say, before you get any ideas, that you pay a pretty penny for the quality of Golden Peony. It may not be in the price point of Hai Tien Lo and My Humble House, but it is still expensive enough that it – for me, at least – falls exclusively within the realm of special occasions. There are other Cantonese stars of the Singaporean scene that you wouldn’t mind going to on any random Friday or Saturday night, as a little treat for the week’s labours: Wah Lok, Hua Ting to mention just a couple. This is not one of those places.

For a special occasion, though, this is quite a delightful place. The service is thoughtful and attentive. The food is exquisite. By all means, count me in just as long as somebody else is paying.