The Plastics

Chatterbox
5/F Mandarin Orchard
333 Orchard Road
Tel: +65 6831 6288

In my previous job in the States I had to be on the road quite a bit, and probably stayed at one too many Courtyard Marriotts for this lifetime. To explain – Courtyard by Marriott is a brand of hotels in the Marriott Group, with locations across the United States, which is designed for business travelers. By that I mean that it is purely functional, with little to no frills. The rooms are blockish, staid affairs that look as if they were furnished in the 70s, and you’d be lucky to get a pool in the hotel, much less other standard hotel amenities. They are popular with business travelers because they have a wide coverage across the country, and because they get the two most important things to the business traveler right: free high-speed Internet, and a hard but surprisingly comfortable bed.

Anyway, since they are no-frills, and also because some Courtyard locations are in the middle of nowhere – not all Courtyards have in-house restaurants. (Some just have a vending machine or two stocked with pretzels and candy.) The ones that do, often have sad excuses for a full-service restaurant, offering little more beyond a breakfast buffet and a limited, unchanging menu of simple dishes for the rest of the day. The food screams bulk, low-cost, pre-frozen, insta-mix – most of it tastes terrible and is probably worse for your health. (The saddest part is trying to improve the flavour of these terrible meals with the little pre-packaged salt and pepper packets that they provide, which themselves do not have much flavour.)

I mention the Courtyard not because I want to review their food, but because I want to give you an impression of the feeling you get while eating at one of these places – which is standard for breakfast and unfortunately unavoidable for some other meals. The furniture quite often belongs in that pre-fabricated, plastic IKEA category – sturdy, easy to clean, modular and stackable to reduce storage space needed. The crockery and cutlery are the kind that you would get in college cafeterias, and you’d be lucky to get nondescript elevator music piped through at one of these places. In short, the entire dining experience is one that is somewhat like the approach to providing accommodation to these business travelers – purely functional. It creates an impersonal, “plastic” feel, ensuring as unmemorable a dining experience as you are likely to have.

(I want to temper my indictment of Courtyards by acknowledging that sometimes to even have that option is a blessing. If you’ve just arrived at your hotel after a long, harrowing day of work and travel, to be able to have some hot food – regardless of its quality or the setting in which you eat it – is something all travelers are grateful for.)

The in-house dining at hotels in Singapore is vastly different. First, since Singapore is so small and built-up, and because of the abundance of five-star and boutique hotels, there is no market for the business traveler type of mid-range hotels. Second, I think it is a point of cultural pride for hotels to have stellar in-house dining options (this is why most top-end Chinese restaurants are in hotels). So needless to say, the unique Courtyard experience – if I could call it that – is almost non-existent in Singapore.

But that “plastic” feel does exist. Eugene was hosting an overseas guest in Singapore, and wanted to showcase local foods to her, in the comfort of an upscale setting. He chose Chatterbox at the Mandarin Orchard, and invited me along. Now, I suspect that a large majority of people in Singapore have heard of Chatterbox, but the percentage that have actually eaten there is, in reality, very small. Chatterbox is famous (or infamous) for one thing – their chicken rice, which is in turn famous (or infamous) not for its quality, but that it costs upwards of $20. (You can get the same dish in hawker centres anywhere from $2 to $4.) When Eugene invited me along, I was disinclined to go, but in the end curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

The Mandarin Orchard recently underwent a name change (from being the Meritus Mandarin) and significant facelift, but in reality has been around in various guises for a really long time. Chatterbox, too, has similarly been around for a really long time – it used to be on the top floor of the hotel but is now on the fifth. Now if there is one thing I respect restaurants for, it is longevity. Whether you like the place or not, for Chatterbox to weather – just in the last decade or so – the Asian financial crisis, the SARS epidemic and the global financial meltdown (and to come out of it STILL able to charge $20+ for their chicken rice) deserves some praise.

Chatterbox serves a variety of local favourites, at wildly inflated prices. We tried several of them – obviously the chicken rice, but also an upscale laksa (with lobster and large prawns), as well as the nasi lemak. All of those dishes cost more than $20. Now I know to an objective observer, that doesn’t sound like a big deal at all. There are places in Singapore where $20 will only get you your pre-dinner drink, especially the higher-end French places. But the audacity of Chatterbox’s business model is that they are effectively selling what you can get in hawker centres - for almost ten times the prices. I suppose that other hotel restaurants operate at this price point too. But the others take the effort to dress up their offerings, either by adding Continental elements and calling it fusion food, or by calling it a different name to “brand” it differently (eg. charcoal-grilled chicken skewers instead of satay – if you call it the former, you can sell it for $2 a stick; if you call it the latter, the going rate at hawker centres is 30c or 40c a stick.)

In their defence – the portions are huge, and can easily feed two. But huge portions alone do not justify such a price tag. I was hoping for some unique selling point, however inconsequential, to shed some light on why Chatterbox is able to charge such a premium. I found none, and instead came away with active disappointment at their food. The chicken rice is dry and bland. While the ingredients do seem fresh, the laksa is a little salty. The nasi lemak is a major disappointment – the rice is not “lemak” enough, the sambal uninspiring, the chicken rendang sorely lacking in spice.

But what disappointed me the most about the place was the shades of that Courtyard “plastic” feeling that I got from sitting at Chatterbox for close to an hour. I didn’t feel any emotional engagement at all: not from the food, not from the setting, and not from the service – which I have to say was efficient if a little impersonal. Now I hesitate to lump Chatterbox together with the various nameless Courtyard in-house restaurants, for that would be drawing the argument to a seemingly plausible but ultimately false extreme, a leap of logic. Yet sitting in the Chatterbox brought back memories of the Courtyard and my travelling days, eating cookie-cutter meals in cookie-cutter spaces, eating to live instead of living to eat – and I couldn’t help but wonder why.

What gives a restaurant that ability to engage its patrons emotionally? What makes it more than the sum of its parts, gives it personality and character, makes it an institution? I tried to think back to the places I had been to that were great at this – Bayona in New Orleans, CAV in Providence, Coppi’s Organic in DC. You don’t have to have exquisite food to create a great dining experience; apart from the pizzas I thought the rest of the food at Coppi’s was never very good. Yet I still went back there time and time again. Coppi’s had character, and it stemmed from a few things – the racing memorabilia on the walls, the quirky, attractive hipster-lite waitstaff they always seemed to hire, the purity and solidity of their food concept (Ligurian cuisine made with organic produce).

By the end of my meal at Chatterbox I had come to terms with the disappointment of mediocre food. You can’t have truly transcendent meals every day of the week, every week of the month; and part of the bargain in being adventurous and trying out new (or in this case old) places is that some will invariably be disappointing. But what rankled me long after we had left the place was how utterly devoid of personality it had been. I struggled to remember a concept, a unifying theme – something, anything – that typified the place. Sadly, I could not come up with anything.