{"id":40787,"date":"2016-06-13T07:30:14","date_gmt":"2016-06-12T23:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rubbisheatrubbishgrow.com\/?p=40787"},"modified":"2016-06-21T17:47:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T09:47:13","slug":"mad-about-sucre-sg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rubbisheatrubbishgrow.com\/zh\/2016\/06\/13\/mad-about-sucre-sg\/","title":{"rendered":"Mad About Sucre, Outram: Moved to Tears by Stories and Michelin-Worthy Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we returned to Mad About Sucre at Teo Hong Road<\/b> recently, we didn’t intend to write another review<\/a>. There are reasons why we don’t write two reviews of the same place: we just want to enjoy the food on repeated visits, no photos, no memorizing the menu, no work; and two reviews of\u00a0the same place confuse Google, which will treat your website as spam. But after the meal, we were so moved we had to review it.<\/p>\n

We have visited Mad About Sucre several times. This in itself is a great testimony to the patisserie because there are so many new cafes and restaurants popping up.<\/p>\n

But this time, we tried the savory food menu<\/b>. At first, when we heard about the menu, we were deeply dubious.\u00a0The patisserie is opened by James, and siblings Lena and Eric Chan. As a French patisserie, it is fantastic, probably the best patisserie in Singapore<\/b>, because Lena has been trained by top sugar decorators of the world. But savory food? Does\u00a0the food justify\u00a0the steep price tag? How are the chefs\u00a0trained? What are the origins of the recipes? In short, we were Doubting Thomases.<\/p>\n

The savory food menu is designed by Eric with no formal culinary training. He eats all over the world and documents his meals in detail, filling up TWENTY ONE food journals. He cooks a lot at home and for 18 years, he learns from French and Italian grandmothers of his friends in Europe. Training from grandmothers is the best kind of training—you are\u00a0whacked on your knuckles with a rolling pin when you make a mistake—but we still doubted the menu.<\/p>\n

Cooking at home is different from serving food at restaurants. How would homely food translate to good restaurant food? You want the best for your family; you use the best ingredients and you take long hours to chop, peel, mince, pulverize, boil, simmer, bake, sear, fry. How would Eric as a home cook handle the restaurant?<\/p>\n

Answer: He does everything exactly the same at the restaurant as he would at home; this doesn’t make commercial sense at all because the effort is Sisyphean. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is punished by the gods. He has to roll a gargantuan boulder up a mountain. But when he achieves his task, he watches it tumble down and has to start over for eternity.<\/p>\n

When Eric told us his stories about how the food is cooked, I thought of\u00a0Sisyphus. (By the way, we mostly do anonymous reviews, but although this isn’t anonymous, we were not treated differently from other customers. Eric, James, and the staff explain the food to every customer, like how a fine-dining restaurant would do.)<\/p>\n

Back to Eric’s food stories. He flew all the way to Norway to discover\u00a0that the wild Norwegian salmon<\/strong> was too lean. Finding it unethical to buy them, he flew to Iceland to find other sources. He worked throughout the flight from Europe to Singapore to write the menu for the shop. He arrived in Singapore at midnight, and a few hours later, he started cooking. And he has to do this every 3 months when the menu changes with the season.<\/p>\n

\"mad-about-sucre-singapore-review\"The food, including sauces, is made from scratch and they are slow cooked. No preservatives, no artificial flavors. Take for instance the\u00a0smoked wild salmon salad<\/strong> ($33). The wild Norwegian salmon is smoked for 6 hours at 35 degrees—it tastes out of the world! Very clean, slightly sweet. My eyes popped wide-open like those Taiwanese variety shows; those celebrities are faking it, but my reaction was geninue.<\/p>\n

Lemon zest is pulverized to powder, which is dusted on huge prawns, beautifully grilled. All of which are tossed in homemade vinaigrette of summer lemon, calamansi, olive oil, and French organic honey. The sweet baked pita bread undercuts the richness of the vinaigrette. The most amazing thing of the salad: NO SALT. The salad depends wholly on the integrity of flavors.<\/p>\n

\"mad-about-sucre-outram-menu\"120g of French foie gras is in this linguine\u00a0aglio olio<\/strong> ($42), speckled with florets of broccoli. This Italian-meets-French dish is very\u00a0rich and delicious. There is some jus from the foie gras at the bottom—we drank it all.<\/p>\n

\"mad-about-sucre-teo-hong-road\"The\u00a0sashimi-grade wild Norwegian fresh salmon\u00a0<\/strong>($36) is slathered with Spanish garlic, and saffron hollandaise. They use baking techniques for the hollandaise, and they over-beat it to give it that impossibly creaminess. Saffron is directly imported from a 120 year-old Parisian shop, the only shop to sell this label of saffron.<\/p>\n

\"mad-about-sucre-sg\"<\/p>\n

\"mad-about-sucre-cafe\"Besides the Summer savory menu, we also tried the Summer cakes. The cakes are even better than the ones we had previously. Inspired by childhood memory of skipping stones on pond, Le Caillou<\/strong> ($12.80), meaning “pebble,” consists of dehydrated bbq blood orange, mandarin orange, pecan nut, Caribbean rum, on pecan-milk chocolate shortbread. It is a delicate\u00a0swirl of nuttiness and fruity fragrance on the tongue, with a sweet undertone of rum.<\/p>\n