Venue by Sebastian, Shenton Way

The name of the restaurant refers to Sebastian Ng, former chef of the defunct Ember. Venue (#01-02 Tower 1 Downtown Gallery, tel : +65 69049688) is his current place - a venue (yeah) that's more casual and ambiently clinical. The menu has diversified/restructured compared to the more traditional setup at Ember and I suppose I could say that it's also more aligned to what people like from the perspective of portions.

That's the breaded lamb cutlet with romesco and some balsamic. I found the lamb flavours a little weak. I'm getting some of them from the fat and not so from the meat. Otherwise this would've been quite tasty. No excessive grease from the frying and no complicated flavours contending with one another.

The Jerusalem artichoke soup was good. Creamy and sweet. Also nicely paired with the crispy duck bits that also served as the salty counter to the sweetness of the soup. Good for returns.

We had these things called lamb riblets which are kinda like satay. Flavour is very Middle Eastern and the meat was very tender. As non-descriptive as it may be, I'm going to say that it's nice. 

Great angel hair pasta with shaven bottarga and mentaiko. Those eggs provide a salty/savoury/umami accent against the main flavour profile from the sorrel pesto. The noodles aren't green themselves but seem to be well coated in the pesto - which tastes quite like shiso. Tangy and refreshing. I'd eat this again.

For those of you who have been to Ember, might recall that they're pretty well known for their pan seared Chilean seabass with truffle yuzu butter sauce. The good news obviously at this point is they've brought that into the menu at Venue. The dish of firm and flaky seabass was as delicious as I remembered it.

The mushrooms with toast were supposed to come earlier. Due to an order misinterpretation, they came after the seabass which was incidentally a good thing since we now have bread to mop the yuzu butter sauce clean from the plate. These mushrooms were chopped up, doused with truffle oil. No idea what kind of mushrooms were used.

Here's grilled octopus on a bed of pureed bean and some burnt butter with capers. I'm running out of adjective so it's nice. The tentacles had a bit of bite which I thought was a good thing even though I too enjoy the very tender renditions.

Burnt cabbage with shaven Parmigiano Reggiano and chive oil. Our token greens/fibre for the meal.

And finally the dessert which is called apple "pie". It's more like caramelized apple in some crispy pastry. Filo maybe? With crumbles and an eggy tasting rum and raisin ice cream. The latter was quite good. Could definitely get that rum and alcohol flavour. As a whole, I liked this.