Asuka N.
Yelp
We came to Corner House for dinner on our second night in town. The restaurant itself is within Singapore Botanical Gardens, but even though we came after the gardens had closed and the sun was setting, there are clear signs from the taxi dropoff to direct you to Corner House without much trouble. Once there, you are escorted up the stairs into the main dining area. There are different sections to it, given the older colonial nature of the building, but the finishes are modern and refined like much of the city-state itself. One of the standouts for sure, alongside the decor, is the general ambiance and the plateware in particular - it has the feeling of a high-end restaurant but comes off as more relaxing (thanks to the temperature here, no one shows up in the more formal dress I would expect to see at a European or American Michelin-starred restaurant), but the design and thoughtfulness of the food presentation is evident. Drinks are limited to an extensive selection of wines; I stuck with a glass of white and red for the meal itself, both of which were quite good. As for service, I found it a bit more attentive than Candlenut (from the previous night), but in a similar fashion, it was not overly personalized either.
In a similar vein, what was listed on our tasting menu was exactly what we got - no deviation or extra surprises along the way. While there are other menu options if you don't come over the weekend, you only have the option of the tasting menu otherwise (we were there Sunday). You get 9 courses, but two of those are the amuse bouche and the petit fours, so it is a bit more of a compressed tasting menu than I was expecting to have. That said, I felt that every dish was very strong as a result - it certainly seemed that the chef and their staff were able to focus on making each dish as good as possible. The amuse bouche to start off were mostly small bites and served in an interesting fashion - our fish skin chips with trout roe were served atop a bed of small pebble. My favorite of the amuse bouche round was the last dish presented, which was an excellent raw shrimp dish served with cucumbers and a lime-infused broth - simple and refreshing. We moved onto more seafood that was excellently prepared. The scallop dish was served cool and with dry ice, and combined with the yuzu, was fresh, and the geoduck clam that came next was served with a generous amount of sliced clam and pasta - making it a bit of an Italian-inspired dish that focused mainly on showcasing the seafood flavors instead of being doused with sauce. The white asparagus dish was a nice respite from the rest of the meal - the only vegetarian course outside of dessert - but a bit more restrained from a flavor perspective. The highlight was definitely the blue cod, which was served with the scales of the skin crisped, mixing the succulence of the fish fillet with the saltiness and crunchy texture of the skin...definitely one of the most beautiful-looking fish dishes I have eaten (and gorgeously presented to boot). The wagyu was presented on a mostly empty slate plate, but it was quite delicious (although it could have been cooked a tad more - the middle was too rare for my liking). We finished up the meal with a fantastic serving of French strawberries with sorbet as a palate cleanser / first dessert, followed by a chocolate mousse served with Earl Grey ice cream and shards of different chocolates - probably the heaviest dish of evening, but a nice way to end the meal sated.
Corner House is a more Western-oriented restaurant in the heart of so much delicious southeast Asian cuisine, but even if you have limited time here, it is worth the stop to enjoy a cosmopolitan setting within the wilderness and a delicious meal to boot. To me, it feels like an appropriate representation of what Singapore has become, and it's worth making the trek out from the city center (about a 15-20 minute drive) to dine here.
