Champagne Brunch and High Tea

Singapore is known for being a place to visit if you are seriously into food and I've had the opportunity to sample a couple of local food luxuries recently.

Before I talk about those I must quickly mention the Lantern bar at the Fullerton Bay hotel, it's lovely and worth a visit.  It's another rooftop bar by the hotel pool and offers great views across Singapore.  I believe it is only open in the evening as the pool is for residents only during the day but in the evening it is worth a visit.  Going there was one of many moments when I've stepped back and had to pinch myself to remind me how lucky I am to be living here.

Anyway back to the food ..... firstly we took in a champagne brunch.  Champagne brunches are fairly common here, lots of the hotels offer them (everyone from Raffles hotel down) and it is usually as much as you can eat for a set price often with free flow champagne.  I've written about one we went to before at a restaurant called Mimolette which we had originally hoped to go to again but it is not currently offering brunches so this time we thought we'd try a hotel.

We went to the Mandarin Oriental hotel and to the restaurant Dolce Vita which offered an Italian themed brunch with yes, you've guessed it, free flow champagne!  Accompanying us on the brunch was another fellow Singaporean blogger and I'd recommend you take a look at his blog, http://singaporechap.blogspot.com/

The food was excellent and the brunch was very well managed in that you had the option of trying a taster of all the dishes for each course and then after that if you wanted to you could have more of anything that you really enjoyed.  This certainly stopped me overindulging on the starters so by the time the desserts came I couldn't eat any of them.  As you can probably imagine there were lots of hams, antipasto, pasta, meat and seafood dishes.  As those who follow this blog will know I'm not a massive seafood but I tried some new dishes again today, caviar, sea bass, barramundi and snapper.  All of which I have to say were really nice, I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing out but at the moment I'm still nervous of attempting a whole dish on my own - just in case!

I'm definitely a dessert fan and everything was beautifully presented as you can see from this picture, which being an Italian themed brunch included tiramisu. It was a lovely afternoon and I'd definitely happily go again or perhaps try a brunch at another hotel, for the purposes of comparison of course.

On the following Monday I went Christmas shopping on Orchard Road and in the afternoon went to high tea with some friends at the Shangri La hotel.  We assumed that high tea would consist of sandwiches, cakes and tea but it was much more of a feast than that!

High tea actually started with main courses which included cold meats, various Asian style dishes, rice, salads and even roast beef with mini vegetables.  There were also some sandwiches there too if none of that appealed to you.  You could have as much of this as you wanted but there was also a whole display dedicated to dessert so you need to make sure you leave room for that.  This included a chocolate fountain with strawberries and marshmallows for dipping, lots of cakes and pastries, cheesecake and fresh fruit amongst other things.  On my second dessert trip (yes I managed to squeeze more in) I'm absolutely certain there were desserts that weren't there the first time.  The picture above shows my first dessert selection.  All of this was washed down with your choice of tea.  The hotel had a vast selection and everyone got their own pot of whatever tea they selected.

Another thoroughly enjoyable afternoon, I think I could get use to this sort of lifestyle!