Sabio Tapas Bar Duxton Hill

Spanish restaurants and tapas are getting increasingly popular in Singapore these days. One of the early movers in this direction was Sabio Tapas Bar at Duxton Hill which opened some years ago. According to their website, it is run by Déliciae Hospitality Management (DHM) whose portfolio also includes L’Entrecôte and &MADE Burger Bistro.

Sabio Tapas Bar on Duxton Hill is quite beautifully done up. With its vibrant colour scheme, patterned wall tiles and the life-sized matador poster, it is unmistakably Spanish. It looked authentic enough – we felt like we had stepped into a small restaurant in Spain. We especially liked the bench seats with small integrated individual table tops, like lecture theatre seats. Most of the seats are along the long bar. There are very few regular seating by a table. These should be booked in advance.

Sabio Tapas Bar Menu

Here are pictures of the Sabio Tapas Bar Set Lunch, the All You Can Eat Menu and some pages from the a la carte menu. The $39 all you can eat menu looked tempting. Thankfully we did not go for that as we are small eaters and (as we later discovered) some of the tapas can be quite heavy dishes.

The ham croquettes ($14) was a serving of five squashball-sized croquettes. This was a large serving of very dark potato balls. A heavy dish, especially when eaten with the mayonnaise dip (which we used very little of). They were quite plain but a welcome first dish as it satisfied our hunger pangs.

The Spanish omelette with chorizo ($13) looked beautiful with its golden brown colour. However we thought it was too well cooked. Instead of a light and moist texture it was hard, dry and crumbly. The taste was fine but the chorizo was barely detectable.

The scallops in sparkling white wine sauce ($18) was a tale of two cities. The sauce was superbly rich and flavourful. We were not too enamoured with the scallops themselves. Nothing particularly wrong but its texture was rubbery and it did not have its natural taste.

Our final dish was mixed grilled vegetables in extra virgin olive oil ($11). This was the simplest item that day but the one we enjoyed the most as we could taste the natural flavours of the ingredients. We had ordered four tapas, thinking that we would order a second round, but that turned out to be unnecessary. They were enough to fill us up.

For drinks we had some Hoegarden beer ($14 p/pint) and Spanish sherry ($12/glass) which seems to match the atmosphere of this Duxton Hill tapas Bar. Overall, we had mixed feelings about the food at Sabio Tapas Bar but the prices are reasonable and the atmosphere was casual and laid back. It is a good place to meet up for happy hour or just to have drinks and some food to go with them.