Lunch at Tablescape Restaurant, Grand Park City Hall Hotel

Tablescape Restaurant & Bar is a new “… contemporary, upscale restaurant and bar serving modern European classics complemented by a curated menu at the bar.” It is located on the third level of the Grand Park City Hall Hotel. This is the hotel that is next to Peninsular Plaza and Capitol Piazza. Currently the hotel is undergoing some major renovations. It is the boarded up building across the road from Excelsior Hotel.

Tablescape Restaurant and Bar Grand Park City Hall — Tablescape Restaurant and Bar

While serious construction work is being carried out at The Grand Park City Hall Hotel (to create a shopping mall on the lower levels – I think), they have cleverly boarded up the operational areas so that business can go on as usual. The foyer just outside the Tablescape Restaurant is now used as the hotel reception desk. My sensitive eyes reacted to some dust in the air. Other diners seem unperturbed. Apart from that, the restaurant is a tranquil place for lunch.

The decor of Tablescape is simple and elegant and matches the description of the restaurant on the website – contemporary and upscale.

Tablescape Restaurant and Bar Menu

Here are pictures of the Tablescape set lunch menu as well as a couple of sample pages from the a la carte menu and the bar menu. A $32 set lunch in such a nice place looks reasonable (assuming the food measures up of course). Not being keen on desserts but curious to see what they had to offer, we opted for a 2-course and one 3-course lunch respectively.

Tablescape Restaurant Menu — Tablescape Restaurant and Bar Menu

After we placed our orders, the food started arriving. A large bread trolley was wheeled over to our table. Four types of bread were available. The bread on the trolley were display items. The butter was the real thing but it was covered with a dome when not being served. We asked for one of each type of bread. The bread was warm and freshly baked. All was good but the two we liked the best were the onion bread and the flaxseed bread. I read somewhere that the quality of the bread is a good indication of what will follow. If the restaurant can put in the effort to make and serve good bread (usually considered a “freebie”), it is likely to set the tone for the rest of the meal. That theory was true on that day.

Starters

The amuse bouche was duck rillette in a beetroot basket. It was a small and pretty snack. The taste was quite good as well.

There being two of us, we tried both the starters on the Tablescape set lunch menu. A quick internet search was needed to find the meaning of “gravalax”. Wikipedia says that it ” is a Nordic dish consisting of raw salmon, cured in salt, sugar, and dill”. Our salmon gravlax was exactly that. The salmon had a clean fresh taste. The texture was firm and bouncy.

The other starter was pan-roasted foie gras on turnip with lotus root chips. I thought that the foie gras flavour was rather strong. My companion who is a fan of foie gras dishes liked it.

Main Courses

The smoked braised Black Angus short ribs was an easy to eat dish. The meat has been cooked till soft and the dark sauce was well made. The challenge was the stick of bone and what appears to be marrow within it. Not wanting to waste food, we extracted what we could out of the bone. It was a fatty issue with some light meaty taste. Not delicious but not bad either. I suppose our friend who likes to eat marrow out of lamb shanks (“tulang’ in Malay) would enjoy this more.

The Australian lamb rack Provencal was even better. The two pieces of lamb had meaty bits. There were certainly enough meat on these ribs. They were encrusted with herbs and one surface was roasted till crisp. A wonderful dish. In some restaurants we might have to pay $32 just for this.

Dessert

We were glad one of us decided to go for the third course. For the dessert we opted for the “selection from the trolley”. A dessert trolley was wheeled to us. It reminded us of our lunch at El Celler de Can Roca. This one was not as fanciful but it still made us happy to be able to pick sweet and beautiful things from the trolley. The kind lady let us have a pick of three.

We ended up with a chocolate mouse, lemon tart and a sponge cake that has an ornate cream trimming (which was the sole reason we selected it). The lemon tart was zesty and fresh. The chocolate mousse was the best and was the only one that we finished. The sponge cake was very average in taste but the most attractive looking.