Origin Grill & Bar @ Shangri La Hotel Singapore - $34++ 3 course set lunch

Origin Grill & Bar Shangri-La Hotel Singapore was the place we picked to meet up for lunch recently. It is located at the ground level, deep inside the magnificent lobby of the hotel on Orange Grove Road. I think the Shang lobby is probably the most impressive hotel lobby in Singapore. According to the restaurant website, “Origin Grill is inspired by the origin of flavours, travel adventures and Singapore’s illustrious history of bountiful trade, colonial charm and tropical splendour”. We are not sure what that means, but we were attracted to Origin by the nice pictures of the place as well as the weekday executive set lunch priced at a reasonable $34++ per person.

The Origin Grill at Shangri-La is certainly an attractive place, but it did not look as “wow” as it did in the pictures that we had seen. It is fashionable these days to embrace the concept of garden to table. A small collection of fresh plants was present at the restaurant, to be harvested and used in their dishes.

Origin Grill & Bar Menu

Here are pictures of the Origin Grill Set Lunch Menu as well as a page from the wine list and a few sample pages from the a la carte menu. The specialty of Origin Grill seems to be steak dishes. They certainly have a wide selection of meat dishes, many of them very expensive. The $208 Origin Beef Tasting Platter certainly looks interesting. We focused our attention on the $34 set lunch. Even then there were some steak options that required a topping up of $68 each, way out of budget for ordinary patrons. And so we confined ourselves strictly to the non-beef items on the menu.

Appetizers

The appetizers that we tried were “Asian” tomato caprese, the soup of the day (cauliflower soup) and pork and turkey terrine. They were all not bad but not exceptional. The best among the lot was the Asian tomato caprese which had silken tofu substituting the usual soft cheese. It was a nice refreshing starter.

Main Courses

Our main courses were spaghetti cacio e pepe with prawns, char grilled daily fish and Brazilian feijaodo. The mains were generally better than the appetizers. The spaghetti was quite predictable. The other two were better and we would be happy to order them again. The grilled fish was accompanied by some crunchy zucchini noodles. Together with white wine sauce, it was a tasty package.

The feijaodo was a new dish for me. According to Wikipedia, it is a stew of beans with beef and pork. It is commonly prepared in some countries including Portugal and Brazil. In this case it was prepared with what looks like pulled pork, black beans and jalepano. It had a familiar Asian taste – like braised pork with chilli.

Desserts

For desserts, there was a choice of cakes or the coconut tapioca pudding. The latter turned out to be very good. The cakes were good but not up the level we were expecting from a top notch hotel like the Shangri-La. There were several types of cake available. We selected an orange chiffon cake and the red velvet.

Coffee was included as part of the Origin Grill Set Lunch menu. They also provided free parking passes. Which made it a good value lunch at a nice location like the Shangri La Singapore.