Restaurant with affordable wine - Wine & Chef revisited

We were at Wine & Chef when it first opened two years ago and were impressed by the quality of food and its selection of low cost wines. We remember it as a restaurant with affordable wine. Its recent one-day 50% discount off food promotion made us return to this restaurant at Keong Saik Road once again.

Restaurant with affordable wine - Wine & Chef

The restaurant looked roughly the same as it was at our last visit. There are many things we like about Wine & Chef, but the decor is not one of them. The dark narrow dining area felt gloomy. The front part is probably the best part of the restaurant. The 50% food discount with any bottle of wine ordered was available only on the public holiday on 5 June 2019.

The Wine

The cosy wine cellar lies at the front of the Wine & Chef restaurant. It is well stocked with Italian wines. Many of them are lesser known labels in the sub-$100 range, but some famous Italian wines are available for those with deeper pockets. I think most of us will be more interested in the former category when looking for dinner at a restaurant with affordable wines.

Diners can make their selection from the wine list or in the cellar. I personally prefer to see the actual bottles. We ended up with a bottle of red wine 2016 Taliano Michele A Bon Rendre Barbera d’Alba ($65). It was an easy going red wine that went well with the food that day. It is was a bit tannic at opening but becoming less so soon after. Here is picture of a page from the wine list.

2016 Taliano Michele A Bon Rendre Barbera d’Alba.

The Food

In addition to being a restaurant with affordable wine, Wine & Chef has an interesting selection of food as well. Western dishes as well as a few Singapore local favourites (such as Hokkien mee which we tried at our last visit) can be found in the menu. Here are pictures of a few pages of the menu.

We started with a Chicken Little ($10, prices indicated here are before the discount) – deep fried chicken wings with shrimp paste. A mild version of har cheong kai. This is the kind of food that goes so well with many types of drinks.

The Asian herbs duck leg confit ($24) was the best dish of the day. The meat was soft and separated from the bone easily. The flavour of duck was just right, robust but not too gamey. It was also presented very beautifully. The perfect dish to go with the red wine.

Beef cheek pasta ($29) was not bad. But our expectations were high after the duck confit. Instead the pasta dish was very ordinary – simple pasta with bits of beef on top. Nothing more, nothing less.