Sky-high Aussie fare at Kaarla

NEW RESTAURANT

Kaarla Restaurant & Bar #51-02 CapitaSpring 88 Market Street Singapore 048948 Tel: 8518-3763 Open for lunch and dinner Mon-Fri: 12pm to 2.30pm; 6pm to 12am. Dinner only on Sat. Closed on Sun.

IF we were lunch, we might be highly resentful of dinner. That’s when all the best dishes come out to prance and preen, leaving their grunt colleagues to work the unglamorous set-lunch shift. Forget fancy plates, think no-brainer (cheap and easy to do) 2 to 3 course sets, feeding an undemanding clientele just biding their time till sundown, when the serious eating begins.

It beats us why restaurants don’t treat lunch with the same reverence as dinner. It’s not like our appetite has a watch. Yet they’re so stingy with their menus, it’s as if there’s hell to pay if they wake up their a la carte dishes before tea time. 

Kaarla is just one of many that take this route, nonetheless doing a roaring lunch business on a pared-down version of its temptingly varied dinner menu – which is off-limits to us.

That said, it is the closest we’ve seen to a power lunch spot in a long time. Dressed in steel and grey, armed with a CBD skyscraper view and filled with denizens of the financial district, there’s a brisk, business-like air to it that head chef JP Fiechtner tries to temper with his brand of Australian fare.

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What helps soften the edges is the greenery – lots of it, especially from the thriving, massive vegetable garden growing just outside the restaurant. It’s certainly worth a wander, because there are serious greens sprouting there beyond the mint, basil and rosemary that qualify as an urban farm in some other places. Apparently, a good mix of the greens makes it into the “closed loop salad” which, of course, will not be tossed before 6 pm.

Instead, we are offered a limited line up from which to assemble a 2-course (S$52) or 3-course (S$67) meal – which isn’t bad at first sight, but you know they know that the options are pretty lame since the more interesting options come with pretty hefty supplements. 

If you’re desperate for variety, there’s a small list of snacks.  You can just about cobble together an almost dinner-like meal, albeit at a price.

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The Australian touches are also refreshing, with the chef’s use of bush ingredients with exotic names you can bandy about even if they don’t make a big difference on the palate. Raw Australian “market” oysters (S$8 each from the snack menu) are dressed in fig leaf and oyster plant vinegar; they taste like mignonette without the shallots, but with a fruity hint. We’re more concerned about the pricey oysters – half of which are fresh, and the other half, tired from harvesting oyster leaves from the garden.

Ignore the free flaky, dry cruffin – yesterday’s croissant “bread” and shell out the S$8 for the yeast-free Damper. It’s round, flat and soft, smeared with an agreeable macadamia spread and strips of tart, dried quandong plum as a substitute for sun-dried tomato.

Your conscience may guide you to the vegetarian options on the set lunch menu, but your palate won’t be happy about it. We fall for the description of tigernut tart with Comte cheese custard, smoked tomatoes and strawberries, but end up hacking at a thick, grainy cracker crust which competes with the pale custard for lack of flavour. The tomatoes and strawberries don’t want to break rank, so they’re bland too.

But we’re perfectly pleased with bouncy, pure white pellets of chopped octopus, tossed in olive oil and piled on top of braised leeks and water chestnut-like boab, topped with what looks like capers but are actually muntries – sweet native berries. But this pleasure – one of the few dinner items making a cameo – comes at a S$20 top-up.

Again, any good veggie intentions come to naught when trying to chew our way through roasted cauliflower paired with an otherwise refreshing, creamy-sweet yoghurt sauce. Someone likely skipped the boiling process and chucked whole florets straight into the barbecue where they get a good char over their hard-as-raw stalks.

We already figure you get what you pay for, so we part with an extra S$30 for marron pasta, and it’s an expensive win. Tender, eggy, flat pasta noodles are bathed in a simple sauce coloured with the rich orangey coral of half a lobster, so fresh we feel guilty at cutting short its swim just moments ago. The flesh is plump and eases out of its shell in a whole piece, but the claw itself requires some battering, if you’re so inclined.

We won’t top up for dessert, so we settle for an acceptable coco-lichi sorbet made with coconut milk and lychees – refreshing with meringue wafers, aloe vera and pear. Skip the chocolate-apple financier, where dark chocolate mousse clashes with hard, musty cracker crust.

Lunch isn’t quite the best platform to see how far Fiechtner – whose boundary-pushing cooking has seen varied success in his previous Singapore stints – has come. But come sunset, he might be worth a further look.

Rating: 6.5