Tasting the flavours of Asia at the National Gallery Singapore
Back in 1988, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London embarked on an ad campaign in which it described itself as “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”. How museum catering has moved on! No longer content with mere cafés, the world’s great public collections are increasingly opening restaurants worthy of - and at times indeed actually bearing - Michelin stars. Witness Rijks at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; Nerua at the Guggenheim, Bilbao; and L’Imbuto at the Lucca Center of Contemporary Art in Tuscany. In New York, The Modern at the Museum of Modern Art has two stars, as has Odette at the National Gallery Singapore.
Home to a collection of 8,600 works of Southeast Asian art, and probably the most important such holding in the world, the National Gallery Singapore opened in November 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary of the nation’s independence. It occupies two immense national landmarks: the former Supreme Court and City Hall. It is full of revelations and well worth at least half a day.
Indeed Singapore deserves to be much better known as a cultural destination. Among its attractions, I found the National Museum, which imaginatively traces the history of the island, and the Asian Civilisations Museum (home among other treasures of the recovered cargo of a Tang-dynasty shipwreck, bound from China to Persia and what is now Iraq sometime in the ninth century AD) especially fascinating. And I’d recommend Peranakan Museum and the Indian Heritage Centre too.
But when it comes to art, the National Gallery is in a class of its own, full of revelations from colonial-era miniatures and ethnographic drawings to contemporary installations by way of paintings – academic and modern – in lacquer, oils and watercolours.
Given its scale, you will probably need sustenance at some point, hence the eight cafes, restaurants and bars it incorporates. The apotheosis of these, Odette, is a formal, French, minimum four-course set-menu affair. Its supremely elegant dining room is set in what was the registration room of the former court, and incorporates an installation by the Singaporean artist Dawn Ng.
But such a time commitment isn't always possible or desirable when exploring a city in haste, and in any case during my own visit I was in the mood for something more local. Under such circumstances, National Kitchen by Violet Oon, on the first floor of the City Hall wing, is the place to head.
Described by the New York Times as “the Julia Child of Singapore”, Oon has had an extraordinary career: as an opera singer, food critic, TV host and purveyor of cookies and branded spices. In 2012, her children persuaded her to open a restaurant – she now has three – serving food cooked to traditional recipes that draw on Singapore’s diverse culinary heritage.
Its menu therefore features an eclectic range of dishes from Indonesian gado gado (tofu, eggs and vegetables in a peanut sauce) and satay; South Indian idly (delicious little pocket-like pancakes made of fermented rice-flour batter, served with fresh coconut and tomato chutney); Malaysian rendang (tender strips of beef shin braised in a spiced coconut sauce, and another revelation); Hainanese chicken rice from China; Peranakan (Straits Chinese) classics like fish-head curry and laksa. There are even old colonial-era English dishes such as coronation chicken and pineapple upsidedown cake; and of course quintessentially Singaporean ones, like chilli crab, which is to all intents the national dish.
It serves almost continuously from noon until last orders at 9.30pm. (Between the lunch and evening services, there’s a tempting Singaporean high tea.) And with its black-lacquer walls, glittering chandeliers, encaustic floor, and buttoned-leather banquettes, the dining room is pleasingly theatrical and romantically retro.
The only thing I didn’t like was its Singapore Sling, sent over unexpectedly by the patronne - the unctuous, pink mixture of gin, Cointreau, Dom Benedictine, cherry brandy and fruit juices remains inexplicably popular here. Better, if you fancy a cocktail, to head up to the gallery’s rooftop bar Smoke & Mirrors Admittedly a Sling is on offer here too (supposedly reinvented, it features rye whiskey, cassis, bitters, and “pineapple bubbles”; I still wasn’t tempted), but the bar also offers an immense library of spirits, including 26 sorts of gin, mostly British, some American and local, and others from Japan, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
The bar’s chief appeal, though, is the sweeping view from its terrace, which takes in almost every major landmark, old and new: the twin durian-like performing-arts venues that constitute the Esplanade; the Singapore Flyer big wheel; the entirely improbable structure that is Marina Bay Sands; Victoria Concert Hall, home of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra; the Cricket Club; and the cluster of towers that constitute the roaring Central Business District. It was a panorama quite as arresting and memorable as the fantastical, immersive digital moving-image installations by the contemporary Japanese collective teamLab that I’d immersed myself in earlier.
Re(Collect): The Making of Our Art Collection, an exhibition that traces the creation of the national collection opens on May 11 and runs until August 19, nationalgallery.sg
