La Braceria Pizza & Grill

An Italian co-worker of mine told me that this place (70 Greenleaf Road, 6465-5918) is the best Italian restaurant in Singapore. After having tried it tonight, I can see why. The antipasto got us started with a good variety of tasty prosciutto, cheese (two types, mind you), and grilled marinated veggies.

For my main course, I opted for the osso buco (seeing as I have now become a bit of a bone marrow convert). The taste of the bone marrow got a bit covered up by the red sauce and the strong cheese flavor in the underlying risotto at first (normally they use saffron but they ran out tonight). However, I still got to fully exploit the marrow's taste by scooping it out onto a couple pieces of bread (and this was much easier to scoop out than Soup Tulang as these were big thick bones cut just right). Nice. The meat of course was very tender and surprisingly easy to eat, and the semifreddo dessert was an straightforwardly light. I admittedly have no real basis for comparison on those last two dishes, seeing that this was the first time I'd had them, but I did enjoy them both on their own.

Still, not everything completely struck home with me tonight. The ravioli had a fish-based stuffing, which was unique, but perhaps much stronger in taste than I would have liked. The flambeed lava cake was actually bittersweet rather than the rich taste I was hoping for (as in Morton's), and the food took a while to come out (although the service was very friendly).

I want to come back though. The thin pizzas that they pulled out of the oven looked spectacular (and you could hear the crusts crunch as they sliced them...mmm). Interestingly, this place is situated in Ban Guan Park across from Cantina, which admittedly I've lost a bit of interest in lately. Maybe we'll be coming here instead from now on, although this place is a bit classier (and expensive) such that we can't just stumble in in a T-shirt and shorts.