Il Lido, Sentosa Golf Club

We'd heard about this place for ages now (27 Bukit Manis Road, 6866-1977) and finally made our way down here tonight to check it out. I normally don't like chichi places like this, on the basis that more attention is usually paid towards appearances than the taste of the food itself. So I wasn't quite sure what to expect here, seeing that this place was also known for having a great seaside view too. Would the food stand up?

The good news is that it did. They ran a special Christmas variation of their classic set tonight, and I generally liked all five courses, including the refreshingly light consomme, the heavily saffron-flavored lobster pasta, and the tender truffle-topped turkey. The goose liver starter was rich, and the chocolate souffle pancake sealed the deal. Even the basket of thin crispy bread chips struck home for me, seeing how I don't like bread but love butter.

Were there things to pick on? Sure. I wasn't a huge fan of the nuts and honey used in the goose liver starter, but that's just a personal preference since I'm not big on sweets (at the end of the day, I still respected the effort to try to create a dish of so many varying textures and flavors at the same time). The seaside view was marred by the ugly sight of anchored container ships, but once it got dark, the lights from those very same ships ironically created an attractively dotted horizon (the hacker inside me also got a bit excited at seeing the meticulously maintained green tee boxes and fairway). And these guys pulled a Senso by automatically opening new bottles of water for you without asking, thus hiking your bill. I suppose that we could have stopped them by simply saying "no" though (well, the set meal price was under S$100, or US$60, which was lower than I would have expected for a classy place like this, especially for a set that included truffles).

My stomach finds more pleasure from much cheaper things (like the other day's sandwich), but regardless, this successfully gets filed under my list of bourgeois places that fortunately remembered to make sure that the food tastes good too.