BTO: Soulful satisfaction from southern pasta recipes

Business Times - 16 Mar 2009

ITALIAN RESTAURANTS
Soulful satisfaction from southern pasta recipes

NEW RESTAURANT

Saraceno Ristorante
83 Duxton Road
Tel: 6438-9638

ONE of the premier French restaurants in town used to be L'Aigle d'Or at Berjaya Duxton Hotel but since it closed about five, six years ago, most foodies have scratched the hotel off their map of places to dine in Singapore.

 

It could well be time to check it out again, now that new Italian restaurant Saraceno opened its doors about a month ago.

 

What piqued our interest is that the menu offers a selection which is not commonly found in Italian restaurants here. The restaurant is opened by German national Shafiq Espen, who used to run Sarracino, an Italian cafe, at Ocean Building in Raffles Place for three years.

 

Mr Espen decided to take his eatery up a notch when Sarracino had to be closed because of Ocean Building's redevelopment. Together with his long-time London-based partner, he opened Saraceno instead.

 

'We were very popular with the office crowd there, but since we had to move out, we decided to upgrade our business into a full-fledged restaurant instead,' he explains, adding that his London partner - an Italian from Napoli - runs three Italian restaurants in the UK and comes over every few months to train the chefs here.

 

So what's on the menu? There is the quintessential melon wrapped in parma ham and beef carpaccio, but there's also grilled smoked mozzarella cheese with eggplant which was a yummy warm cheese 'roll' wrapped in smoky eggplant.

 

That was part of the antipasto Napoletano ($19.80, good for two persons), although you could also order a plateful of it for $14.80. Other starters in the sampler included beef carpaccio and parma ham for the cold cuts, as well as an aromatic raw tuna marinated with herbs.

 

The pasta dishes are mainly Southern Italian pasta recipes, so think full-on flavour. The linguine gamberoni (prawns, mussels, clams) came soaked in an olive-oil based tomato sauce, spiked with chilli, but though it was yummy, the seafood itself was a major let-down, being the frozen-and-thawed type devoid of natural, juicy sweetness.

 

The linguine can be found on the restaurant's set lunch menu, by the way, which is priced at $28.80 for a starter, a main course, sweet of the day and tea/coffee.

 

But what we did thoroughly enjoy was the paccheri alla Amatriciana ($19.80) as you don't usually find large tubular pastas in menus here. The pasta was smothered in a hearty sauce of smoked bacon, tomato, onions and parmesan. Not knowing if we'd like the paccheri pasta, we had at first asked to change it to something familiar like linguini but the chef advised us to stick with the original recipe because the flatter, thicker pasta would be able to absorb the sauce better. He was right, and the smoked bacon fragrance was also prominent while the parmesan tempered the rich tomato sauce.

 

Our pan-fried fillet of Chilean seabass was done nicely as well, with a sea-salty crust and not-overly-cooked meat, placed atop a light ragout of mussels, clams, prawns and cherry tomatoes ($32.80).

 

You'd want to save space for dessert at Saraceno, as the selection is quite unique. The pineapple ravioli ($9.80) featured an ultra-thin slice of fresh pineapple wrapped around lemon sorbet for a light, refreshing bite, after a heavy dinner especially. The Torta di Male was baked apple in filo pastry, deliciously caramelised apples on top of buttery, flaky pastry ($9.80).

 

On the whole, we found the fare there to be soulfully satisfactory, in a decent restaurant setting that still feels like it's basking in the former L'Aigle d'Or's glory.

 

Rating: 6.5/10
By Cheah Ui-Hoon