Pontini

C says:

When KH told us that we were meeting up for dinner at Pontini at Grand Copthorne for his birthday, we assumed that we’d just order a la carte in the restaurant. When we got there, we realised he’d booked a private room, and arranged a feast for us. Check out the menu:


First up was the lobster salad, which was perfectly deshelled – the tail and head were just for decoration. It was served on a bed of rocket and sliced beans, and though I expected the rocket to somewhat overpower the lobster, surprisingly it didn’t.


The porcini mushroom soup was a huge concentration of flavours into a tiny little teacup. Simple and a little predictable, but very flavourful nonetheless. Next up was the cannelloni-like pasta tubes filled and topped with a duck and mushroom ragout. This was actually one of my favourite dishes of the night – the pasta seemed a bit thick, but turns out it needed to be more substantial in order to withstand the strong flavour of the ragout.


By then, fullness was starting to creep up on us. The next course was the sea bream, which came in a rather huge portion given that it was still considered a pre-main course. This was pretty good – quite light and delicate, but man, it filled us up. Didn’t help that between this course and the main course proper, KH was insane enough to order a few pizzas for us to share, cos he wanted us to try them. Out of the vegetable, seafood and meat pizzas, no surprises that we preferred the meat one.


A and I both felt like beef, so we both ordered the tenderloin, instead of sharing one beef and one duck confit. The beef was very good, if a tad predictable, and I couldn’t help half wishing I’d ordered the duck instead, because there were some oohs and aahs coming from the people who’d ordered the duck.


By then you can imagine we were about to explode, and before dessert we even had a slice of cake! A had the tiramisu and I had the milk chocolate parfait, which was almost like chocolate mousse. Not bad, but I actually preferred the Le Royale birthday cake.

This looks like a pretty fancy place, so not somewhere that we’ll go without an occasion. It’s more Italian fine dining than Italian home cooking, like Valentino and Pasta Brava, which is more our thing.

A says:

Very good on all courses except the dessert. My favourite course of course was the lychee sorbet. Although in all honesty, we have to try the regular ala carte before I can make a proper recommendation.

Pontini
2nd floor, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel
392 Havelock Road
Tel: 6233-1133
Lunch: 12 pm – 2.30 pm
Dinner: 6.30 pm – 10.30 pm