Friday, August 20, 2010

Oso Ristorante

C says:

This is our first time back to Oso since they moved to their current swanky premises at Bukit Pasoh Road, from their original, slightly more humble beginnings on Tanjong Pagar Road. They are now located next to Absinthe, with the ground floor being a bar area and the dining area upstairs.

The UOB Chef’s Creation menu sounded pretty decent – chicken liver pate, mullet roe pasta, truffle risotto, meat or fish, and dessert. But because we had heard so much about the burrata there, we decided to forego the UOB menu and went for a la carte options instead.


We shared the burrata to start, as well as an item from the Summer Truffle promotional menu – scallops with shaved black truffle and white asparagus. The burrata was quite deconstructed – a large square platter with a whole burrata, with sliced tomatoes served separately, and the salt and pepper was also separate for you to sprinkle according to your preference. The burrata was good, but I found the one at Valentino’s to be much better. The one here was served a bit too cold, and wasn’t as creamy and oozy inside as Valentino’s. Also, the inside was almost cottage cheese-like in texture, and taste-wise it was like cream cheese. Maybe I’m just used to the one at Valentino’s as a benchmark.


The scallop dish looked very impressive, but seemed to lack any sort of distinct flavour. The black truffle didn’t really taste of anything at all, nor did the white asparagus, and the scallops were quite ordinary – the scallops at Ember are definitely better seared and more flavourful. In fact, that became somewhat of a theme throughout dinner – everything was ok, but we’ve had better versions of each dish elsewhere.


I ordered the roasted venison loin (after passing on the risotto on account of too much cream and carbs in the rest of our selections), which was tasty but slightly tough.


No thanks to Anthony Bourdain, who has waxed lyrical about the delicious simplicity of a simple aglio olio pasta with shaved bottarga (cured mullet roe), we decided to order the tagliolini with chilli, lemon and shaved bottarga here. Because of the combination of flavours, this tasted disconcertingly like a hae bee hiam pasta from Relish/Wild Rocket – good but certainly not what we had in mind when we ordered it.


We shared a panna cotta with black pepper caramel for dessert, and finally this was something that we were actually quite impressed with. The panna cotta was quite light, and though it sounded a bit strange, I really liked the black pepper caramel sauce.

Maybe it was what we ordered, but all in all, I think I was just slightly disappointed because I expected more.

A says:

Good food. Good service. And if you don’t order too many of the specials, it isn’t really astronomically priced.

I still wouldn’t say it’s my favourite though.

Oso Ristorante
46 Bukit Pasoh Road
Tel: 6327-8378
Lunch : 12pm - 2:30pm (Mon - Fri)
Dinner : 6:30pm - till (Mon - Sat)
http://www.oso.sg/

1 comment:

amiscell said...

Ther pasta with bottarga doesn't look anything like it's supposed to be, by the way :) Sorry you had a bad experience with your first attempt with this delicacy!