Le Habit

La Cui­sine is becom­ing a hard habit to break.

Not that it’s going to be any time soon that Naomi and I attempt to do that. It has become our refuge of sorts, and we rave about it to our friends, urg­ing them to give the lit­tle bistro a go.

(Two of them tried to give the bistro a go, in fact, and only man­aged to go as far as through the front door of that tiny lit­tle estab­lish­ment, to be turned away by the amaz­ingly French-like maitre d’, who told them that a reser­va­tion was nec­es­sary if one wanted to dine there, whether or not the place looked empty, as it always seems to be)

I am rav­ing about the place again because it really is the kind of place you’d want to go take refuge in after a hard week’s work. And though the food and ambi­ence is not fab­u­lously fancy — it is food that you’d enjoy a lot more if you ate it a lot slower, as I imag­ine the slow food con­vivium peo­ple would know and do.

Recently I’ve been mak­ing excuses and mak­ing up occa­sions to have a meal there — anniver­sary, birth­day, mon­thiver­sary, just­feel­likeitver­sary — mostly because even though it serves home-styled french cui­sine, it isn’t cheap.

But really, despite the price (about $150 for the two of us), you don’t really need an excuse to dine there. I mean, you don’t even have to dress up — I went in my t-shirt, jeans and slippers.

Naomi and I went there again last Fri­day, and we felt that the hith­erto surly and amaz­ingly French-like maitre d’ wasn’t as surly any­more, hav­ing seen us dine there three times pre­vi­ously already. He even man­aged a smile when he took our order, some­thing which really, he didn’t have to do, because for the fourth time in suc­ces­sion, we ordered the same things:

Foie gras;
Prawn ravi­oli;
Sir­loin medium rare;
Rack of lamb.

But of course he didn’t offer much else by way of con­ver­sa­tion after we chuck­led at our­selves and said to him, ‘you didn’t have to take our order, really, because we are order­ing the same things’. But I think, in his own way, he’s tick­led, and he sorta likes us.

Oh, and before I for­get again (because I didn’t men­tion it the last time I wrote about it), the potato gratin is the bestest I’ve had bar none. And accord­ing to the chefs (there were two of them who came out of the tiny kitchen to greet us bon­soir and bon appetit sev­eral times, maybe hop­ing that we’d think the kitchen is staffed by more than two of them), there is no cheese in the gratin even though it tastes as if there is.

So, if you were to give our habit a go, thank us if you get hooked, and order the other stuff on the plain-looking menu too, they’re really not bad, um, look­ing.

La Cui­sine
Cluny Court
Cor­ner, Cluny Park Road, Bukit Timah Road
Tel: 6468 8850

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of Tomber de toi by <a href=“http://www.google.com/musicsearch?q=Isabelle Boulay & France D” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://www.google.com’]);“amour”>Isabelle Boulay & France D’amour of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.

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