Sparkling or Still: Julien Bompard @ Ascott Raffles Place

The Asia Insurance Building was the tallest building in Singapore and Southeast Asia back in the 1950s. It reopened last year as Ascott Raffles Place.

Recently, the Le Saint Julien group which has a restaurant at Fullerton Water Boat House, opened its sister restaurant at Ascott Raffles Place. The restaurant not only serves daily meals to diners, but also provide room service to the residents of the service apartment.

The restaurant looks bright and cheery on a Sunday afternoon. The main colour themes are Orange and White, making the restaurant cheery and bright.

Service was top notch as the service staffs made sure that every request from the diners were met with satisfaction.

But as with other restaurants in the CBD area, Julien Bompard sees very slow days on Saturdays and Sundays when Raffles Place becomes a ghost town.

2 sets of the Executive Set Lunch were ordered including 1 with two tapas, ham, caviar and a soup.

Complimentary bread is served. The manager told us the bread is freshly baked from the oven of Julien Bompard. And it sure is hot! We had problems tearing our bread open because it was so hot!

The 2 varieties of bread are Tomato Focaccia and Baguette. I love the Tomato Focaccia the best. When you tear the bread open, you can smell tomato and herbs.

There are also 3 condiments to go with the bread. There is olive oil with balsamic vinegar, paparika powder and creamy French butter with black salt. The butter is one of the most creamy butter I have ever tried. Black salt is actually made in India and used in Indian cuisines, and is made by boiling Harad seeds in brine.

This is Baeri caviar. Accompanying the caviar is a host of other condiments such as lemon wedges, sour cream, chives, white onions, chopped egg yolks and egg whites, and mini pancakes. The caviar are from France and they go very well with sour cream and chives.

The restaurant displayed this whole leg of ham on the counter table. We also ordered some. The ham goes very well with the bread. I understand the full name of the ham is Jamón ibérico and is produced only in Spain. It is not too salty and is not like Parma ham.

Seared Yellow Fin Tuna (Nicoise style with French beans and Mesclun). The tuna was seared on the top, leaving the bottom still sweet and fresh. The vegetables were refreshing and goes well with the smokey taste tuna.

Terrine of Braised Beef Shank with Dijon Mustard - I didn't enjoy this dish as much as the Tuna. Perhaps it tasted a bit like minced beef. It's nice, but not as good as the seared Tuna.

Cauliflower Soup with truffles, crab meat and mussels. The soup is extremely tasty, but quite expensive at S$24 a bowl. A pity that there is barely any truffle taste to the soup.

Here are the 2 tapas which came with 1 of the set lunch. Pan seared foie gras with grape sauce (left), and Octopus with Piment d'espelettes.

I was amazed at how good Foie Gras tastes with grape sauce! The sweetness of the grape sauce goes very well with the oily and salty foie gras.

Didn't enjoy the Octopus tapas much, even though it was cooked with Piment d'Espelettes (a chilli pepper popular in the Basque), which till now I have no idea what it is.

Here are the 2 main courses. First is Fricassee of seafood with tomato concassee with Fava bean and vin jaune emulsion.

Fricassee means the meat (seafood here) is cooked in gravy and then thickened with butter or cream, and concassee means that the tomato is skinned and deseeded, and chopped into pieces. I love the taste and contrast of the creamy sauce with the seafood. There is a diagonal arrangement of squid ink risotto below the seafood.

Spahettini pasta with Magret of Duck and seasonal mushroom. Enjoyed this dish a lot too.

Petit Fours. The chocolate one is actually Valrhona dark chocolate with 66% cocoa. Pretty bitter and needs to be eaten with the light brown caramel thingy.

Classic Crumble Apple tart with caramel sauce and vanilla ice-cream. I would say the dessert is pretty average.

Here is the very cute milk container which is actually a cow. The milk comes out from the cow's mouth into the tea!

The manager was kind enough to show us the tea leaves used to make the tea we had. They are Dammann Frères tea leaves from France! Currently only 2 places in Singapore are using their tea leaves. 1 is St Regis and the other place is here. The tea is not too acidic and quite smooth. And check out the very classic container used to store the tea leaves.

Overall, though it is quite a pricey lunch, but definitely worth it due to the excellent service and great food using quality ingredients. Will definitely come back again!