When you do a search for restaurants suitable for romantic dinners, White Rabbit will definitely show up in the results as one of the establishment. After seeing so many pictures and hearing so much about them, I finally had a chance to drop by for dinner. Some background, White Rabbit is housed in a restored 1930s chapel on Dempsey Hill.
The building itself is shroud in mystery as it is surrounded by bushes and beautiful greenery. The establishment aims to transport their diners into a different world through their rabbit hole.
The building is beautifully restored with its distinctive European colonial architecture. The first thing you will see is the elegant door arches and pristine whitewashed walls. From the outside, the building still very much resembles a chapel as they retained some of the metal cross window grilles.
The internal decor of the building is kept to very simplistic to highlight the original detailing of the building itself. The high ceiling and beams are maintained throughout the building to give an overall spacial effect. You can still see the restored original stained glass from the chapel.
There is also an outdoor alfresco area for diners who prefer to dine outside and enjoy nature. You can also see their cute rabbit hole wall which kind of reminds you of Alice in a Wonderland.
There is also a very cool bar area in the outdoor area with spacious bar seats and garden loungers.
For dinner, there is a fixed coursed menu where the 4 course is at SGD 88 and the 5 courses at SGD 108 ( before tax). You will get to choose an appetiser, a starter and a main as well as one dessert. For the 5 courses, you get an additional pasta dish.
We were all served this cute snack to start off the meal which is not part of the menu. The left is a puff like a snack with a savoury cream centre and the right one is a waffle cup filled with fresh salsa. Both the items look prettier than they actually taste as they tasted nothing too spectacular.
The next dish served was the uni custard which came in a rounded glass container sitting on top of fine sandy salt.
There were small chunks of scallops within the custard itself and the dish has strong umami flavour from the sea. There was also black garlic used in the dish which gave the seafood flavours a good balance. The custard itself was creamy but the uni taste was not overpowering.
The next dish we had was the pan-seared foie gras with seasonal fruits and umeboshi gastrique. The umeboshi provided an acidity to the dish which I personally did not appreciate. The foie gras, on the other hand, was perfectly seared with a golden-brown crust and creamy and succulent centre. The serving of the foie gras was also quite generous.
I had the Iberico pork collar which is served with fried bintje potatoes, sauerkraut and spiced jus. The potatoes tasted just like potato chips.
The pork collar was cooked excellently with a slightly charred crust but a juicy and pinkish tender centre. The light spice in the sauce also complimented the pork very well
My friend had the classic bouillabaisse which is the seasonal catch from Lombok with roasted fennel, tomato confit and rouille. If I did not remember wrongly, the seasonal catch served that day was the sea bass. The fish was very fresh and had good texture and the tomato confit added an additional savoury layer of flavours to the pan-fried fish.
For desserts, there were 2 choices and we ordered both for a comparison. The seasonal fruit salad was filled with berries like blackberry, rasberry, strawberry as well as dragonfruit, kiwi and orange. The salad was also served a small orange granite which is something similar to a fruit sorbet.
The other dessert was the crepes suzette which was served alongside our table but not before their server had a little fire performance.
This is the finished product from the little fire show. The crepes were quite small and well soaked with orange flavours from the fresh orange juice which is squeezed into the dish. There are also nuts, orange slices as well as cream cheese which completed the whole dessert.
We were served these chocolate eclairs to end off our meal but we were too full to actually eat all of them. There were 2 different flavours; dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate.
Overall, the food at White Rabbit is slightly above average especially for their mains but I find the price too steep for the 4-course meal and the starters and desserts are not exquisite enough for this price point. Perhaps if you consider the beauty of the location, some diners might still find the price tag worthwhile. A side note, I found the environment too noisy and since the ceilings are high, there is a lot of echo and feedback thus constant murmuring in the background which I found hardly romantic.
Address: 39C Harding Rd, Singapore 249541
Operating hours: 11.45 am to 2.30 pm and 6.15 pm to 10.30 pm
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