Top Tables for Top Guns!

For the super chic and super clued in, the top table in super connoisseur's eat out choice, Iggy's of Singapore - is not in the main restaurant nor the private dining rooms. Guess where it is?

In the heart of the kitchen itself at the Show Kitchen (pictured above) and its no nonsense Chef's Table where six people can dine in the bowels of the restaurant in the chef's private sanctum and see their food actually being prepared and finished off before being served. 

It has become a mark of intense gastronomic one-upmanship amongst the rich and famous to be able to say that you are dining out at the chef's table, and certainly the sheer exclusivity of this practice is one that makes it all the more desirable. 

The Chef's Table at Iggy's, for example, is not available to just you and me. You either have to be Ignatius' friend or a visiting chef or a long time customer who has become a friend - but if you insist on dining at the Chef's Table, the minimum booking is for four persons at the handsome price of $175++ per person for the dinner Menu Degustation.

I've had the fortune of being invited to the Chef's Table of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, where you literally dine in the main kitchen and realise just how clean it is. I know because I was at this table last year while researching for the Peninsula Hotel cookbook called Naturally Peninsula - FLAVOURS, for which I tested the recipes and wrote the text.

In Singapore the most professionally desired Chef's Table to be invited to is that of Otto Weibel, the Director of Kitchens of the Raffles the Plaza and Swisshotel the Stamford Hotels. Not having actually eaten a meal there in years, I often sit down at the large table, enough for more than 12 persons, for meetings and there is alway a wide array of cold drinks in the fridge and a really good coffee to drink.

The walls are hung with beautiful pictures of food and of the Singapore Chefs' Association team at their various triumphant competition showings around the world.