Brian Kennett
Amateur Chef and Traveling Foodie Extraordinaire
Restaurant Absurdities ia a quirky themed rooms restaurant with food to match
No address, no menu. Yep, you book Absurdities with no menu and no address. All you have is some potential word of mouth and some pictures you can find on their website and social media. Friends of ours had posted some snaps on Facebook, so I thought time for the wife and me to go and have some date-night fun. AKA, the kids are not permitted.
Absurdities price was $368 for 2 pax + $5 booking fee + $26 GST and another $100 on top of that for accompanying cocktails! That’s $499, are you surprised there were no kids coming? And so here comes the Absurdities Restaurant Review 2022.
The concept is not fine-dining, but fun-dining. I’ll give them that much. Absurdities location is kept secret, until 24 hours before your dining date and time. You get an SMS with an address and photo of where you need to report to. It was outside some random coffee shop. The Wife and I sat waiting, giggling a little with the excitement and wonder of what was coming.
You must book in 2’s of 4’s only. For Absurdities are NO single bookings allowed. They only have 8 pax per sitting, but they have something like 5 sittings a night. As you exit one room, another sitting is not far behind you. It’s a slick operation. Everyone is has a number on arrival and when you enter a room you are informed. “Number 1 and 2 sit here please”. Where you end up sitting depends on your special dietary needs and whether you have acquired the cocktails package.
Let's hear what Restaurant Absurdities has to say about themselves
“Absurdities is an Omakase which means you trust us, our chef, the kitchen team. The team at Absurdities are there to serve you a kick-ass delicious 6 course anti-fine dining, fun-dining dinner. Wacky food, quirky realities, welcome to Absurdities. The most absurd restaurant in the world.”
A room with a view? 6 rooms in fact to see in Absurdities Review Singapore
Room #1 at Absurdities Singapore. Asylum Coffee Shop
I’ll cover the rooms first at Absurdities and then the food. 6 individual rooms of different themes are on offer at Absurdities. 1st you start in a random coffee shop for course #1. Then to select one of 5 doors to your second room and second course, which is through a hall of mirrors. You enter room two into a setting from Avatar the movie with a tree trunk as a table, and a hostess dressed in a zebra suit.
The transition from Room #1 to Room #2. Absurdities SG Hall of Mirrors
Room #2 at the Absurdities location
is the Avatar Room
You then exit that into a Bedouin tent (well Moroccan) with your second host dressed like a dessert Arab of course. It is quite fun actually. You then climb and crawl, exiting a tunnel through a kitchen cabinet into a 50’s pastel American kitchen. Watch the video for a glamorous view of Wifey performing the crawl-through. Classic!
Room #3 is Moroccan Dessert and Bedouin Tent
They really do make seriously good cocktails in Morocco. Great work on these Absurdities SG.
Room #4 is the 50's pastel kitchen from the good ole US of A at Absurdities Singapore
Exiting under the kitchen table we enter Room #5 at Absurdities Singapore, which can only be described as the wand shop in Happy Potter
You exit under the kitchen table into a Harry Potter-style wizard library, akin to the wand store in the film. Yes, more crouching and crawling. It was actually really tough to find the exit door from the kitchen in Absurdities SG.
You know, for once I am literally speechless…
A Sherlock Holmes moment at Absurdities Singapore
And we're at the final Room #6. Austin Powers eat your heart out. This is Absurdities Airlines, even with their own theme song
Your final room is to board Absurdities Airlines, styled to 70’s garish Austin Powers. Once that is complete you exit a door, and hey presto you’re on the street. Omit. Quirky. Hell yes!!!
Have to say that Absurdities Airlines is way way better than @Scoot, that’s for certain!!!
Agreed this is long, but there are SIX rooms of stuff to show off in Absurdities Singapore
And now to that Omakase menu and the food of the chef and kitchen at Absurdities SG
To the food at Absurdities. They describe it as Omakase and to trust the chef and kitchen.
To firstly define what Omakase means; “Few formal dining experiences are as revered or as intimidating as omakase,a form of Japanese dining in which guests leave themselves in the hands of a chef and receive a meal which is seasonal, elegant, artistic, and uses the finest ingredients available.”
In the case of Absurdities, it is Omakase when they run out of something. So, Omakase can also be an excuse to change the menu. Hey, it was Chef’s choice right, it’s Omakase. But to have Quail replaced with Falafel is a joke. And the reason for that was I hate fish, and the Quail changed to CodFish because they had no Quail. Insanity. No replacement of meat with meat.
So, to have Hobson’s Choice of Falafel after the vegetarian soup in room #1, and vegan offering in the tree room was disappointing. Was I starting to see a consistent theme of food disappointment here? It was very much below standard. Both wife and I enjoyed the fun but not the food.
The cocktails were excellent though, well done to the bar person. Chef, sorry my friend, that was not good on the food front.
Course #1 Vegetable Soup in the Absurdities Coffee Shop
Dish #1 was a vegetable soup. Pretty bland I must say, but the plating was cool at Absurdities. They had spherical fruit balls in a bowl, with some bread and a green topping that I can’t remember what it was. Then the server comes over with a kettle and pours the soup (watch the video for the food theatre). No spoons so get your hands in there and tip that bowl. Not bad.
Course #2 in the Avatar Room at Absurdities Singapore, Pulled Jackfruit Burger 'w' Semolina Chips
Now we're off to Morocco for Course #3
Dish #3 came with an apology. “Sorry, this should have been Moroccan-style Quail…”
ooooh awesome I thought, I’d love some Tagine Quail after all the vegan stuff so far. But why sorry and supposed?
“But we haven’t got any Quail, so it exchanged for Codfish…”
Are you kidding me Absurdities, fish?
“Ah but #2 for you because you don’t like fish, we have replaced it with Falafel.”
Are you kidding me AGAIN Absurdities? Vegetarian dish number three in as many rooms. And the Falafel was as dry as the mock Moroccan desert setting we were in. I have now stopped taking pictures of my food. I am so disappointed.
But a cracking cocktail at least brings a semblance of a smile to my face.
Please I need some meat for Course #4. The USA pastel kitchen room
Hallelujah. Some meat. 4th time is lucky. Dish #4 at Absurdities was the only dish that had any merit to me. That was in the 50’s American pastel kitchen. A deconstructed chicken pot pie, covered in some cornflakes with a cauliflower puree.
Top marks for that. I loved it. Very flavourful and seasoned so very well. I liked the plating, and the cauliflower puree was the kicker. Did I like it so much though because it was the FIRST chance I had all night to eat some meat?
Just when I thought we were back on track, we enter room #5, and Harry Potter land
You have to watch the video to see the food. Sorry I have literally given up on it. It’s back to non-meat. But I’ll share the rather interesting beetroot cocktail.
The biggest joke was with whatever the dish was in the Harry Potter room. Dish #5. Described as squid risotto, well watch the video and you decide about that MAIN COURSE.
I don’t like squid and was yet again force-fed on some bland inedible vegetable substitute. This showed a complete lack of chef imagination for any non-fish eaters in the world.
Even wifey could not even tell what her dish was, and that was the original squid risotto that she was eating. As in, there seemed to be no squid or rice and enough of whatever it was to only sustain a small shrew.
Up next is Austin Powers and course #6, dessert, aboard Absurdities Airlines
Then we enter room #6, rather the fuselage of the Austin Powers’ plane. This was actually quite a giggle and included free Prosecco bubbles, I thank you. I did enjoy this ‘room’. But then they served dessert. This was something like 4Kg of jelly. Add to this some crushed biscuit, a chocolate dial, and some gold flake to bedazzle it.
I couldn’t consume this all. It was not far shy of the size of a real dial-phone from the past. I wouldn’t eat one of those either.
Our conclusions of Absurdities Restaurant Singapore
Absurdities you need to up the ante with your choices. If someone doesn’t eat fish it does not mean they are vegan. You should inform guests before they pay the \$400++ expecting a good dining experience! Or is it that it is all about the experience, not the food…? Is that the point? Make the food absurd and hope all is well…?
“Kick-ass and flavourful, texturally exciting, absurdly delicious” is a NO. Absurd is a YES.
During the experience, you get given these little cards for each room. I like that. And each card becomes part of a jigsaw. But the jigsaw ends up missing one piece. If you want to complete the jigsaw, they sell the final card for something like an extra $40. Yeah right. I’ll use the cards I got free to stop a wobbling table instead.
This is a one-time only visit place because you would not return for the food in my humble opinion. Not for the money they charge. And once you have had the fun and surprise of the rooms you won’t likely want to do them twice. Now if Absurdities set up a cocktail bar in the Austin Powers’ airplane I’d be there in a shot.
But for dinner at Absurdities, that is our first and last. Absurdities Restaurant is fun but the food needs to up the ante to match their fixed pricing. $500 is up there with MBS and top chef dining, the food did not match by a mile.
Time for some ISLIFEARECIPE-dia FAQ's about Absurdities SG
To start, they only open Thursday to Saturday. You can book 1830, 1900, 1930, 2000, 2030, 2100. Expect 2 hours dining time, you’ll move from room to room every 20 minutes.
Book here https://www.Absurdities.com.sg/tickets but be aware: No single bookings. Only 2’s or 4’s and max seating per sitting of 8 PAX. You also have to pay the FULL price of the ticket up-front.
Absurdities claim Omakase but it is actually a set menu. They have those little cards printed out, so it is not actually Omakase at all. Omakase is more aligned to what’s in season that chef will craft a menu from. How can you have printed cards defining an Omakase menu thus? If you don’t like fish, but like meat prepare yourself for disappointment, or consider this training to become vegan.
The Absurdities Price is a fixed cost that you have to pay in full when you book. Our cost for 2 PAX was $368 + $5 booking fee + $26 GST and another $100 on top of that for ONE set of paired cocktails.
What an absurd question, haha, of course not. The experience is visiting the restaurant and enjoying the rooms with the food pairing.
It is a surprise, but of course with those bespoke builds of the rooms it is the same place every time. Asylums Coffee Shop on… hey can’t say. It’s a secret. Wait for your SMS the day before haha.
Address of Absurdities Singapore Restaurant
Officially there is no address… but Absurdities address could be within this area… Just sayin’ like.
