Designing My Food Fantasies With DW Workshop

Every few months, a new restaurant opens in Singapore and serves up similar fare that would not get far from what was being served at an older restaurant just down the road.  At best, you would have yet another restaurant to visit where you could hopefully find a vacant table on a weekend flooded by brunch-fanatic Singaporeans.  Oh yes, I do love brunch fare.  I often write about the food I eat at restaurants that serve up All Day Breakfast.  Here are some of my previous posts:  http://whatmakesmybellytick.blogspot.sg/2015/07/brunch-hopping-around-singapore.html and http://whatmakesmybellytick.blogspot.sg/2016/05/breakfast-will-not-be-boring-again.html

 

What I completely abhor though, was to be made to pay  through my nose for a plate of pallid chicken chipolatas and scrambled eggs that looked like yesterday’s dinner after a very boozy evening.  And if I had to drag myself out of bed  during a weekend, and into a restaurant that I had picked to provide my first meal of the day, it had better be a good one.

 

So I was delighted to be invited by a friend who was about to open her new bistro, DW Workshop, to do a taste test of her All Day Breakfast menu. 

 

Her bistro is located in a pre-war colonial bungalow surrounded by lush greenery at Rochester Drive. Stepping into the well-lit, cozy and laidback space within the bistro, made me feel like my weekend had just started.  I really appreciated that hour of peace “in the boonies” on a  Tuesday afternoon in between back to back meetings at work.

 

The first question I asked owners, Edalin and Sebastian was what did the DW in their brand DW Workshop meant?  Sebastian explained that DW meant Design your World.  He wanted to create a safe space for anyone to design their world, design their lifestyle and design their space which was interesting because, this was no longer purely a bistro focused solely on serving food.  The bungalow was divided into distinct spaces that served specific purposes according to how you wanted to match a specific space with your favorite food and the company that dines with you.  If you love an afternoon spent with good friends and family, you could have a meal at a communal dining table or a coffee table and sofa area that resembled the dining room and the living room of a typical home.  If you preferred a traditional bistro style table sitting alfresco or indoors, that was available too.  If you just wanted to hang out alone around the kitchen counter to watch the world go by or chat up the crew, you would be delighted that the kitchen counter felt like you were sitting around in your mother’s kitchen.  You might prefer to have a beer by the bar just outside on a balmy night. That was a useful spot to “park” the husband while you went shopping at Rochester mall or if you were attending a workshop within the vicinity.  You don’t drink?  Perhaps you might want to have a cup of coffee and a cake at the outdoor coffee patio where you can pick your choice of a cup of stove-brewed coffee or a cup of drip coffee made from a NASA Engineer-designed drip machine called Pour Steady.  It looked like the pilot’s control panel from the Starship Enterprise.  I was told it was the only one available in Singapore.  The drip coffee we had tasted clean and smooth.  Just standing by the coffee patio and smelling the coffee aroma wafting in the air was enough to give you a caffeine kick.

However, the main purpose of setting up DW Workshop was to literally provide a space for learning and designing while you could enjoy great food too.   While we were there, they were just setting up the tools and materials to hold a workshop soon where you could learn to design paper jewelry.

Now let’s talk about the food.  I loved the way they have prepared their food and I could tell from the food served that that menu was inspired by their love for all things beautiful about life.  I could taste the freshness of the food, and the dedication they have put into the cooking. Edalin and Sebastian were finicky about freshness and often used the phrase “wholesome food from the earth”.  When you tasted each dish, you would know they were walking the talk.

Here are a selection of must-try dishes on their All Day Breakfast menu, courtesy of the good folks at DW Workshop.  The food was just so heartwarmingly delicious, but don’t take our word for it.

A Selection Of Breads And Flavoured Butters

 

 

What we had was a tomato bread, olive bread and brioche, served with sundried tomato butter, tahini butter and lemon zest butter.

 

Crab Salad Croissant

Rosti

 

Braised Minced Beef With Roasted Potatoes

 

Homemade Granola With Yogurt

 

 

 

 

 

Our Verdict?  -  BELLY AWESOME

 

Photo credit: Most of these photos in this post was taken by Kasia Auyang.

 

About The Writer:

This blog post was co-written by my brother Jerome and I. Although we are siblings who grew up 11 years apart, shaped by differing experiences to see the world from different perspectives, we do share a common obsession – FOOD.  We celebrate our passion for life with food.  However, our attitudes to food are quite different and the way we celebrate our love for food are also quite different.  Jerome lives to eat and hoovers everything edible that crosses his path.  As he shovels food into his mouth with that fork in his right hand, he takes photographs of what he eats, and posts pictures and notes up on Facebook with his left.  Often, his beautifully written prose about what he had eaten would be 7 paragraphs in length and would not have any punctuations in between because he had been too busy multi-tasking. 

I, on the other hand, eat to live. It is not just about my attempts to eat healthily. As I am a “cam-whore” and “social media hussy”, I spend about half an hour styling my food, taking photographs, writing notes and posting them across my social media platforms before eating them, right after the hubby has paid for the bill and is about to head out of the restaurant.  I enjoy reading all my posts about what I had eaten because I know that I had lived fully in spite of watching what I eat.  Welcome to the foodie world of the quirky Ong siblings.