Singapore's Aurum serves meals in macabre setting

By Wee Sui Lee

SINGAPORE (Reuters Life!) - For most people, dining at death's door is not a palatable idea.

But Clement Lee, executive director of nightspot operator LifeBrandz, hopes Aurum, which serves "molecular gastronomy", hopes to convince them otherwise.

Lee said he wanted a controversial theme for the restaurant that features an avant-garde cooking style which uses scientific methods to create new flavors.

Molecular gastronomy was made popular by world-renowned chefs such as Ferran Adria from Spain's El Bulli restaurant and Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck in the English town of Bray. Adria's apprentice, Paco Roncero, is Aurum's technical consultant.

And in case the unusual cuisine isn't enough to entice spoilt Singapore gourmands, Lee added a dash of the morbid -- gold wheelchairs, a morgue and surgical steel tables.

In modern but superstitious Singapore, getting locals to dine at Aurum could be a tall order, as the ethnic Chinese who make up 75 percent of the city-state's population tend to shun anything that connotes death or sickness.

"Personally, I think it's too macabre -- that's coming from an Asian point of view," Daven Wu, a food critic for lifestyle magazine Time Out, told Reuters.

"Why are you courting disaster by sitting in a wheelchair for no reason? It's like asking people to go and sleep in a coffin for fun."