Singapore's Aurum serves meals in macabre setting

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."

Aurum's reception is a fake morgue and operating theater. On the second floor, where the restaurant is located, customers sit in gold-painted wheelchairs and eat from metal tables designed to resemble operating tables.

Located near the riverside Clarke Quay, Aurum neighbors The Clinic, a bar where customers are served by waitresses in nurse outfits and sip alcohol from mock drip packets.

PIGLET DECONSTRUCTED

But it's not all gloom and doom.

Aurum means 'gold' in Latin, and the restaurant's owners make sure you know it: gold polka-dotted wallpaper, gold-colored floors and a glitzy disco ball.

The same drama and attention to detail is also given to the S$148 (US$96) 13-course menu.

Using liquid nitrogen, syringes, gas canisters and equipment typically found in scientific laboratories, chef Edward Voon and his colleagues whip up a bizarre blend of foods, such as "isotonic lychee caviar" and "piglet deconstructed mosaic of pear with coleslaw".

"Let's break the monotony of cooking, rules are meant to be broken," said Voon, a boyish-looking 33-year-old who started as a butcher but rose to head the Singapore national culinary team.

Voon flits around the restaurant, inviting diners to watch the food preparation and explaining the concepts behind dishes.

But the extravagance seemed wasted on the bemused customers. On a Friday night, only a third of the seats were filled.

Most of diners, however, enjoyed the food.

"We don't need the hospital theme, the food can stand on its own," said Amy Matthews, an American living in Singapore.