Bugis Street Brasserie

If you can ignore the rather sterile ambience & the ‘municipal swimming pool café’ decor, Bugis Street Brasserie does a very passable trade in cross-border Asian cooking from its premises within the Millennium Gloucester Hotel. This isn’t the place to hover over dinner, rather somewhere to fill up on big helpings of spare ribs or stir-fried beef with ginger & spring onions, before heading off for drinks elsewhere. A few Singaporean & Malaysian specialities, such as spicy Penang prawn mee soup or mee-po noodles, have drawn praise from expats, & the regionally inspired set menu is also worth exploring. The bargain-priced, ‘express lunch’ offer (£7.95 for a soup, main course & dessert) is yet another good reason to visit. ‘Bugis Street’, incidentally, is a reference to the once-notorious Singapore thoroughfare.