Located at the top floor of Clearwater at Damansara Heights, Babe is a tastefully decorated cosy restaurant with one of the best views of the city.

There’s an infinity pool with an unobstructed post-card worthy view of KL, shiny good quality cutlery imported from Spain, and an air-conditioned alfresco dining area.

The only downside is the rather confusing elevator system where you have to select your floor before getting in.

Babe is led by Chef Jeff Ramsey, a Michelin starred chef who previously headed the Tapas Molecular Bar at Mandarin Oriental Tokyo.

The menu here is a unique Ramsey creation using lots of Japanese ingredients while infusing international and local flavours. Some of the dishes are termed “Japas” or Japanese tapas.

While the term “fusion” has long been overused, you must celebrate chefs who aren’t afraid to experiment and push boundaries in the culinary space. Without these trailblazers, we’d forever be stuck with traditional dishes. What’s the fun in that?

Start your night with “down the rabbit hole”, a shot drink that tastes surprisingly like chicken rice. An interesting start, and certainly a precursor to what is to be expected for dinner.

The first course recommended is foie gras and jackfruit. The finely chopped jackfruit in a crispyshell and foie gras proved to be a good combination and served as the perfect starter to open up our appetite.

Next try the Onsen chowder, a potato mousse with smoked coconut, egg and chives. It is unexpectedly good as the smoked coconut imbues a very unique crispy contrast to the texture of the potato mousse.

The laksa injection canapé is like a mouthful of your favourite ingredients in a bowl of curry laksa, prawn and soup, though perhaps a slightly bigger syringe would have made it even better to enjoy.

The mango and curry sphere utilises a molecular gastronomy technique called “spherification”, where calcium chloride makes an egg yolk look like a sphere that explodes in your mouth with the tangy and spicy taste of the liquid ingredients within. Quite a unique experience.

Next are two of the more creative dishes that look and taste almost exactly like what they are supposed to be, but are made up of entirely different ingredients that are halal.

The crispy chicken terrine looks and taste like charsiu, but is actually made up of 40 layers of crispy chicken skin sans the fatty part rendered in charsiu sauce, while the marinated roast kabayaki ikan keli is their interpretation of bak kwa, but instead of pork, catfish is used.

You will never guess the ingredients in a million years if you are not told.

The prawn and curry Leaf ice cream is a unique combo as you don’t find seafood in ice cream very often.

Manga crab is perhaps one of the more “normal” dish, but they actually print the sauce on the plate manga style, and serve it with coriander sauce.

Snow crab donburi with sambal is just what its name suggests, a small portion of snow crab rice in a bowl, but with sambal and dashi jelly to give it an extra dimension. To be honest, you may enjoy this more without the sambal

If you’re still hungry by now the smoked chicken percik is a whole ayam kampung meant to be shared by two. Four hours were spent preparing the chicken, resulting in prefect tenderness and flavour, definitely one of the benefits of applying molecular methods to traditional dishes.

Stanbroke farms striploin with Japanese sambal is another welcome meat dish which you will really enjoy, especially with the accompanying yuzu kosho sambal.

End your meal with a playful dish named Dinosaur Egg, a dessert made from daun kadok, yoghurt, tropical fruit and a nutty “birds nest”. Crack it open with your spoon and viola, an egg look alike that by now, you know tastes entirely unlike an egg but is a sweet concoction apt to end your night.

Babe Gastro
Level 11, Clearwater
Jalan Changkat Semantan
Bukit Damansara, KL

GPS: 3.152327, 101.666762

Tel: 03.2095 8599

The article first appeared in www.KYSpeaks.com

Trying to influence your cravings since 2005, Kar Yeong was Guest Judge on Versus 1001 Rasa Baba’s 2018, R.AGE Food Fight Judge 2015 and NTV7 Foodie Blogger 2014. To read more about Kar Yeong’s food journeys, visit his blog at www.KYSpeaks.com