Tables tucked into recesses make the large room cozy. The sore-back sufferer says his trendy low-slung black chair feels fine as he pulls it up to the dark wood table with its fat chrome base. Suede-covered banquettes and walls are shades of grey-green, the walls bare except for black-and-white photos of the old and new Singapores.

Month-old Prima Taste is extremely cool, right down to the bar with its bottles backlit against a papaya-coloured wall and its sleek drum-shaped lights as scarlet as the servers’ aprons. All too often overlooked by designers, the acoustics are excellent and the background music is just that.

The service, too, is topnotch: prompt and not intrusive. (Death to all conversation-invading twinks!) The only thing the restaurant lacks, even though it is part of a franchise—the first Canadian offshoot of a Singapore-based company—is the inhuman perfection (hello, is that a key in your back?) normally present in those who have undergone corporate training programs. Points for setting and staff; now let’s see what’s being served on those smart, square white plates.

Singaporean cuisine draws on all the cooking—Chinese, Indian, Eurasian, Indonesian—that flows into the great funnel of mainland Malaysia and concentrates at its small, southern, very food-aware end, Singapore. Curries, noodle dishes, stir-fries—they’re all on the menu at Prima Taste. One table over, two women were making their way through the “Indonesia” version of a fish dish that looked so tasty we ordered it too. The slices of cobbler fish are thin but moist, crunchy outside, mixed in with crisp red and green peppers and onions, and bathed in a sweet-hot sauce. Recommended.

Plates arrive as they’re cooked, which meant that by the time it arrived we were already midway through our char kway teow. This noodle dish is not a drop-dead photo op. About all you can say is that it’s brown and textured, but what textures and flavours! Chewy fish cake, Chinese sausage, bean sprouts and stout prawns for crunch, and the slithery slap of two kinds of noodles—it’s all wrapped in a sauce that does a lovely job of integrating sweetness and spice. Heat is well handled here. It doesn’t blast its way into your mouth, steamrollering milder flavours; it sneaks up on you.

Most countries have a handheld pie somewhere in their culinary culture, like samosas and calzoni; Singapore’s is the curry puff. A demilune of first-rate short-crust pastry with a neatly crimped edge, packed with chunks of chicken, hard-cooked egg, and vegetables bound together with a low-key curry sauce, it blew any Cornish pasty I’ve had out of the water. Share, because they’re large and served in pairs.

Unless you’ve eaten your way through the streets of Asia, fried bananas and ice cream may be the only familiar dessert on the menu. But if you’ve stood steaming in Penang in the shade of a hawker cart’s awning while its owner shaved ice into a plastic bowl, you’ll leap on the ice kachang, a small Mont Blanc of crystals surrounded by corn kernels, red beans, and other ingredients alien to western desserts. Sadly, the ice-shaving machine had teething problems. Next time, maybe, after we’ve tried laksa and Hainanese chicken, the current hot sellers.

Other options: chili or black pepper crab; Nonya-style calamari (Nonya is the cuisine that evolved when Malay wives cooked for their Chinese husbands); beef rendang; and Singapore chicken curry made with coconut milk, kangkong (juicy water spinach), eggplant, green beans, and other veggies, simply stir-fried and served glistening with a Nonya, garlic-oyster, or sesame-oyster sauce. But no “Singapore noodles”, because this Chinese-restaurant fave originated in Hong Kong. Homesick Singaporeans are already hoovering up authentic side dishes like ikan bilis (dried anchovies) and nuts, and achar (Indian pickles).

There’s wine (four by the glass, half-litre, or bottle), imported and local beer, and cold or hot Horlicks. Prices range from $4 for roti prata to seafood and meat dishes around $13.95, unless you want the weekend $28 fish-head curry made with red snapper or whatever is fresh in Chinatown. Watch for tasting menus in the new year.

Restaurant is now closed.