Must tries at Room With A View: Ham Panini and carrot cake

Audrey Phoon | The Business Times | Tue Aug 3 2010

A JORDANIAN truck piled high with carrots; the interior of the Sydney Opera House; an aerial display by the Singapore Air Force – all these are sights to be seen from Room With A View, a new cafe near Clarke Quay.

The surprising thing is: the narrow space on the fifth floor of its somewhat obscure Carpenter Street location (which also counts a karaoke lounge and a gym among its diverse collection of tenants) has no windows at all.

The vibrant scenes are in fact the work of amateur photographers; after all, Room With A View is as much a gourmet cafe as it is a photography gallery.

Set up two weeks ago by Joanna Wan and Keryl Low, it serves a small but well-done selection of sandwiches, pies, tarts and cakes, and at the same time aims to be a platform for people to share what they see through the lens via thematic exhibitions that change once every three weeks.

Says Ms Low, a former human resource professional who quit to devote her time to the cafe-gallery: “There are so many people out there who are not professional photographers who take good photos, but it’s a pity you can’t really see their pictures except if you go online. So we decided to open this as a gallery for them.”

To that end, Room With A View is done up very simply; a sort of blank canvas, as it were.

The walls are white; the lighting comes from cleanly-designed Caravaggios; the furniture is made up of custom-made wooden modular blocks that can be rearranged easily; and the chairs are of a low height so that they and their occupants “don’t block people looking at the photographs”, which are displayed at eye level.

At the back of the narrow space, across from the cafe’s kitchen, a quote from the American artist Aaron Siskind is emblazoned across an acrylic design feature.

It reads: “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever Â… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”

It’s here, so far, that two exhibitions – one entitled Crowded and the other, National Pride, to commemorate National Day – have taken place. A third, a cat-themed charity exhibition cum sale, will run from mid-August and have proceeds going to the Cat Welfare Society.

The shows are curated by the owners, who review email submissions and select what’s to be featured based on whether the images fit the theme and the sort of feel they convey.

“Professionals may look at the photos we have and say the focus is all wrong or something, but we choose them because they capture certain moods and feelings,” Ms Low explains.

The spotlight stealer, however, is really the food. Says Ms Wan, who straddles her time between Room With A View and her family’s construction business: “We won’t serve things here that we won’t eat ourselves.”

What’s on the menu here, then, are things like rustic breads served with aged balsamic vinegar, home-made English scones with Cornish clotted cream, grilled panini sandwiches stuffed with quality ingredients, and scrumptious cakes and quiches.

All the baked goods are made by Ms Wan’s aunt, who comes in early every other morning to bake before going to her day job, and must-tries include the moist, rough-chopped carrot cake ($4.50 per slice); the light, tart lemon slice ($3.50); and the ham and cheese panini ($9) made with a special New Zealand chutney.

There is also a small shelf of imported gourmet goods for sale, such as Di Costa nougat, Venchi chocolate, shortbread from the Shortbread House of Edinburgh and limited edition bottles of aged Leonardo aceto balsamico Modena.

So you won’t just get to see the world from this Room, but eat it too.

Address: 17 Carpenter Street, #05-01
Tel: 6438 4230