My wife and I went to Novus this evening for dinner. The usual "still or sparkling water,sir" was proferred and we went for the former. A bread basked arrived soon after we ordered along with some olive oil - we asked them to send over some balsamic vinegar and butter too.

For starters, I had roast sirloin with buffalo mozzarella and tomato, rucola and parmigiano reggiano (although the menu says beef tomato ... haven't come across this before) while my wife asked for the white truffle linguine with truffle oil, baby spinach and half boiled egg in a smaller starter size. Both were a bit slow in coming (given that there were only two other tables with a total of 12 people) but when it did, the taste of both dishes did not disappoint. My beef was roasted nicely and the softness of the mozzarella went well with the graininess of the beef. My wife really enjoyed her pasta but we both noted that the size seemed to be a bit large. Upon checking with the waiter, he confirmed that this was a starter size. Of course, my wife didn't want to ruin her appetite for her main course so we had about a quarter of the plate bagged to take home.

The mains were where I felt let the overall experience down. My Saint Jacques with crab risotto didn't indicate to me what kind of fish Saint Jacques was. We did know that it was a fish dish as it was in the fish section of the menu ... maybe a printing error left out the word scallops after Saint Jacques ... Anyway, my main course was ok and certainly not as good as my starter. The crab risotto was adequately flavourful as were the seared scallops but there didn't seem to be enough oomph for me ... My wife's main of crispy skin red snapper with white bean and octopus ragout and bruschetta was not good at all. My wife is quite picky with fish and complained to me that it was overly fishy - my main gripe after trying a bit of her fish was that it was way overdone such that the flesh was solid and not smooth at all. The ragout was interesting but not interesting enough to save the badly done fish. And the bruschetta was pretty bad as the tomatoes were not sweet and the toasted bread was limp. As an indication of how much my wife disliked her main, she didn't want to have dessert ... and for her to decline dessert would indicate that a very blue moon will soon appear over Singapore.

The only other slight gripe we had was the pricing of the starter sized linguine: Instead of the $24 main course price, we were charged $22. At the end of the day, I have no problems paying $22 or $24, but seeing that we had asked for a starter size, could the chef not have used his common sense and really scaled down the size to account for the fact that we have main courses coming up?

In terms of ambience, we really liked the setting, the cutlery, the large flower arrangements and the overall vibe. Perhaps it was a bit noisy that night as there was a function at the bar but it was a tolerable level of noise and not off-putting.