Chu Fa (Pu Tian) Restaurant
楚发莆田（兴华）本地菜
In this era of ours where cooking as a profession, and food in general, has been slowly but surely fetishized – you get 24-hour networks dedicated to culinary shows, you get chefs enjoying a level of celebrity hitherto unseen, you get a million and one food blogs trumpeting the strengths and weaknesses of every new restaurant that opens. Don’t get me wrong, there are positive effects to this – chief among them being that, compared to generations past, the general populace is better informed and able to make healthy, sustainable choices in what they eat. But it can all get a little much for what is a pretty basic endeavour – feeding people.
It is easy to find reviews of the fashionable restaurants in almost any media these days – ranging from the pithy to the protracted. Almost everybody who has a camera or can string several words together is suddenly the next Fisher, or Liebling, or Reichl. And who am I to begrudge them their opinion? (I am, after all, one of those hacks.) But I have to say a large majority of the stuff you read is, unfortunately, noise. You can tell by the number of exclamation marks that are used, or the inability to describe anything beyond ‘good’ or ‘nice’ or ‘delicious’. Thankfully, there is still quality out there, the healthy smattering of blog posts that are able to provide one or more of the following: an honest-to-goodness opinion, a compelling narrative, engaging prose, and useful information – and the rare few blogs who can do so on a consistent basis.
I was thinking about this the other day and got to wondering about the restaurants that nobody likes to blog. Sure, everyone blogs the good restaurants. Some people blog the bad restaurants. And the new restaurants, especially those opened by famous chefs. But who blogs the middling restaurants – the ones that just get by with marginally decent food at affordable prices, tucked away in the heartlands with minimal publicity? These are the places just down the block that command the loyalty of your average Joe Sixpack, who takes his wife and two kids there on a Saturday night as a reward for the week’s labours. You don’t get fancy ingredients at these places. You don’t get elaborate preparations. You just get a hot meal, marginally better than what you could throw together yourself, in simple surroundings and at very reasonable prices. Who blogs those restaurants?
My mother took my brother and me to just one such place the other day, when none of us wanted to cook, or had an opinion where to eat. In her mind this place was cheap and decent, and if there is one thing my mother is a sucker for, it is value. She also loves Heng Hwa (Xinghua) cuisine, and had tried this place’s take on Heng Hwa lor mee, mee sua and beehoon. It wasn’t great, she cautioned, but it was good enough.
It was a little on the late side when we went, I suppose. Especially compared to New York, people in Singapore tend to eat dinner earlier, and 7pm is considered prime-time. By the time we got there it was nearing 9pm and the crowd at the restaurant – if there ever was one – had thinned to a couple of tables. This is not a place you go to for the décor, unless you are a fan of whitewashed walls and industrial tiling. One thing I wished they would change was their fluorescent lighting, which was bright, white and unforgiving. No restaurant should have fluorescent lighting. It kills the mood for eating.
Although this place puts out some Heng Hwa dishes, and is advertised as having Putian roots, they have expanded their repertoire to include all manner of Singaporean tze char staples (the ubiquitous yam ring, sambal kang kong, etc). In truth their cuisine was probably more akin to a foreign cuisine adapted to suit the local palate, and could not be called one or the other.
My mother, having been here multiple times, ordered two of her favourite dishes here – the spicy la-la, and the drunken prawns cooked in bamboo. Neither was very impressive, with the la-la particularly disappointing, but at least the prawns were large and fresh and the broth in which they came had the good, strong heft of Shaoxing wine. The Heng Hwa lor mee was poor – it had hints of the flavours that the dish was known for, but the overall taste profile was not a rounded one, and it felt a little uneven.
There was one thing here that surprised me greatly though. They did a wonderful preparation of deep-fried snapper. At least, I think it is a snapper – I’ve never known the English name, only the Cantonese one (马友鱼 ma yau yu). What they do is they slice the fish cross-sectionally instead of filleting it, so you wind up with oval-shaped pieces with a T-section of the spine in the middle. Then they dust it with flour and deep fry it. It’s a pretty standard treatment but difficult to do well, since the skin of the fish and the exterior have to remain crisp while the inside has got to cook through without drying out. The version here was flavoured just enough not to mask the natural flavour of the fish, and also deep fried to perfection. Also decent was the Heng Hwa mee sua – the noodles were springy and generously coated with the clam-based sauce.
I gave my mother a little stick for taking us here – and “wasting” a perfectly good meal on barely average food, but it was all in good fun, of course. As we left I mused to myself that this was a self-respecting business, with people doing good, honest work. There was no reason to let their limitations, real or imagined, diminish the dignity that they so rightly deserved. The family at the table across from us lingered for about half an hour after the last pair of chopsticks had been laid on the table, so they must have enjoyed it. And the enthusiastic goodbye of the waitress that showed us out could only have come from someone who felt a healthy dose of pride in her establishment and its offerings. Chu Fa may not be the next hawker made good, or the next blogosphere darling. But it is what it is, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise – so while criticism may be justified, it should be accorded nothing but the utmost respect.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Epic fail
Everyone needs one of those days to remind them that they are not invincible, that there is work yet to be done and hours yet to be put in. I think I know a fair bit about food. I think I can cook. But you wouldn't have known it today.
I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a meal that I put out. I over-salted the potatoes. My vinaigrette broke after I had tossed the salad in it. But most disappointing of all, I committed the kitchen's cardinal sin.
I over-cooked the steak.
Steak is one of those things that is pretty forgiving to cook. It's best when kept simple - salt, pepper, a nice pat of butter, grill. If you want to be fancy you can introduce garlic, or rosemary. In any case, you don't have to be Tom Keller to cook steak. The only thing that you absolutely cannot do is to over-cook it. Words cannot express the disappointment at carving through a piece of well-done meat and seeing brown instead of red or pink. Or gnawing through what could have been a tender juicy steak, but instead - for all intents and purposes - became nothing more than a dry piece of rubber.
That's what gets me the most when I eat a well-done steak - whether or not I was the one who cooked it. It's the fact that the cook abused the potential of that piece of meat. There is only so much good beef around, so really, every well done steak is one less steak that could have been done medium rare. So today I wasted three pieces of Australian striploin.
No point making excuses. I shat the bed, plain and simple.
A couple of photos from the meal:
(None of the said steaks, of course - that would just be offensive.)
Probably the only thing to come out right of the entire meal, because it required so little work. Asparagus, wrapped in some Spanish jamon that my sister had brought back from her travels, drizzled in olive oil, salted and peppered.
Salad of arugula, roasted red pepper, portabello mushrooms, red onion and leftover asparagus.
I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a meal that I put out. I over-salted the potatoes. My vinaigrette broke after I had tossed the salad in it. But most disappointing of all, I committed the kitchen's cardinal sin.
I over-cooked the steak.
Steak is one of those things that is pretty forgiving to cook. It's best when kept simple - salt, pepper, a nice pat of butter, grill. If you want to be fancy you can introduce garlic, or rosemary. In any case, you don't have to be Tom Keller to cook steak. The only thing that you absolutely cannot do is to over-cook it. Words cannot express the disappointment at carving through a piece of well-done meat and seeing brown instead of red or pink. Or gnawing through what could have been a tender juicy steak, but instead - for all intents and purposes - became nothing more than a dry piece of rubber.
That's what gets me the most when I eat a well-done steak - whether or not I was the one who cooked it. It's the fact that the cook abused the potential of that piece of meat. There is only so much good beef around, so really, every well done steak is one less steak that could have been done medium rare. So today I wasted three pieces of Australian striploin.
No point making excuses. I shat the bed, plain and simple.
A couple of photos from the meal:
(None of the said steaks, of course - that would just be offensive.)
Probably the only thing to come out right of the entire meal, because it required so little work. Asparagus, wrapped in some Spanish jamon that my sister had brought back from her travels, drizzled in olive oil, salted and peppered.
Salad of arugula, roasted red pepper, portabello mushrooms, red onion and leftover asparagus.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Goodness in a clay pot
I must admit that for someone as crazy about food as myself, I am rather indifferent when it comes to considering what I actually put in my body. I have friends who are continually curious about the origins of their food and what was done to it, and scrutinise every nutrition label thoroughly keeping a sharp lookout for artificial preservatives or other undesirable ingredients. I know people who treat their bodies as temples, and try not to pollute it with artificial colourings, sweeteners, or other flavour enhancers. I know people who insist on organic – even though that label has come to carry less and less meaning these days. In any case, I must say this mentality is highly commendable. Unfortunately I have always been of the “eat first, think later” persuasion, and to me pleasure has always trumped principle – if something is delicious, I’ll eat it regardless of what nasty ingredients are in it or what unspeakable processes took place before it got to my table.
One of the chief reasons I think the way I do is my weakness for Singaporean hawker food. From a purist’s point of view, hawker food is sin visited upon sin. It is unhealthy – meals are unbalanced, and food is typically oily, fatty, and high in calories. It is not organic – there is widespread use of MSG and other artificial flavour enhancers. Very little thought, if any, is given to processing methods when selecting ingredients – cost is the primary criteria. This means that if you are concerned about your chickens being free-range rather than battery-raised, your flour being unbleached rather than bleached, your sugar being natural rather than refined, then you probably should steer clear of hawker food. But, and to me this is a huge but, the good shit just tastes so fucking good.
This was weighing on my mind the other day as I returned to one of my perennial faves – Yew Chuan claypot rice at the Golden Mile hawker centre on Beach Road. To explain – claypot cooking refers to the cooking of food in clay pots (duh) over high heat. The pots are usually doused in water prior to use so that they release steam during the cooking process and create a steam wall around the food that locks in its moisture, ensuring a tender, flavourful dish. It’s basically one-pot cooking, with a clay pot. These clay pots also absorb flavour, so if you go to those hawkers who have been using the same pots for decades, the food is likely to be very tasty.
Claypot rice refers to a one-dish meal where rice is steamed in the clay pot, with the subsequent addition of ingredients like salted fish, chicken slices, sausage, and a few leafy greens to satisfy the Health Promotion Board. When served it is then typically topped with a generous serving of sweet soy sauce and drizzled with sesame oil, then tossed to coat the rice with the condiments.
For some reason I don’t remember eating claypot rice before my teenage years – I must have, but I just don’t remember it. What I do remember is eating at the Food Junction at Junction 8 after school, where my two go-tos were the claypot rice and the beef noodles. This was before food courts became even more corporatised and sanitised than they already were back then, so the food was actually decent. The best part about the claypot rice was the burnt bits of rice at the bottom, which I dutifully scraped off at the end of the meal and ate. Carcinogens be damned!
The version at Yew Chuan was introduced to me by my mother, bless her heart, and quickly became one of my favourites. Different people have different methods of introducing food to others – my dad always started with the basic premise that quality was not subjective, so if you didn’t appreciate anything he recommended then there was nothing wrong with the food, but instead it had everything to do with your standards. As a result he treated everything he shared with his children as an education of sorts. There was nothing high-handed or snobbish about it – far from it, in fact – but food for him was an induction into the possibilities of pleasure, so that was how he couched every recommendation. Everything was an announcement, something to be pointed out in a matter-of-fact way. You should eat this – it is good. End of discussion. My mother had a different tack, and always took on a conspiratorial tone when recommending something, as if each of her recommendations were some precious secret to be passed on only to those who can be trusted to use the information for good. Psst – I found this stall selling X, see if you like it. As for me, I try as much as possible to curb myself, but when I find something that I like I tend to beat people about the head to get them to try it. Some call it being a food Nazi, I prefer to think of it as exuberance. Maybe, just maybe, this exuberance sometimes takes on an almost indignant tone. Why for the love of all that is holy have you not tried this yet? You need to go there. And try it. Now.
The claypot rice at Yew Chuan has tremendous flavour, for several reasons. One, they add a healthy portion of salted fish, an unbelievable source of umami. Two, the pots look like they have been in use for ages, and I am sure that contributes to the flavour. Three, they give you the soy sauce (home-brewed, I assume) and sesame oil so you can add however much of it as you want. In addition to all this, the rice is always perfectly cooked (save for the layer of burnt rice at the bottom), the chicken chunks always succulent and tender (they use thigh meat, which is juicier).
This time, as I ate the claypot rice I thought a little harder about the various processes and ingredients that went into the pot of food before me. So many ingredients – each with their own little story, and each story with their own twists and turns. Take the soy sauce, for example. Was it brewed naturally by fermenting soybeans, or was it made chemically from hydrolyzed soy protein? What levels of sodium did it have? If it was sweetened, how was this accomplished – through the addition of refined sugar, cane sugar, or molasses? The soy sauce at Yew Chuan comes in a nondescript squeezy bottle, which completely belies the number of choices made prior to it appearing – as if magically – on your table together with your claypot rice.
But once the smell of the claypot rice hit my nostrils, with that insistent aroma of salted fish, the steam escaping as the lid was removed – all was forgotten. In that instant I could only think of how quickly I could stuff as much of that claypot rice into my mouth as possible. As I was wolfing it down (much too quickly, I might add) I felt my body temperature rise due to the ingesting of the still-hot rice, and beads of sweat starting to form around my temples. And yet I still kept reaching for more, more of this sweet, salty, savoury goodness in a pot – consumed solely by the desire to eat, blissfully oblivious to everything else. Conversation slowed. I gave monosyllabic answers to any questions I was asked, and ceded conversation-making duties to someone else at the table, I didn’t care who.
This is not to say that the claypot rice at Yew Chuan is artificial in any way. I honestly do not know. All I know is that I am a fool for it.
In short, I am a lost cause. In my line of work I am exposed to many processed foods, and am much more aware of the choices made in their production than ever before. I know what manufacturers do to enhance flavour, improve colour, impart aroma – naturally or artificially. I know that almost everything is a choice, and when you buy a finished product you often cede thousands of choices up to the many individuals who have worked to get you that finished product. Many of these choices are not made with your long-term well being in mind. I know all that. But when shit is that good, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
One of the chief reasons I think the way I do is my weakness for Singaporean hawker food. From a purist’s point of view, hawker food is sin visited upon sin. It is unhealthy – meals are unbalanced, and food is typically oily, fatty, and high in calories. It is not organic – there is widespread use of MSG and other artificial flavour enhancers. Very little thought, if any, is given to processing methods when selecting ingredients – cost is the primary criteria. This means that if you are concerned about your chickens being free-range rather than battery-raised, your flour being unbleached rather than bleached, your sugar being natural rather than refined, then you probably should steer clear of hawker food. But, and to me this is a huge but, the good shit just tastes so fucking good.
This was weighing on my mind the other day as I returned to one of my perennial faves – Yew Chuan claypot rice at the Golden Mile hawker centre on Beach Road. To explain – claypot cooking refers to the cooking of food in clay pots (duh) over high heat. The pots are usually doused in water prior to use so that they release steam during the cooking process and create a steam wall around the food that locks in its moisture, ensuring a tender, flavourful dish. It’s basically one-pot cooking, with a clay pot. These clay pots also absorb flavour, so if you go to those hawkers who have been using the same pots for decades, the food is likely to be very tasty.
Claypot rice refers to a one-dish meal where rice is steamed in the clay pot, with the subsequent addition of ingredients like salted fish, chicken slices, sausage, and a few leafy greens to satisfy the Health Promotion Board. When served it is then typically topped with a generous serving of sweet soy sauce and drizzled with sesame oil, then tossed to coat the rice with the condiments.
For some reason I don’t remember eating claypot rice before my teenage years – I must have, but I just don’t remember it. What I do remember is eating at the Food Junction at Junction 8 after school, where my two go-tos were the claypot rice and the beef noodles. This was before food courts became even more corporatised and sanitised than they already were back then, so the food was actually decent. The best part about the claypot rice was the burnt bits of rice at the bottom, which I dutifully scraped off at the end of the meal and ate. Carcinogens be damned!
The version at Yew Chuan was introduced to me by my mother, bless her heart, and quickly became one of my favourites. Different people have different methods of introducing food to others – my dad always started with the basic premise that quality was not subjective, so if you didn’t appreciate anything he recommended then there was nothing wrong with the food, but instead it had everything to do with your standards. As a result he treated everything he shared with his children as an education of sorts. There was nothing high-handed or snobbish about it – far from it, in fact – but food for him was an induction into the possibilities of pleasure, so that was how he couched every recommendation. Everything was an announcement, something to be pointed out in a matter-of-fact way. You should eat this – it is good. End of discussion. My mother had a different tack, and always took on a conspiratorial tone when recommending something, as if each of her recommendations were some precious secret to be passed on only to those who can be trusted to use the information for good. Psst – I found this stall selling X, see if you like it. As for me, I try as much as possible to curb myself, but when I find something that I like I tend to beat people about the head to get them to try it. Some call it being a food Nazi, I prefer to think of it as exuberance. Maybe, just maybe, this exuberance sometimes takes on an almost indignant tone. Why for the love of all that is holy have you not tried this yet? You need to go there. And try it. Now.
The claypot rice at Yew Chuan has tremendous flavour, for several reasons. One, they add a healthy portion of salted fish, an unbelievable source of umami. Two, the pots look like they have been in use for ages, and I am sure that contributes to the flavour. Three, they give you the soy sauce (home-brewed, I assume) and sesame oil so you can add however much of it as you want. In addition to all this, the rice is always perfectly cooked (save for the layer of burnt rice at the bottom), the chicken chunks always succulent and tender (they use thigh meat, which is juicier).
This time, as I ate the claypot rice I thought a little harder about the various processes and ingredients that went into the pot of food before me. So many ingredients – each with their own little story, and each story with their own twists and turns. Take the soy sauce, for example. Was it brewed naturally by fermenting soybeans, or was it made chemically from hydrolyzed soy protein? What levels of sodium did it have? If it was sweetened, how was this accomplished – through the addition of refined sugar, cane sugar, or molasses? The soy sauce at Yew Chuan comes in a nondescript squeezy bottle, which completely belies the number of choices made prior to it appearing – as if magically – on your table together with your claypot rice.
But once the smell of the claypot rice hit my nostrils, with that insistent aroma of salted fish, the steam escaping as the lid was removed – all was forgotten. In that instant I could only think of how quickly I could stuff as much of that claypot rice into my mouth as possible. As I was wolfing it down (much too quickly, I might add) I felt my body temperature rise due to the ingesting of the still-hot rice, and beads of sweat starting to form around my temples. And yet I still kept reaching for more, more of this sweet, salty, savoury goodness in a pot – consumed solely by the desire to eat, blissfully oblivious to everything else. Conversation slowed. I gave monosyllabic answers to any questions I was asked, and ceded conversation-making duties to someone else at the table, I didn’t care who.
This is not to say that the claypot rice at Yew Chuan is artificial in any way. I honestly do not know. All I know is that I am a fool for it.
In short, I am a lost cause. In my line of work I am exposed to many processed foods, and am much more aware of the choices made in their production than ever before. I know what manufacturers do to enhance flavour, improve colour, impart aroma – naturally or artificially. I know that almost everything is a choice, and when you buy a finished product you often cede thousands of choices up to the many individuals who have worked to get you that finished product. Many of these choices are not made with your long-term well being in mind. I know all that. But when shit is that good, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Dim sum dollies
Victoria Peak
181 Orchard Road (Orchard Central)
#11-01/02
Tel: +65 6238 7666
My love of dim sum has been well documented in these pages (and well evidenced by my physique), so when Winnie told me about the latest HK import to hit Singapore’s shores – Victoria Peak at Orchard Central – I immediately filed it away for future reference. Now, Winnie is one of my dearest friends and has many strong points – but a discerning palate is sadly not among them. She is also prone to hyperbole, especially when it comes to recommending restaurants, so I normally take what she says with a huge pinch of salt. But when the time rolled around for Winnie to buy us a meal, I suggested this place – so she could put her money where her mouth was.
(I felt a little tinge of guilt at going through with swindling the treat out of her, since the original reason for it was very trivial. But hey – who’s going to pass on a free lunch, right? I admit, I am a shameless person.)
Victoria Peak was brought here by the group that was responsible for Victoria City Restaurant in Hong Kong – apparently a multi-award winning restaurant but sadly, one that I have not tried. It opened atop Orchard Central, amidst a roof garden, about seven or so months ago. Any foodie worth his salt can tell you that you never go to a new restaurant within a month of their opening – instead you wait for them to iron the kinks out in their menu or in the rest of their operations. Then normally you wait a few months for your friends to try it and tell you what the good dishes are (and what to avoid).
Victoria Peak professes to be the only Chinese restaurant in Singapore that also specialises in wine, and indeed the glass columns that you see as you walk in are stacked full of bottles. But while I did not peruse the wine list carefully, my awe soon turned to a minor disappointment, for a different reason. The tea at Victoria Peak is a bit of a letdown – the selection is limited and the quality decidedly second-rate. Might it not have been a good idea to carve out some of the wine budget to get some good Chinese tea?
Now, I concede, it is a common gripe that Chinese restaurants typically shit the bed when it comes to wine – the large majority have laughable selections of undrinkable piss. If you go to the top end restaurants, granted, you can get very extensive winelists, with impressive arrays of premium wines. Most times this is because the best restaurants are typically housed within hotels and have access to the purchasing power and expertise of seasoned hospitality personnel. But I have never been to a Chinese restaurant with a thoughtful winelist, painstakingly crafted to match the restaurant’s cuisine while reflecting the individual character of the sommelier or wine director. Perhaps Victoria Peak’s winelist is just such a winelist, but I did not have the chance to find out.
In any case, it is a Chinese restaurant, and when I go to a Chinese restaurant, I want some good Chinese tea.
My other initial impressions of Victoria Peak, though, are more positive. The décor manages to avoid the cliché of typical Chinese restaurants, and the soothing green motif is complemented well by the natural light let in by the large glass panels facing east. The service personnel are delightful – polite and eager to please, all the while remaining the epitome of professionalism. Throughout the meal they were nothing but a credit to their profession.
The food is a little harder to place. It is not bad – far from it – and I can honestly say that I enjoyed almost everything I had. I cannot say it is spectacular – of all the various dishes we ordered not a single one screamed out at us, begging us to return. Yet it would be a tremendous disservice to the restaurant to pass the food off merely as good. It is more than that. As dim sum goes, it is definitely one of the better places to go in Singapore. Standards taste like they should, dishes are executed well and with care.
(Dishes to try: there is a dish of poached rice in seafood stock that is quite remarkable. Grains of rice are poached till they are partially cooked, then served with a consommé containing scallops, fish slices, prawns and other seafood. You add the grains to the consommé and eat it like you would drink soup or eat porridge. The grains are crunchy and have a tinge of wok fire, while the consommé is light and flavourful, and the freshness of the seafood rounds out what is a rather marvellous dish. Also worth trying is the shark cartilage soup – peppery and not as creamy as versions at other restaurants.
Dishes to avoid: the roasted pork – siu yoke. The slices of pork are cubed for uniformity, which means that the fat is cut away and you’re left with small, dry pieces of meat. The skin doesn’t crackle like it should, and the pieces of pork are paired with a very ordinary dijon mustard. Also not up to scratch was the XO carrot cake – the texture was too mushy and it was a pale shadow of versions that I have enjoyed elsewhere.)
At their prices, I suppose they would be considered a treat for a large majority of Singaporeans. And if they are viewed as such – as a place to go for a special occasion – then Victoria Peak disappoints. It is solid without being spectacular; it comforts without inspiring. But it is not excessively expensive either, and nowhere near the stratospheric prices you pay at your Humble Houses or your Hai Tien Los. If money were no object this would be a great place to become a regular of, to come for Sunday brunch every few weeks. I suppose that in this – as with all things else in life – it all depends on your point of view.
In sum, though, I rather enjoyed my trip to Victoria Peak. Good restaurants are easy to find. Good company – not so much, and I was more than grateful to break bread with a couple of good friends.
181 Orchard Road (Orchard Central)
#11-01/02
Tel: +65 6238 7666
My love of dim sum has been well documented in these pages (and well evidenced by my physique), so when Winnie told me about the latest HK import to hit Singapore’s shores – Victoria Peak at Orchard Central – I immediately filed it away for future reference. Now, Winnie is one of my dearest friends and has many strong points – but a discerning palate is sadly not among them. She is also prone to hyperbole, especially when it comes to recommending restaurants, so I normally take what she says with a huge pinch of salt. But when the time rolled around for Winnie to buy us a meal, I suggested this place – so she could put her money where her mouth was.
(I felt a little tinge of guilt at going through with swindling the treat out of her, since the original reason for it was very trivial. But hey – who’s going to pass on a free lunch, right? I admit, I am a shameless person.)
Victoria Peak was brought here by the group that was responsible for Victoria City Restaurant in Hong Kong – apparently a multi-award winning restaurant but sadly, one that I have not tried. It opened atop Orchard Central, amidst a roof garden, about seven or so months ago. Any foodie worth his salt can tell you that you never go to a new restaurant within a month of their opening – instead you wait for them to iron the kinks out in their menu or in the rest of their operations. Then normally you wait a few months for your friends to try it and tell you what the good dishes are (and what to avoid).
Victoria Peak professes to be the only Chinese restaurant in Singapore that also specialises in wine, and indeed the glass columns that you see as you walk in are stacked full of bottles. But while I did not peruse the wine list carefully, my awe soon turned to a minor disappointment, for a different reason. The tea at Victoria Peak is a bit of a letdown – the selection is limited and the quality decidedly second-rate. Might it not have been a good idea to carve out some of the wine budget to get some good Chinese tea?
Now, I concede, it is a common gripe that Chinese restaurants typically shit the bed when it comes to wine – the large majority have laughable selections of undrinkable piss. If you go to the top end restaurants, granted, you can get very extensive winelists, with impressive arrays of premium wines. Most times this is because the best restaurants are typically housed within hotels and have access to the purchasing power and expertise of seasoned hospitality personnel. But I have never been to a Chinese restaurant with a thoughtful winelist, painstakingly crafted to match the restaurant’s cuisine while reflecting the individual character of the sommelier or wine director. Perhaps Victoria Peak’s winelist is just such a winelist, but I did not have the chance to find out.
In any case, it is a Chinese restaurant, and when I go to a Chinese restaurant, I want some good Chinese tea.
My other initial impressions of Victoria Peak, though, are more positive. The décor manages to avoid the cliché of typical Chinese restaurants, and the soothing green motif is complemented well by the natural light let in by the large glass panels facing east. The service personnel are delightful – polite and eager to please, all the while remaining the epitome of professionalism. Throughout the meal they were nothing but a credit to their profession.
The food is a little harder to place. It is not bad – far from it – and I can honestly say that I enjoyed almost everything I had. I cannot say it is spectacular – of all the various dishes we ordered not a single one screamed out at us, begging us to return. Yet it would be a tremendous disservice to the restaurant to pass the food off merely as good. It is more than that. As dim sum goes, it is definitely one of the better places to go in Singapore. Standards taste like they should, dishes are executed well and with care.
(Dishes to try: there is a dish of poached rice in seafood stock that is quite remarkable. Grains of rice are poached till they are partially cooked, then served with a consommé containing scallops, fish slices, prawns and other seafood. You add the grains to the consommé and eat it like you would drink soup or eat porridge. The grains are crunchy and have a tinge of wok fire, while the consommé is light and flavourful, and the freshness of the seafood rounds out what is a rather marvellous dish. Also worth trying is the shark cartilage soup – peppery and not as creamy as versions at other restaurants.
Dishes to avoid: the roasted pork – siu yoke. The slices of pork are cubed for uniformity, which means that the fat is cut away and you’re left with small, dry pieces of meat. The skin doesn’t crackle like it should, and the pieces of pork are paired with a very ordinary dijon mustard. Also not up to scratch was the XO carrot cake – the texture was too mushy and it was a pale shadow of versions that I have enjoyed elsewhere.)
At their prices, I suppose they would be considered a treat for a large majority of Singaporeans. And if they are viewed as such – as a place to go for a special occasion – then Victoria Peak disappoints. It is solid without being spectacular; it comforts without inspiring. But it is not excessively expensive either, and nowhere near the stratospheric prices you pay at your Humble Houses or your Hai Tien Los. If money were no object this would be a great place to become a regular of, to come for Sunday brunch every few weeks. I suppose that in this – as with all things else in life – it all depends on your point of view.
In sum, though, I rather enjoyed my trip to Victoria Peak. Good restaurants are easy to find. Good company – not so much, and I was more than grateful to break bread with a couple of good friends.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
If you can't stand the heat...
G7 Sin Ma Live Seafood Restaurant
161 Geylang Lorong 3
Tel: +65 6743 2201
There’s a crying baby at Table 20. The rowdy college students at 31 want their waters topped up. The fussy couple in the corner is sending back a dish. That’s going to piss off the line cooks, who are harried and overworked, drenched in sweat and red-faced from the inexorable heat of the kitchen. The waiters are running to and fro, displaying almost balletic grace to avoid one another while balancing any number of large plates on their forearms. The busboys are out on their cigarette break, so nobody is clearing 15 and 36 even though the customers left ten minutes ago. Meanwhile there’s a group of 8 standing impatiently at the door, tapping their feet to the same beat. The yelling – so much yelling. Now, what would you do?
A restaurant, on any given night, is often an exhibition in controlled chaos. So many people – some of whom want to eat, some of whom want to drink, some of whom just want to make it through the night alive. Nowhere is this pandemonium better observed than in a tze char style restaurant, where anything goes. I was just at one such place the other night, and lived to tell the tale.
I had a craving for frogs’ legs porridge that night, so when the question of restaurant choice came up I immediately ventured the suggestion. To explain, this is a dish of edible frogs, stewed and made with congee. Frogs’ legs are also served in other preparations – stir-fried with ginger and onion, braised in kung pow sauce, and so forth. Now if you’ve eaten this dish in Singapore you will know that there is only one place to get them, and all others pale in comparison. Next to the former Allson Hotel on Victoria St there is a small eating place, and one of the stalls there sells frogs’ legs porridge in the evenings and all the way through to around 3am. If I am not wrong this is a branch or somehow related to the one at Geylang Lorong 9, but in my opinion is just that bit better than the Geylang version.
In any case we did not want the hassle of paying ERP to get to Victoria St (and to hunt for limited parking in the area) and so decided to head to Geylang instead. Now, there are generally a few options that people go to for frogs’ legs in Geylang – in addition to the aforementioned Lorong 9 stall that specialises in frogs’ legs there is also Sin Ma, a larger establishment at Lorong 3 that also serves seafood and other dishes. I had been to Sin Ma once previously and remember thinking that it wasn’t too bad (just nowhere near the Victoria St stall), and so we settled for this place.
The previous time I was there, though, was not a Saturday night at dinner-time, and so in no way prepared me for the chaos that presented itself. One of the more problematic issues at Sin Ma is that they do not have a proper entrance. The dining space only has two of four walls, with the other two opened up to the public, and tables spilling over to the sidewalk. Now, this is a great design solution that ventilates the space naturally, but it also means that the restaurant cannot regulate the inflow of customers. People show up from all directions, walk in and plonk themselves down at any empty table, or mill around until they can find one. Not only does this create a lot of confusion, but it also means that there is a lot of unnecessary human traffic. The captains and waitstaff thus have to have a heightened awareness of their surroundings – of who just left and who just walked in – to ensure that they get to everyone. Of course, they don’t succeed all of the time. It is a recipe for chaos.
Even so, this can be somewhat mitigated by strong processes (and of course, efficient workers). But processes are not the strong point at Sin Ma, or at least they are not observably so. Waiters don’t have a dedicated section, for one. In any case the end result is a lot of people running around and moving a lot more than they have to. It doesn’t help that they probably bit off more than they can chew. In an effort to maximise the revenue-generating space at the restaurant, the tables and chairs are squeezed impossibly close to one another – to the point of discomfort. All those hungry people in a room together – and not enough people to give them what they want, and you get a situation like I described above.
Of course, this is an inconvenience to be gladly suffered if the food is good. Unfortunately, while quite decent and fairly priced, it is not good enough. We ordered the kung pow frogs’ legs with a side of congee, hotplate tofu and stir-fried kai lan. The frogs’ legs came first, and we attacked them with gusto. The frogs they used were nowhere near as succulent as the Victoria St edition, and the kung pow sauce not as spicy or flavourful. But they were decent enough, and at $22 for five – they were quite a good deal. Yet we were almost halfway through them and our other dishes had not arrived.
We realised later that due to a mix-up, our food had been sent to the wrong table – where it had been sitting for 15 minutes as the other table waited for a runner to take the food back. Once the captain realised the mistake, he brought the food over from the other table to ours. There are just so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. First – and most inconsequential of all – we had ordered a hotplate dish, which is typically served piping hot and sizzling, right off the pass. Needless to say, it was cold and no longer sizzling when served to us. But more importantly – there has to be something either legally or ethically wrong with serving food that has technically already been served to another table. At the very least it is probably a sanitary issue. Who knows what the other table has done to the food? We, of course, sent the food back and requested replacements. Now, I am usually loathe to send food back in any kind of restaurant, but I felt justified in this instance.
I have said it before and I will say it again – the processes are what separate the men from the boys in the restaurant business. The mark of a well-run restaurant, food aside, is a structure in place that regulates workflow, maximises productivity, and – importantly – is simple enough for even idiots to follow. Without structure, work degenerates into chaos. People move around more than they have to, creating motion waste. Mistakes are made, and more people get called in to fix a problem that was avoidable in the first place – creating rework waste.
From the looks of it, though, Sin Ma appears to be doing well despite my criticisms – which shows how much I know. The place was hopping on a Saturday night – it was already crowded when we got there, and people were still coming in when we left. The food is actually not bad, but it is by no means superb. The prices are reasonable – although I’m not sure whether that can be said for their big-ticket seafood items like crab and lobster, since we did not have those. So I am not surprised that Singaporeans – accustomed to terrible service at F&B outlets – continue to come back. I, on the other hand, probably will not.
161 Geylang Lorong 3
Tel: +65 6743 2201
There’s a crying baby at Table 20. The rowdy college students at 31 want their waters topped up. The fussy couple in the corner is sending back a dish. That’s going to piss off the line cooks, who are harried and overworked, drenched in sweat and red-faced from the inexorable heat of the kitchen. The waiters are running to and fro, displaying almost balletic grace to avoid one another while balancing any number of large plates on their forearms. The busboys are out on their cigarette break, so nobody is clearing 15 and 36 even though the customers left ten minutes ago. Meanwhile there’s a group of 8 standing impatiently at the door, tapping their feet to the same beat. The yelling – so much yelling. Now, what would you do?
A restaurant, on any given night, is often an exhibition in controlled chaos. So many people – some of whom want to eat, some of whom want to drink, some of whom just want to make it through the night alive. Nowhere is this pandemonium better observed than in a tze char style restaurant, where anything goes. I was just at one such place the other night, and lived to tell the tale.
I had a craving for frogs’ legs porridge that night, so when the question of restaurant choice came up I immediately ventured the suggestion. To explain, this is a dish of edible frogs, stewed and made with congee. Frogs’ legs are also served in other preparations – stir-fried with ginger and onion, braised in kung pow sauce, and so forth. Now if you’ve eaten this dish in Singapore you will know that there is only one place to get them, and all others pale in comparison. Next to the former Allson Hotel on Victoria St there is a small eating place, and one of the stalls there sells frogs’ legs porridge in the evenings and all the way through to around 3am. If I am not wrong this is a branch or somehow related to the one at Geylang Lorong 9, but in my opinion is just that bit better than the Geylang version.
In any case we did not want the hassle of paying ERP to get to Victoria St (and to hunt for limited parking in the area) and so decided to head to Geylang instead. Now, there are generally a few options that people go to for frogs’ legs in Geylang – in addition to the aforementioned Lorong 9 stall that specialises in frogs’ legs there is also Sin Ma, a larger establishment at Lorong 3 that also serves seafood and other dishes. I had been to Sin Ma once previously and remember thinking that it wasn’t too bad (just nowhere near the Victoria St stall), and so we settled for this place.
The previous time I was there, though, was not a Saturday night at dinner-time, and so in no way prepared me for the chaos that presented itself. One of the more problematic issues at Sin Ma is that they do not have a proper entrance. The dining space only has two of four walls, with the other two opened up to the public, and tables spilling over to the sidewalk. Now, this is a great design solution that ventilates the space naturally, but it also means that the restaurant cannot regulate the inflow of customers. People show up from all directions, walk in and plonk themselves down at any empty table, or mill around until they can find one. Not only does this create a lot of confusion, but it also means that there is a lot of unnecessary human traffic. The captains and waitstaff thus have to have a heightened awareness of their surroundings – of who just left and who just walked in – to ensure that they get to everyone. Of course, they don’t succeed all of the time. It is a recipe for chaos.
Even so, this can be somewhat mitigated by strong processes (and of course, efficient workers). But processes are not the strong point at Sin Ma, or at least they are not observably so. Waiters don’t have a dedicated section, for one. In any case the end result is a lot of people running around and moving a lot more than they have to. It doesn’t help that they probably bit off more than they can chew. In an effort to maximise the revenue-generating space at the restaurant, the tables and chairs are squeezed impossibly close to one another – to the point of discomfort. All those hungry people in a room together – and not enough people to give them what they want, and you get a situation like I described above.
Of course, this is an inconvenience to be gladly suffered if the food is good. Unfortunately, while quite decent and fairly priced, it is not good enough. We ordered the kung pow frogs’ legs with a side of congee, hotplate tofu and stir-fried kai lan. The frogs’ legs came first, and we attacked them with gusto. The frogs they used were nowhere near as succulent as the Victoria St edition, and the kung pow sauce not as spicy or flavourful. But they were decent enough, and at $22 for five – they were quite a good deal. Yet we were almost halfway through them and our other dishes had not arrived.
We realised later that due to a mix-up, our food had been sent to the wrong table – where it had been sitting for 15 minutes as the other table waited for a runner to take the food back. Once the captain realised the mistake, he brought the food over from the other table to ours. There are just so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. First – and most inconsequential of all – we had ordered a hotplate dish, which is typically served piping hot and sizzling, right off the pass. Needless to say, it was cold and no longer sizzling when served to us. But more importantly – there has to be something either legally or ethically wrong with serving food that has technically already been served to another table. At the very least it is probably a sanitary issue. Who knows what the other table has done to the food? We, of course, sent the food back and requested replacements. Now, I am usually loathe to send food back in any kind of restaurant, but I felt justified in this instance.
I have said it before and I will say it again – the processes are what separate the men from the boys in the restaurant business. The mark of a well-run restaurant, food aside, is a structure in place that regulates workflow, maximises productivity, and – importantly – is simple enough for even idiots to follow. Without structure, work degenerates into chaos. People move around more than they have to, creating motion waste. Mistakes are made, and more people get called in to fix a problem that was avoidable in the first place – creating rework waste.
From the looks of it, though, Sin Ma appears to be doing well despite my criticisms – which shows how much I know. The place was hopping on a Saturday night – it was already crowded when we got there, and people were still coming in when we left. The food is actually not bad, but it is by no means superb. The prices are reasonable – although I’m not sure whether that can be said for their big-ticket seafood items like crab and lobster, since we did not have those. So I am not surprised that Singaporeans – accustomed to terrible service at F&B outlets – continue to come back. I, on the other hand, probably will not.
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