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.