Of pedigree, and tradition

Roland Restaurant
Blk 89 Marine Parade Central, #06-750
Tel: +65 6440 8205


There are people for whom eating is a fad. For these people, it is important to keep up to date on the moving and shaking in the restaurant scene, and try the new restaurants as soon as they pop up. I, however, place myself squarely in the opposite camp. I like to search out the old restaurants – the ones that have been around for ages, the ones with tradition. In the restaurant business, time is the greatest arbiter of quality. You can’t keep customers coming back through good times and bad, if you didn’t put good food on the table. You just can’t. Don’t get me wrong: to suggest that just because a restaurant has been around for a while, their food will necessarily be spectacular is questionable logic at best. But you can’t go very wrong.

Roland Restaurant is one of those restaurants in Singapore that have pedigree up the wazoo – Chef Roland is from the family who used to run the famous Palm Beach Seafood Restaurant along Upper East Coast Road. This was back in the days when Upper East Coast Road was literally along the coast, before they reclaimed some land and built the ECP. Palm Beach was one of the several seafood places along that stretch, which all started from the same humble beginnings – in attap structures with zinc roofs, providing good food in mosquito-infested, “al fresco” settings. You have to drive down that stretch to get to my house, and I remember trundling down that road as a kid in the back of my dad’s beat up Datsun 1207. As I grew up, the restaurants slowly left one by one, to make way for condos and fancy residential developments. (The only one left standing today – Hua Yu Wee – is still going strong, in that beautiful colonial bungalow-on-stilts of theirs. I always mean to go back there, but the word on the street is that the quality has taken a tremendous dip, and so I am afraid of ruining my impression of the place.)

In any case, Palm Beach eventually closed for good, but Chef Roland eventually trained at the famous Sin Leong Restaurant. When Chef Sin Leong decided to hang up his wok, he left the restaurant to his disciple, who renamed it after himself. To this day, they are in the same, quirky location – at the top floor of a multi-storey carpark in Marine Parade.

If being the progeny of two famous franchises isn’t enough, consider these additional titbits: the family that ran Palm Beach Seafood is widely credited with inventing chilli crab – a dish that has now achieved ubiquitous, “national dish” status in Singapore. Also, Chef Sin Leong, Chef Roland’s mentor, was one of the four “heavenly kings” of the culinary world back then who created yusheng – the raw fish dish that is a must at Chinese New Year dinners now. Put all this together, and it is like saying Roland Restaurant is like Man O’War, Citation, Secretariat and Ruffian all rolled into one. I struggle to think of another franchise with as much pedigree as this one.

In any case, we got together for Sophia’s farewell the other day, and it fell to me to suggest a place. I hadn’t come back here in ages and, unsure of the quality, was a little hesitant about recommending it. But after considering the other options for good crabs in the East, there didn’t seem to be many other options: Eng Seng would have sold out by the time we got there, the seafood stretch at East Coast Park was a little difficult for everyone else to get to, and No Signboard at Geylang was in a pretty dodgy area. It was a good thing that Sophia seconded the suggestion, but she also cautioned that the place was sometimes hit-and-miss.

It might literally have been twenty years since I last visited the restaurant, and upon walking in I had no recollection of how it used to look like or how it had changed. What it does look like now is your standard banquet-style Chinese restaurant. For a Friday evening, it was surprisingly empty – apart from us there were only about six or seven other tables, and the restaurant was less than half full. I did a double take – surely this was not a good sign?

I needn’t have worried, because the food that Roland puts out is still – and I hate to use such a cliché but it is rather appropriate while eating crabs – finger-licking good. Roland has amassed a small array of signature dishes – culled from the history of Palm Beach and Sin Leong, and these do not disappoint. The prawns in soy sauce were succulent and flavoured well, while the braised pork ribs melted off the bone. Deep-fried you tiao came crispy and had good volume, without being too oily; and the sambal watercress was strangely addictive. The Peking duck was a little dry, and perhaps the most lacklustre of the dishes, but by then the kitchen had earned a reprieve.

And the crabs – who could forget the crabs? We ordered them two ways: in their signature chilli sauce as well as in a salted egg batter. Now, chilli crab may be a national dish, but it is one of those things that have as many variants as chefs, and nobody can agree on what the truly definitive version is. Some make it sweet, some make it spicy; some add crab roe, others add egg. Roland’s version was very good and had impressive amounts of crab roe – which I liked – but may have been a little too sweet for me, and definitely not spicy enough. The salted egg treatment was also, unfortunately, quite mediocre. The crabs themselves were meaty and fresh, though, so say what you will, but those dishes still disappeared in a flash. Li Jade was thoughtful enough to stop by even though she had eaten already – but she was unfortunate enough to arrive just as the crabs were served, so nobody paid her any attention.

Obviously, the best part of eating crabs is getting to dip mantous into the sauce and slurp it up. Roland’s mantous are bite-sized, which make them easier to handle with chopsticks, and also easier to polish off. I lost count of how many of those little buggers I ate, and by the end of the meal the serving dish with the chilli sauce was absolutely spotless.

The highlight of my night was the fried seafood mee sua at the end of the meal, to fill whatever empty spaces in the stomach you could possibly have after eight or nine courses of protein. It was fried well, had good, understated, nuanced flavour – and the noodles were very tasty.

We were there for quite a while – during what we thought would have been a peak hour – but the crowd never got larger. I felt a little sad for this bastion of the culinary scene. They’re still around, so they can’t be doing too badly, but I can’t help but feel that all the new restaurants popping up are dealing significant blows to the old ones.

My opinion may be coloured by nostalgia and love of tradition, but it isn’t too coloured that I cannot admit – Roland is not amazing. They will, sadly, not blow you away. The signature dishes are very good and very honest, but they are clearly not one of the big boys in the restaurant scene any more. From a subjective standpoint, I like Roland, and would go back in a heartbeat – because the food is satisfying and good value for money. But from an objective, professional standpoint – the place lacks the exquisite treatments of the finer restaurants around, and the oomph of the better tze char places.

As the demography of Singaporeans changes, and their tastes along with it, Roland is slowly but surely becoming outmoded. You and I from a certain generation may still appreciate their signature dishes, and the way they cook these dishes, but sooner or later more and more will beg to differ. It’s like watching Roger Federer play tennis now. He is still a wonderful player, but no longer the best, and try as he might it is only a matter of time before he is surpassed by more and more up-and-coming players. Watching him play is only going to get more and more painful for his fans – maybe not now, but surely in two or three years’ time, if he plays on for that long. The only question is – how much longer can he, and Roland Restaurant, continue to trade on their pedigree?