The fabric of community

Restoran Oversea
No. 100 Beach Road, #01-27 to #01-37,
Shaw Leisure Gallery, Shaw Tower
Singapore 189702
Tel: +65 6294 2638

I have begun to feel more and more that doing business, as it were, is about so much more than just dollars and cents. It’s about, among other things, making an imprint on the fabric of society – about bettering the lives of others through your product or service. The best business ideas come out of making someone’s life just that bit easier, efficient or enjoyable. It sounds trite, but it is, I think, rather apt especially in the restaurant world, or small business in general. You don't just go to a restaurant because you want to take it easy and not have to cook or wash up; you go because you want to enjoy yourself and have a good time eating out. The best restaurants, in my view, are the ones that transform their local community and become an indelible part of it. They become – slowly, bit by bit – part of the lives of their customers, until a community coalesces around them. Families trooping to a particular restaurant for regular Sunday dinners, or couples going back to a place because it’s the restaurant they went to on their first date – a restaurant is often so much more than just a place to eat.

So when restaurants close, the loss is not just the loss of a place to eat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a fan of regeneration as anyone else, because it also means that a new set of folks are pursuing their dreams, making their own imprint on the landscape and community. I can only hope that the ones who were there before have moved on to bigger, better dreams. In any case, the ground floor restaurant space at Shaw Leisure Gallery – for so long Ah Yat Seafood Palace – was recently opened again as the first Singapore branch of Restoran Oversea (海外天), the famous Jalan Imbi restaurant in KL renowned for its char siew.

I met Winnie for dinner there last night, and the new owners had definitely spruced it up a little bit. A sleek if somewhat overwrought bar counter defined the room, and the fish tanks that had housed Ah Yat’s live seafood were replaced by booths. A ceiling to floor screen marked out what was for all intents and purposes a private room. There was a reasonable crowd for a restaurant that had only been open for a month, but it was by no means packed.

You have to pre-order the char siew, as you do with their 功夫汤 – a soup specialty of theirs, which Winnie had done. When the char siew came it glistened under the bright white lights of the restaurants, and it was all we could do to hold off attacking it while we took a photo for posterity. I’ve met people who are religious about taking photos of their food and I always wonder what they do with the photos, and why they take photo-taking to the extents that they do. Some don’t even consider the aesthetic quality of their subject. I’ve seen people take photos of green bean soup, which looks – even if you do it well – like an unidentifiable green mush. Why do they do it? I can never understand. For me the enjoyment of the meal comes first, and sometimes I am so overwhelmed by the urge to eat that photos be damned. And if the photo-taking puts off what happens to be perfectly charming conversation and the mood of the moment, then I often think better of it. In this case I had promised my colleague that I would take a photo of the char siew just to show him the quantity you get, which isn’t a lot for twenty bucks.


But I suppose you do pay that sort of money for quality, which the Oversea char siew definitely is. Fatty, succulent and carved into substantial enough cubes to be a gloriously meaty bite, it compared very well with the version in KL and indeed other versions elsewhere. It was a little sweet at first taste, but then I found that eating it together with the Chinese parsley added tartness and improved the experience.

The 功夫汤 – gongfu soup – was a cheesy take on gongfu tea: medicinal soup double boiled in clay teapots. What this meant was that by pouring the soup out into miniature teacups, you could drink the soup on its own without the ingredients. Of course, you could also open up the teapot to get at the various pork cubes, dried scallops and all other manner of goodness hidden within. It was certainly a very interesting presentation and it didn’t hurt that the soup was delicious – intensely flavoured, yet light and refreshing.

I think that since it is early days for the restaurant, they are still working out what their popular dishes are, and the right quantities of ingredients to stock. As a result, they had run out of several of the things I had wanted to try. The XO duck tongues, claypot pork ribs and roast duck were all out. We wound up ordering a couple of other "second choice" dishes to round out our meal, but they didn’t hit the heights of the char siew and the soup. The sambal eggplant could have been great, but they hadn’t salted the eggplant enough beforehand so it was still a little bitter; and they hadn’t cooked it long enough, for the skin on the eggplant was a tad too firm for my liking. I like my eggplant mushier. The teppanyaki beef rib was well flavoured and tender, but alas, nothing out of the ordinary.

Expanding overseas (pardon the pun) is never an easy thing, especially for restaurant chains. Setting up a whole new supply chain, sourcing and procuring ingredients, hiring, dealing with a whole new set of regulations, approvals, permits – it is a significant investment of time and resources. So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not planning to stay. I hope Restoran Oversea is here to stay; from what I have seen I have no doubt that they do good work and can become a local institution. For their sake I look forward to many more families trooping there for their Sunday dinners and couples headed there for first dates or anniversaries.