The Peace Hotel

Wo Peng Eatery (和平饭店)
476 MacPherson Road
Tel: +65 6747 9892

The one thing a good foodie cannot do without is a network of reliable fellow foodies. In a city of any size, new gems open up with incredible frequency, and old favourites lose their lustre from time to time. Without a cadre of scouts it is nigh-on impossible to keep track of the goings-on in Singapore’s culinary scene. However, maintaining such a network is not without its difficulties. First and foremost, not all foodies are created equal. It is tough to find one, let alone a few, to match your own exacting standards and ideas of quality. At the same time, you also want to maintain some diversity within your network. For example, I don’t often go out of my way to try Japanese and Korean food, so I need someone who does so regularly to keep me updated on the good places to go. One needs a network to cover all cuisines, in all locations and neighbourhoods, across all price points.

Victor sent me a message the other day that was uncharacteristically full of exclamation points – claiming that he had discovered a gem in MacPherson. I was initially sceptical, for MacPherson is a sleepy industrial estate that was once littered with manufacturing plants – most of which have since exited the area in search of cheaper rents. But the idea of finding good food in such a forlorn place was a romantic one, and I fell even further in love with the idea once he told me it was Cantonese cuisine cooked by a master chef from Hong Kong. I made a reservation immediately, and spent a good hour scouring the Internet for reviews.

Most of the press on Wo Peng Eatery is very good. The basics are simple and can be found in any blog or press clipping: Julian Tam, who used to cook at the Furama Palace before leaving to open a restaurant chain in Guangzhou, made a triumphant return to Singapore last year when he heard about an open shop space. The resulting eatery pushes out hotel restaurant-worthy cuisine masqueraded as tze char and served in an undistinguished setting.

At first, I wasn’t sure whether or not to place a reservation but did so anyway. It turned out to be irrelevant, in a bad way. We arrived about ten minutes late – (a warning: it is difficult to find parking) – and the person who greeted us had no clue of any reservations made. Upon checking their (handwritten) logbook and finding our reservation, she informed us that there were no available tables. To her credit, she was pretty apologetic about the whole situation, but it still was pretty annoying. What is the whole point of making a reservation, then, if the front of the house is not going to make sure there is a table for you at the time you stipulated? To compound matters, there is no space or seating for you to wait, either in or out of the eatery.

Fortunately for us, business had began to slow – it was approaching 9 o’clock – and it was only another ten minutes before a table opened up. You cannot say that Wo Peng has a spartan décor, but yet you cannot say that it is thoughtfully decorated either. The entire place takes up two shophouse units, has blockish beige walls adorned with lucky Chinese couplets and photos of the chef with many celebrities (a very Asian thing). It is only when they set the table that I realise that this humble eatery has restaurant pretensions – for all its faults Wo Peng does have some good cutlery.

The menu is simple and limited, and from the selection it is again evident that this is no simple tze char place. For one: the soups. These came highly recommended both by Victor and the blogosphere, and we ordered two to try – first the shark cartilage soup with hua jiao, and then a herbal soup with ming mu yu. The shark cartilage soup was excellent, with just a slight taste of ammonia from the shark cartilage but otherwise masked and countered perfectly with the hua jiao. The other soup was also hearty and delicious. My only complaint was that while the former arrived at the start of our meal, the latter only arrived towards the tail end, and only after our prodding of the waitstaff. I like to drink soup before the main course, so this was another on the list of grievances.

The deep-fried fish skin pieces were also excellent – wafer-thin and fried to a crisp. They came with a bowl of superior stock topped with chives, which made for an excellent complement. The simple kai lan (kale) with lean pork slices was fiery and had good wok hei. This was a simple dish that showcased the skill of the kitchen – the kai lan had been blanched to remove its bitterness, but not for so long that it lost its texture. And the masterful use of chilli pepper was impressive given that the chef was not local. For a foreign chef to appreciate the exact nature of the local palate’s inclination towards spice can only imply a curious mind behind the hands at the wok – for, clearly, Singaporean spice is different from Szechuan spice, and much different from the spice in Yue cooking. We also had a dish of braised garoupa head with eggplant and tofu, which was very well executed, save for the unfortunate fact that the eggplant had been cooked to the point where it had lost its texture and flavour.

The big disappointment for the night was the lobster ee mee., which had, again, come highly recommended. The waitstaff that brought the dish out forgot to present the dish at the table and hurried straight to the serving table by the side to begin dividing it up into individual portions. A terrible faux pas that would not be condoned at any good restaurant, but since we were in much humbler surroundings we did not kick up a fuss. Yet when the noodles arrived they were almost unedible, for they had been tossed in too much butter. I never thought I would write those three words together, but now I have. We made our feelings known to the waitress, and were informed that you can request for less butter, or no butter at all. Good information for next time, but a lesson that came at a cost: at $15 a head, the lobster ee mee is not a cheap dish.

The saving grace of the lobster ee mee was a side note that came as a great surprise – for I ate the dish with some of the house-pickled green chillies, which were excellent. Wo Peng also provides house-made sambal that is a little heavy on the dried shrimp, but nonetheless has good flavour and spice. At least these details were well taken care of.

To me, Wo Peng operates at a very strange price point. It is not cheap, by any means, which implies that they are not competing with the cheaper tze char places. And yes, it may not ordinarily be as expensive as the top restaurants, but if you order the big-ticket items you can actually come close. The question then is – wouldn’t most people who are already paying that much for a meal then throw on a little more cash and head to a nice hotel restaurant with a similar if not better quality of food, but much better service and surroundings? The things that Wo Peng has in its favour would then be its neighbourhood feel, and portion size (you do get slightly bigger portions here than at top restaurants). Yet still it is a dangerous space to work in - when people are either thinking of a weekday dining out option because they are lazy to cook, or racking their brains for a destination on a special occasion: it is hard to see Wo Peng at the forefront of anyone's mind.

There is no question that you will have a good meal at Wo Peng, the chef is too skilled for that not to happen. Yet its restaurant pretensions are cruelly exposed. It is the various processes essential to a restaurant’s operations that separate the men from the boys: the big houses have these nailed down, where the pretenders often struggle. If the front of house operations can live up to the food that comes out of the kitchen, this place has a chance to become a Singapore staple despite its less-than-favourable location.