Food Picks: Michelin-starred Seroja’s soulful food from the Malay Archipelago keeps diners coming back
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Seroja's seafood course features perfectly cooked silver pomfret, with skin coaxed into crisp ridges, in a tapai sauce.
PHOTO: DESMOND LIM MING LONG
Follow topic:
- Seroja, chef Kevin Wong's one-Michelin-starred restaurant, is celebrating its third anniversary with an enhanced Nusantara tasting menu.
- The $288++ dinner menu features highlights like silver pomfret with roasted tapai sauce and blue lobster with laksa leaf sauce, alongside innovative dishes.
- The reviewer praises the high-quality ingredients and cooking, questioning why Seroja does not have more Michelin stars, highlighting dishes like the Sarang Semut.
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SINGAPORE – In Singapore’s brutal food scene, where new restaurants pop up at an alarming rate, it takes good food to keep diners interested.
Seroja, chef Kevin Wong’s one-Michelin-starred restaurant showcasing food from the Malay Archipelago, is marking its third anniversary. The 31-year-old has levelled up in terms of cooking. His tasting menu is better thought through and the service a lot more seamless.
At my recent dinner there, I find I am in very good company – the 24-seat restaurant is full.
Highlights of the $288 Nusantara menu for dinner include a snack of fish floss wrapped in a crisp parcel and topped with a raita bubble and mint jelly. Cool and refreshing, it perks my appetite up for what is to come.
And the hits keep coming. The soup course is a take on bak kut teh, the chicken broth aromatic with spices, and slices of braised beef tripe and cheek. The surprise find is a tiny chicken rice ball, so very mochi mochi.
Then comes what is my favourite course of the meal. It features silver pomfret and jade abalone with a heady roasted tapai (usually a snack made with fermented glutinous rice) sauce.
Of course, the abalone is cooked to delicious submission. But it is the pomfret that takes my breath away. Somehow, the chef has coaxed the skin into crisp ridges that contrast with the velvety texture of the fish.
Blue lobster charred over mangrove wood comes with a kicky laksa leaf sauce so good, I mop it all up with the pillowy roti paung. The sauce almost eclipses the butter, made in-house using milk from Johor, that is served with the bread.
I pay $22 extra to add a barbecued chicken wing stuffed with rempah udang and do not regret it. Yes, the stuffed chicken wing is a cliche that restaurants here and around the world trot out. But this one, with that spicy, aromatic prawn filling, is well worth eating.
Duck from Bidor near Ipoh is aged seven days, barbecued and served with percik sauce. The accompaniments are smashing – termite mushrooms on the plate; and sia rice from Borneo, some grains fluffy, some grains crispy; and a cup of deeply comforting duck broth.
The pre-dessert of wild basil sorbet and pineapple granita comes with lychee and bandung pearls that look like tiny tang yuan but disappear once they hit the tongue. The Kuih Bahulu petit four now comes split in half and filled with Kuih Lapis cream, heady with spices that go into that classic layered cake.
I fall in love with Sarang Semut, wedges of honeycomb cake also called ant’s nest cake. That smokiness comes from cooking the cake over charcoal. And the aged tangerine peel on top is a genius move.
Sarang Semut or ant's nest cake, served as a petit four at Seroja.
PHOTO: DESMOND LIM MING LONG
Why, I wonder, does Seroja not have more Michelin stars?
Where: 01-30/31/32/33 Duo Galleria, 7 Fraser Street seroja.sg
MRT: Bugis
Open: 6 to 11pm (Tuesdays to Saturdays), noon to 2.30pm (Fridays and Saturdays)
Info: Call 8522-2926 or go to
