Not the same-old, same-old – new restaurants that dare to be different

SINGAPORE – In a city that prides itself on offering a smorgasbord of dining options and cuisines, some food businesses are trying to stand out with the unusual and the under-represented.

Marina Bay Sands is opening a Greek restaurant – a cuisine that has a presence in Singapore, though these restaurants are not ubiquitous like French and Italian ones.

A group of young food entrepreneurs is opening a cocktail bar and dance club, where the flavours of the drinks and food are international, but filtered through a Korean lens.

And then there is Singaporean chef Ace Tan, 42, who will offer new flavours of Asia in his restaurant, drawing inspiration from Myanmar and Filipino food, among other cuisines.

What they hope to do is draw curious and adventurous diners, those game for the new and bold. In Singapore’s savage food and beverage scene, where restaurants open and close in whiplash-inducing fashion, could this be the way to survive and thrive?

New Asian flavours

Asu

Where: 30 Labrador Villa Road; opens: September

Singaporean chef Ace Tan is taking a very deep dive into Asia. At his 25-seat relaxed fine-dining restaurant Asu, which is how Japanese and Korean colleagues pronounce his name, the chef will serve food seasoned with housemade soya sauce, oyster sauce, garum or fermented fish sauce, and miso, among other condiments.

And that is just for starters. He is looking to reimagine oyster sauce with other kinds of shellfish, and is tinkering with Korean mussel reduction that he says fishermen there make when they have a bountiful catch.

Laphet, Myanmar’s fermented tea leaves, might feature in the food too. And he has already come up with a purple rice koji that will be served as a palate-cleansing sorbet when the restaurant opens in September.

His kitchen team includes chefs from Myanmar, Malaysia and the Philippines, with a Korean joining soon, and he wants them to delve deeper into their own culture and cuisines, and to do research into flavours and ingredients to share with the entire team.

“We want to build a library of new Asian flavours,” the 42-year-old says. “I followed the trend of wanting to work in Western restaurants, but I feel there is an over-saturation of Western culture in restaurants. There is so much in Asian food. What we have seen is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The restaurant, which takes over the space vacated by Tamarind Hill restaurant, will feature mostly counter seating, with some tables for diners who want more privacy. An eight-course meal is likely to be priced under $200, he says, and there will be three to four dishes, ranging from $20 to $50, that people can add on if they want.

Asu is housed in a 10,000 sq ft colonial bungalow perched atop Labrador Nature Reserve. Sharing the space is another restaurant and a bar, both of which he will oversee. Renovations are scheduled to start soon, and Asu is expected to open first.

Shan, elegant Chinese for “meal”, is a smart-casual Cantonese-Teochew restaurant with 50 seats indoors and 40 outdoors.

Chef Tan and the restaurant’s chef, Lim Wei Jie, 33, are looking to showcase dishes that are “not so mainstream”. One of these will be Puning Chicken, made with fermented soya beans. There will also be duck braised with housemade soya sauce and steamed fish with three different toppings.

The third concept is a yet-to-be-named bar, serving cocktails and featuring Asian liquor such as soju, baijiu, sake and China wines. The bar food will be Asian-inflected too.

Chef Tan, who got into cheffing at age 27 after quitting his job in advertising, knows how tough the business is.

His first venture, the fine-dining Restaurant Ards, closed six months after its 2017 opening. He went to South Korea and worked at Flower Child for a year before returning to Singapore to work for 1-Group, which runs restaurants such as Kaarla Woodfire Grill and Latin-European bistro Sol & Luna.

These stints, he says, helped him understand the restaurant business better. For this project, he has partnered Labrador Hill, a company which has been tenants of the bungalow for 15 years.

He says: “One thing I believe a lot in is the need to understand the full picture of how to build the resources to keep on evolving. At Ards, we thought that as long as we could cook, things would make sense. That’s the wrong way to go. We didn’t understand the dynamics of the business.”

Eat, drink, dance

Bae’s Cocktail Club

Where: 01-04/05, 21 Tanjong Pagar Road; opens: July

This place solves that intractable problem that plagues people in their 20s and 30s. They have had dinner in a restaurant. They adjourn to a cocktail bar, but that closes at midnight. They still want to keep going – gotta dance – but many clubs would already be packed to the rafters. What should this restless tribe do?

Well, the partners behind Bae’s would like them to park themselves all night in one place. Their place.

Bae’s Cocktail Club, named after a common Korean surname, and slang for girlfriend, will open until late, feature serious cocktails, easy-to-eat food, a DJ, private and semi-private rooms and high energy.

There is seating for 74, although many patrons will likely be on the dance floor.

The space is being renovated and the opening is scheduled for July.

It is located in the Korean restaurant precinct, but customers should not expect K-BBQ and banchan or K-pop. The food and drinks will have a mix of international flavours done with what the partners call “Korean flair”, and the music will be hip-hop and R&B.

One of the partners in the venture is The Proper Concepts Collective, which runs restaurants such as The Feather Blade and Goho. It is headed by Mr Leong Sheen Jet, 31. The other partners are Mr Dharma Wang, 36, managing director of Coolpotions, which distributes boutique Korean liquor brands; Mr Vijay Mudaliar, 35, founder of Native and Analogue bars; Mr Benjamin Aryanto, 32, founder of Grimm & Company, an F&B branding and marketing agency; and Mr Tora Widjaja, 25, co-owner of Torasho Ramen & Charcoal Bar and co-founder of Wild, a record label and talent agency. 

Mr Mudaliar says: “In high volume places, sometimes the quality of the drinks suffers. We have invested in planning the drink stations and in training, to make sure you can get a gin and tonic quick and fast. But from the first drink to the ones we make at 3am, the quality will be consistent.”

He has come up with much more than gin and tonic for the bar, however. Cocktails, priced from $25 to $30 each, include Makeogli Colada Slushie, featuring makgeolli, the milky Korean rice wine; Doenjang Espresso, with doenjang extract made from the Korean fermented soya bean paste; and Kimchi, a mezcal cocktail featuring a kimchi salt rim.

Mr Leong says the food – especially the bar bites, priced from $15 – is designed to be easy to eat. There will be a two-bite cornflake-covered corndog on a stick, oyster shooters with kimchi gazpacho, and chilli crab tteokbokki served on spoons. More substantial offerings include steak, pork collar and fried chicken, and these will be priced from $30 to $50 a serving.

He says: “We are not creating another cocktail bar or a DJ club. Bae’s will have state-of-the-art DJ entertainment, serve really good drinks and you can stay on until 3am.

“Korean culture is arguably the most influential globally. We want to tap that because you don’t see it in the clubbing and cocktail scene in Singapore.”

Grecian adventure

Estiatorio Milos

Where: B1-48, The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands; opens: late July

An array of seafood and fish displayed on ice. Tomatoes arranged in a pyramid. Hundreds of Greek wine labels. Greek marble and wood fittings. The upscale Estiatorio Milos bucks the trend of mostly casual Greek restaurants in Singapore.

The 155-seat restaurant takes the space vacated by db Bistro & Oyster Bar, which closed in January. It joins other Milos restaurants in Montreal, New York, Athens, Miami, Las Vegas, London, Los Cabos and Dubai.

The group was founded by Greek restaurateur Costas Spiliadis, 77, who is from Patras in Greece. He moved to the United States and then Canada to study, and opened his first Milos in Montreal in 1979.

The New York Times in 2019 said: “The Milos kitchens do not dabble in haute cuisine. Their focus is meticulous cuisine. Milos is a triumph of the authentic over the artistic.”

Guests are led to the seafood display, where they make their selection from the array flown in from the Mediterranean, and servers recommend the best ways to cook it. Those tomatoes, NYT said, are never refrigerated and the pyramid formation is to ensure they ripen properly. They must also be sliced to his specifications for the Greek salad.

Attention to detail seems key. Greek produce, including olives, lemons and seasonal fruit, are used to make the restaurant’s cocktails. Three key ingredients for the restaurant come from Kythira, an island between the Aegean and Ionian seas: sea salt harvested by hand, thyme honey and cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil from centuries-old trees.

The average bill is expected to be $80 a person for lunch and $140 a person for dinner, without alcohol.

Signature offerings include the Milos Special, a tower of lightly fried courgette and aubergine, paired with Kefalograviera cheese and tzatziki; whole fish baked in sea salt; and Astakomakaronada – Athenian-style lobster pasta.

Heading the Singapore kitchen team is executive chef Fotis Kokoshi, 33, who has 14 years of experience in Mediterranean cuisine, having worked at one-Michelin-starred CTC Urban Gastronomy in Athens and Alati Divine Greek Cuisine in Singapore, among other restaurants.