Food review: Belimbing by The Coconut Club - where hawker food gets a mod-Sin interpretation by chef Marcus Leow

Business Times

08-05-2025

NEW RESTAURANT
Belimbing 269A Beach Road Singapore 199546 Tel: [phone] Open for lunch and dinner Tue to Sun: 12 to 3.30 pm; 6 to 10.30 pm.
[SINGAPORE] Nasi lemak on the ground floor. Artfully poised, street food-inspired fine dining on the upper level. Want to see how far Singapore cuisine has come? Head to Belimbing, where an evolution by staircase takes place in real time at The Coconut Club's two-storey flagship outlet in Beach Road.
The transition starts at the latter, which successfully gentrified humble local fare with pricey nasi lemak served in trendy premises. Except that now, it shows signs of slipping back into its hawker centre roots. The street-level dining area looks worn and unkempt – like your neighbourhood zi char, but with better dressed customers. Noisy, cramped and messy, it extends to the restroom, which may not have had its toilet paper replenished since Covid. Its overflowing (yet large) trash bin is a sign that the person most qualified to empty it must have quit that morning, if not the week before. We pity the bottle of Aesop handwash, releasing soap bubbles like morse code for: 'Help me – take me to a nicer bathroom, pleeease…'
We can't wait to get back to our comfortable, cleaner perch upstairs where chef Marcus Leow takes the essence of The Coconut Club's Singapore comfort food – the sambals, rojak, satay and curries – and reinvents them completely.
For those who remember Leow from his fledgling days at Magic Square, followed by Naked Finn and the short-lived Focal, the young man with a penchant for juggling local ingredients and recipes with a genre-bending mindset is back – with a new place to (almost) call his own.
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As The Coconut Club's offspring, Belimbing inherits the second floor of the conservation shophouse, serving a very reasonable, S$88 four course menu. If you pay S$21 for nasi lemak downstairs and top up with starters and other sharing plates, it could easily come close to that amount.
Most of the dishes are new to us, but some are familiar from Leow's time in Focal, where the food was promising but raw, with good ideas that needed a few more rounds of research and development to perfect.
No problem with that now, because Belimbing's dishes are mostly sharper, with a clearer storyline. It's not so easy to spot the local connection, though, given their distinctive, modern European appearance. But unlike an immigration official who will detain you if your post-surgery face doesn't match that in your passport, we know it when we taste it. The fleeting pungence of rojak's hei-ko prawn paste; fermented pineapple in a peanut sauce; the tartness of belimbing, the fruit that the restaurant is named after; and the fragrance of nasi ulam.
Leow shows restraint by not making his food all about his heritage, but using heritage as the link to his thought process. A pre-meal bite has chopped raw shrimp and 'gong gong' sea snails stuffed into a crunchy charcoal-hued kueh pie tee shell, topped with belimbing kosho (instead of yuzu) and fried leeks. It's a bit spicy, a touch sour, and a very good start.
Aged kanpachi in a cold coconut cream sauce. PHOTO: BELIMBING
Fleshy slices of aged kanpachi swim in a pleasing cold coconut cream sauce tinged with the fruity tanginess of pickled pink guava. Slightly funky mussels distract a little. But what seals the deal is the 'firefly' squid 'rojak' – grilled local baby squid in an unlikely toss-up involving fried kailan, jambu, torch ginger and homemade hei-ko. Fruity, sweet and strong in the best way, it gets an extra push of umami from the squishy squid innards.
Grilled 'firefly' squid 'rojak'. PHOTO: BELIMBING
A combo platter of mee suah kueh, otak paste, fermented tau cheo dip and salad appears, with instructions to eat them in any combination we like. That's like sticking four anti-social people together at a dinner party and expecting them to have a heartfelt conversation.
Mee suah kueh, otak paste and salad in peanut dressing. PHOTO: JAIME EE, BT
They're good in their separate ways. The salad tossed in a peanut dressing with fermented pineapple sauce on the side has lovely satay implications. The mee suah – pressed into carrot cake rectangles – is a plausible match with the Thai-Teochew dip, but is too independent to submit to the assertive otak spread. Toasted French loaf would be welcome here.
Clam chawanmushi laced with assam pedas and white pepper sauce. PHOTO: BELIMBING
There's also clam broth chawanmushi with extra kick from assam pedas and white pepper sauce, which we prefer to Leow's take on Taiwanese beef noodle soup – braised beef in broth arranged on potato espuma with chunks of green tomato.
Fried chicken in yellow curry with coconut rice. PHOTO: BELIMBING
The refreshing novelty does fizzle out a bit with the rice-based mains. A deep-fried chicken chop is weighed down by a heavy and one-note yellow curry, and the same for the green curry paired with otherwise tender grilled short rib and satay on the side. Nasi ulam is a refined update of Focal's donabe, where the wok-fried herbal rice is sealed in banana leaf and served with pomfret fillet on the side. The banchan-like condiments are a nice touch.
Wok-fried nasi ulam served in banana leaf. PHOTO: BELIMBING
Desserts (priced separately) are unchanged from Focal: a buckwheat min jiang kueh (S$12) that's drier than we remembered, filled with cempedak cream and peanuts; and the perennial favourite corn salat (S$14), this time served with corn husk tea.
Perennial favourite corn salat served with corn husk tea. PHOTO: BELIMBING
Belimbing's unrenovated, botanical-themed dining room feels at odds with Leow's modernist aesthetic. Maybe it's a low-risk test bed to see how his concept flies in this market. But they needn't worry. Leow is on the right track with food that is clever but not conceited. Even so, there's still that tendency to overthink, plus a need to fine-tune sauces, textures and combinations.
But when it comes to playing it safe downstairs or stretching our horizons, we vote up.
Rating: 7