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Business Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Times
Food review: Belimbing by The Coconut Club - where hawker food gets a mod-Sin interpretation by chef Marcus Leow
NEW RESTAURANT Belimbing 269A Beach Road Singapore 199546 Tel: 8869-7243 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. A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU Friday, 2 pm Lifestyle Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself. Sign Up Sign Up 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
AsiaOne
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- AsiaOne
The Coconut Club has a new restaurant inspired by an 'overlooked' fruit, here's what to expect, Lifestyle News
The Coconut Club has made a reputation for itself as a restaurant where diners can enjoy premium plates of nasi lemak. And now, it has a new sister brand with a new concept. Belimbing, which opened on April 15, was inspired by an often "overlooked", oblong, sour indigenous fruit, and its name is a metaphor for the hidden potential of Singaporean cuisine, they shared in a press release on April 16. It is located on the second floor of The Coconut Club's Beach Road outlet. Helmed by head chef Marcus Leow, who was an alumnus at Magic Square and Naked Finn, the restaurant explores local fare in a modern context. "Singapore is celebrated as a global food capital, yet our own cuisine feels at a standstill, often equated solely with hawker fare a national treasure and a source of pride, but not the full picture," Marcus shared. "We hope Belimbing can help to shape the next chapter of local cuisine — not by clinging to age-old traditions or depending on luxury ingredients, but by celebrating the flavours and ingredients that reflect who we are today. "The food is comforting and unmistakably Singaporean — just not quite how our grandparents would remember it." Reimagining native flavours The curated menus at Belimbing are designed for sharing. During lunch, there's a two-course menu ($58) and a limited a la carte selection, while at dinner, there is a four-course menu ($88). Marcus has also made an effort to reuse and repurpose ingredient scraps across the menu to demonstrate the versatility of the ingredients that Singaporeans grew up with. Some examples of dishes diners can look forward to is Aged Kanpachi, a starter where the fish is aged on the bone for five days and brushed with a soy sauce made from fish bones and trimmings. It is enhanced with pickled pink guava and a "cold curry" made from The Coconut Club's cold-pressed "white sutera" coconut milk with mussel jus and galangal. Another interesting starter is the Grilled Firefly Squid, where the seafood is cooked with soy, pickled young ginger and house-made squid powder. For the main courses — which are centred around rice, a mainstay in every Singaporean household — there is the Wok-Fried Nasi Ulam. Here, cured fish has its skin air-dried for two days to achieve a crackling crispness when seared. It is paired with Japanese rice that has undergone a three-step transformation—steamed in fish bone dashi, wok-fried with sambal belado and belacan, and grilled in banana leaves. There is also the Grilled Short Rib, which features grilled Angus short ribs brushed with beef garum, alongside a Wagyu rib finger satay glazed in buah keluak. It is served with a side of percik sauce and The Coconut Club's coconut rice. The dessert selection, which is only available on the a la carte menu, reflects Marcus' Peranakan upbringing. Some menu examples include the Pumpkin Bingka, where the fruit's flesh is blended with tapioca into kueh and also transformed into a smoky puree. There is also Marcus' signature Corn Salat, which is made with every part of the corn. Diners who want a tipple can enjoy a selection of cocktails that spotlight local ingredients in unexpected expressions, including concoctions from Side Door's Bannie Kang, who was the winner of Diageo World Class 2019 and Asia's 50 Best Bars' Mancino Bartenders' Bartender Award 2021. Address: 269 Beach Rd, Singapore 199546 [[nid:716572]] melissateo@
