We will come, soon enough, to Singapulah’s intriguing backstory and its manifold multisensory distractions; we will come to the richly staged retro interior, the stacked displays of purchasable larder items, and the flavours that, at their best, flare and sparkle with jolting, technicolour vividness. But, in the case of this Soho launch from Singaporean restaurateur Ellen Chew, I’m moved to begin with The Uncooperative Beef Rib Rendang.
Billed on the menu as “fork-tender”, this bone-in rendition of the hallowed Malay-Indonesian staple arrives as a fragrant, glowering mass of browns that is, in fact, so unyielding that the spoon it is pointedly presented with is useless. If you are anything like me or the poor guy on a date I saw doing the same later, your first bite is likely to be preceded by lots of impotent spoon jabbing, sauce spray and a desperate final request that one of the passing servers please, please bring you a knife.
This is a small detail. It is also not the same as saying that the rendang itself — which slices away in sweet-edged, dry-spiced shreds that are soft-enough, if not quite fully collapsing into submission — is wholly unenjoyable. It is more that the fact of something not quite delivering on its advertised promise seems to strike at the heart of one of the prime frustrations at an otherwise perfectly serviceable opening.
It is Chew’s second stab at the idea. Initially launched in 2019, Singapulah was the evening guise of the original Arôme bakery. Now, with the backing of the Singaporean government’s business development arm and the Singapore Tourism Board, it has been reimagined as a fully fledged operation, sprawled across three floors in a prime corner site on the permeable border between Soho and Chinatown. If the government involvement primes you for a 20ft neon sign screaming “VISIT SINGAPORE”, then the reality of the space — a Wes Andersonian mix of Sixties-era pastels, wood-panelled booths, mismatched auntycore photos and Lego-grade dioramas of Singaporean market scenes — is far subtler.
Though, pleasingly, there was a distinct lack of subtlety to the early dishes. Fish balls had springy buoyancy and a thickly slathered ripper of a pungent chilli sambal. Deep-fried bao, thickly armoured golden parcels with pudding-sweet dough and an exploding payload of piquant chilli crab, were indelicate in all the best ways. And both egg-fried rice and heat-wrinkled fine beans were studies in smoky-sweet, garlic-laced moreishness.
What seemed clear, as Chew and her team scrambled to cope with a mobbed Thursday night service, was that things had gone awry in the flailing rush to open
Yet it didn’t take long for some waywardness to emerge. Iberico pork satay had a scrawny, austerity-age stinginess; nasi lemak (fragrant rice, simmered in coconut milk) lacked the anticipated creamy richness and came capped with a fried egg that had the dread, watery ring of undercooked albumen; Singapore laksa had a transcendent, complex broth but, as one pal at the table noted, was meagrely dotted with just a few (not especially delicate) prawns. I would never presume to be any sort of authority on Singaporean culinary authenticity but what seemed clear, as Chew and her team scrambled to cope with a mobbed Thursday night service, was that things had gone awry in the flailing rush to open.
Nowhere is this more apparent than among the wait staff, who are all very sweet but appear to have only previously experienced restaurants as an abstract, theoretical concept. After hand-waving pleas for forgotten drinks orders and for our table to be cleared, we finished with shaped ingots of oddly compelling, pandan-scented kueh lapis (a version of the squidgy rainbow layer cake), and the blessed arrival of the bill.
Singapulah has moments of sucker-punching potency and a good deal of atmospheric flair; its broader mission to use its rotating menu as a shop window for Singaporean food businesses is intriguing. But the lasting impression, whether it is through the inconsistency of the cooking or the well-meaning haplessness of the service, is of an ambitious wider project crowding out the simple details of an unequivocally pleasurable dining experience. Dire Straits? Not totally. But there is definitely room for improvement.
