If you were shocked when The Coconut Club started selling $12.80 artisanal nasi lemak, brace yourself: the cai png from its sister restaurant costs about $20 per head. The concept came about because Coconut Club’s chef and co-owner, Lee Eng Su, wanted to make Peranakan food more accessible. So, the 40-year-old isn’t doing a Candlenut or a Violet Oon type of eatery. Instead, he has opened a concept similar to that of economy rice stalls, where the dishes are pre-cooked and displayed for ordering in single servings. But in a stylo-mylo air-conditioned setting, of course. What this means is that you no longer need to round up your entire clan just to eat at a Peranakan restaurant, where the dishes are generally made for sharing.

Belimbing Superstar, which opened on 21 August, takes over the former premises of The Coconut Club (meanwhile the latter relocated to upgraded digs that boasts almost twice its original seating capacity at 28 Ann Siang Road). The concept may take inspiration from “point-point rice” stalls, but the whole display looks more like a chic deli with salads in elevated stands, and stews in colourful cast iron pots and casserole dishes.

The double-storey, two-unit space that sits a maximum of 143 guests is breezy and bright with traditional shophouse design elements incorporated into the interior, and décor pieces such as woven food baskets and tingkats are strategically placed around the restaurant. There are a few tables on the ground floor, right in front of the food showcase, but we reckon it’s best to escape the crowds queueing to order, and head upstairs to the bigger round tables.

The service style here is definitely a notch up from your regular cai png stall or Teochew muay place or even nasi padang restaurant. To begin with, you are assigned a table at the door, and when you’re done ordering, the food is served to your table. If you wish, you can even just sit and ask for recommendations and have your order taken tableside.

In fact, this service format is a bit of a departure from Eng Su’s original concept. It is the design of restaurant manager Coco Liew, who also insisted that, instead of being slapped onto plates of rice, the dishes should all be individually plated. “The food here is so painstakingly cooked, so they should be served nicely also, lah,” says the affable 36-year-old. “Also, people are paying good money for this, so we should give them a high level of service.” The little enamel dishes that each item is served in are from Crate and Barrel. “Eng Su insists on having top quality for everything,” says Coco with a laugh.

Coco's high standards also come from a fine-dining background: prior to joining Belimbing Superstar, Coco was a supervisor who had worked for eight years at one Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant Summer Pavilion in The Ritz-Carlton Millenia. It was there that she first met Eng Su (who was a customer), and she had only joined Michelin one-star Jiang-Nan Chun at Four Seasons Singapore for nine months when he poached her for this new restaurant. “She is so good at upselling things to me,” he says with a guffaw. “I thought: we need somebody like her!”

Coco — together with her team of eight floor staff — are aiming to deliver the same personalised style of service found at fine-dining Chinese restaurants, from addressing customers by name to remembering the preferences of regulars. Get ready to be pampered.

While Eng Su is the main man at The Coconut Club, he takes a back seat at Belimbing Superstar, leaving Coco and head chef Ben Teo to take charge. He had first tried Ben’s food when the latter was head chef of Peranakan Flavours restaurant housed in what was formerly The Ardennes Hotel in Kampong Glam, and followed him when the restaurant moved to Tan Quee Lan Street. “I like the simple but bold flavours of his food,” says Eng Su.

Ben hasn’t always been cooking Peranakan food though. Born to a Peranakan father and Hong Kong-er mum, and brought up by a Peranakan nanny, he first started peddling home-cooked nasi lemak and nonya bak zang illegally as a teenager. Then, in 1985, he joined fine-dining Cantonese restaurant Li Bai in Sheraton Towers as a junior cook in the opening team. After five years of climbing the ranks, Ben proceeded to head a few other fine-dining Chinese restaurants for the hotel group’s properties in the Middle East and Korea, living abroad for more than a decade.

When he returned to Singapore, Ben found the market saturated with Hong Kong chefs. “The Cantonese cuisine belongs to them lah, no point trying to compete,” the 62-year-old says. So, he went back to his own Peranakan roots. “Not very many people can do Peranakan food, because preparation methods are always fiercely guarded by the families. And each family will have their own way of doing things,” says Ben. “This means that very few people get to know much about Peranakan food. Even today, when I speak to young people, they don’t know what buah keluak (Indonesian black nut) is.” Naturally, Eng Su’s idea of making Peranakan more accessible to a wider audience resonated with him.

However, Ben isn’t content to just put out the tried-and-tested classics. Through Belimbing Superstar, he hopes to introduce people to less common dishes such as belimbing pork — a dish which he used to serve at Peranakan Flavours. He is also planning to roll out special items later on, such as an impressive sounding buah keluak pork knuckle. “It’s a special order where you get the whole knuckle for the whole table, and rarely do you find this dish anywhere,” says Ben.

Apart from giving lesser-known Peranakan dishes a place to shine, Ben also wants to show the masses that Peranakan food can be healthy. Our kerabu (Peranakan-style chopped salads) is a highlight here, and we have seven types each day,” he shares. “We want to attract the health-conscious too and open their eyes to an alternative to western salads. Sometimes we have ladies who order three or four types of kerabu and make it a lunch.”

Besides serving more greens, he is also making Peranakan food lighter. “Only salt, pepper, some sugar, and a lot of natural flavour from the fresh ingredients. No artificial flavours, no MSG and no seasoning from the bottle — not even soy sauce or oyster sauce,” he proudly proclaims. The only exception: tau jio (fermented bean paste) that he specially sources. Imposing such a rule on himself meant updating all his recipes, and it took almost a year of experimentation before he finally achieved the flavours that he wanted.

Some 30 dishes are offered each day, and there are plans to change the spread every two weeks. On the day we visited, we were wowed by the vibrantly coloured assortment spanning finely chopped salads, inviting-looking stews and, on the opposite end of the kerabus, a decadent assortment of deep-fried goodies. Prices range from $2 for a sambal egg, to $10 for a portion of rendang, but the price-per-serving for most dishes hover at around $6. Solo diners could easily be shelling out more than $20 for lunch (e.g. $5 for a banana flower salad, $5 for hae bee hiam, $10 for beef rendang). That said, there are ways to keep a meal to about $10 — by sharing the items with a group, or limiting your orders to just two items, such as rice with assam steamed fish for $7.50 and sayur lodeh for $3.

For those unfamiliar with Peranakan salads, this is a super easy-to-like introduction. A melange of finely julienned green chilli, coriander, shallots and crunchy slivers of black fungus tossed with shredded chicken, this cold dish is all freshness and lightness with just a hint of heat.

You’ll find the kitchen staff painstakingly removing the pistil of the myriad tiny florets nestled within each banana blossom. (For those who have returned your Primary school science to your teachers: go Google, and thank the Interwebs for diagrams like this). These little florets have to be quickly blanched, as they oxidise quickly and develop an astringent taste. They are then tossed with tender pieces of chopped banana blossom heart, which are reminiscent of artichoke hearts, dressed in light coconut milk and topped with a sprinkling of pulverised baked lime leaves. However, for all the effort that goes into this salad, it tastes bland — at least on the day that we were there.

Made with a generous amount of thick pork belly slices, this side dish — a savoury, spicy blend of dried shrimp and a blend of chillies — is almost as good as a main dish. It’s a tad salty on its own, but perfect when enjoyed with plain rice.

This is a childhood favourite for chef Ben, whose nanny would make this dish. While he used to serve a similar rendition at Li Bai, the Peranakan version here is a little different from what you’d expect from a dim sum cart. Coated with a light batter fried to a crisp, the smooth creaminess of the yam cake is slightly reminiscent of a fried yam ring. This is punctuated by small, soft chunks of steamed yam that add a different texture to the dish, and dotted with bits of lup cheong (Chinese waxed sausages) and hae bee (dried shrimp) for extra kick in flavour. Yum.

A juicy umami bomb that’s superb when eaten hot and good even when stone cold. Made with fresh sea prawns hand-chopped and beaten — rather than blitzed in a blender — for optimal texture, these are mixed with coriander, spring onions, and studded with little dices of water chestnut that add crunch. Biting into one of the beancurd-skin wrapped babies is like sinking your teeth into an extra succulent crab claw, but even better 'cos somebody has done the shelling and seasoning for you. A must-order.

The signature dish, modified from Ben’s family recipe, fell off the mark on the day we visited. The pieces of braised pork belly are surprisingly tough, and the bright, tangy flavours that we were looking forward to are sorely missing. That, we assume, is the challenge of working with seasonal ingredients which can be unpredictable in flavour with every batch. Pity, since the belimbing is Ben’s favourite ingredient to work with — he prefers the natural tanginess of the tropical fruit to tamarind, since the latter is often preserved with added sugar.

We must have gone on an off day for this promising looking braise cooked with only chicken drumstick pieces, ‘cos it’s also a little tough. While the gravy is smooth and the earthy flavours buah keluak unmistakeable, the flavours are muted.

We’re told a fattier cut of beef shank is used for this rendang so that you get that gelatinous texture from the tendon when you sink your teeth into it. The gravy for this was a little more robustly flavoured than other dishes, but the texture of the beef was sadly tough on our visit.

A simple steamed selar topped with a generous mound of a fiery looking blend of chillies and aromatics, this is an easy winner. The fish is cooked to tender perfection and the tangy blend of ginger flower, galangal, turmeric, kaffir lime and chillies is not as spicy as it appears. What we love, apart from its bright, appetising flavours, is a lingering warmth in its aftertaste. Note that chef Ben goes to the wet market to pick the freshest for the day, so you might get a different fish on your visit.

Packed with eight ingredients spanning white fungus to ginkgo nuts, and even a generous slice of toothsome dried persimmon, this longan and red date-based sweet soup is as wholesome as it gets. Heck, even our own grandmother didn’t make it this good. Note that they only serve it warm though (like our grandmothers would, too). For those who don’t do hot desserts, there is also the superb coconut jelly comprising lemak coconut milk and coconut water — same as that served at The Coconut Club.

The fried dishes are amazing, the unique salads quite yummy, the main dishes hit-or-miss. We suspect that the team is still ironing out the kinks. In fact, the boss’s mum was there lunching with an elegant group of salt-and-pepper haired ladies during our visit — and we overheard them commenting that the food was different from what they had previously. The Peranakan food here is a bit lighter and more “cheng” than what we expected, perhaps due in part to chef Ben’s half-Cantonese heritage and fine-dining background. That said, Peranakan food is an extremely personal expression and this lighter, healthier rendition is probably more suited to eating on a regular basis without alarming one’s cardiologist. Unless you’re coming here solely for the to-die-for hae cho and yam cake. Price-wise, $20 plus a head is decent for the impressive service, diversity of choice and the effort that goes into the preparation of the dishes. Afterall, most folks have no issues paying that kind of money for a plate of pasta.

Photos: Mark Lee