Palm Beach Seafood: Giant Ass Crabs And Devouring Them in Singapore

Palm Beach Seafood
One Fullerton Road
Tel: +65 6227 2332
Singapore

I went to Palm Beach Seafood for my first Chili Crab Experience in Singapore last year, had a nice meal, and figured it would be fine for us to go back again. It's one of the chili crab emporiums that gets regularly recommended to out-of-town types willing to pay for the experience, and it's also in an indisputably enviable locale at One Fullerton Place, within post-dinner stroll distance of the Merlion and many, many high-end shopping opportunities. (Like all of Singapore).

Palm Beach is a standard Chinese seafood house and you can tell by the dining room, which has white tile floors, fake foliage-adorned walls, a bunch of large bubbling fish tanks at the back of the room, and is pitched at a very, very high volume. Chinese seafood houses are roughly the same everywhere insofar as I can tell.

The menu has a range of fresh seafood dishes, along with some non-seafaring specialities to even out the menu. The standby is of course crab, and there are a number of different species and sizes on offer, priced by the weight, and with a number of different cooking styles. You can pick your own victim from the tanks. Most people get the Singapore classic chili crab, which is cracked crab stir-fried in a sweet and spicy red sauce, served with bread rolls for sopping purposes.

Palm Beach really does do an epic chili crab, and this supposedly "medium" stone crab was an impressive specimen of the species. It was roughly as big as my head, in fact. Staring down a gigantic crustacean at dinner time is one of my (many) definitions of a good time, and once we were given Palm Beach branded seafood-bibs and some implements of destruction (crab crackers), we were well on our way.

The demise of Pinchy.

I don't really remember much about digging into a good crab, as I tend to enter what is commonly known as a fugue state, but it was tasty, really tasty, and there was a lot of it. I must say that I prefer my family's home-made chili crab to the restaurant stuff - the sauce is too sweet - but this was pretty excellent all the same. They didn't overcook and undercook the crab, which is an occasional complaint. Chili crab is in essence a fairly simple thing, or it should be.

We also tried some very good milk-fried prawns: bursty little beasts fried in hot oil then served with buttery crumbles mixed with fried curry leaves and a touch of garlic. Curry leaves are a favorite of mine, rarely encountered in the West, and they gave the dish an exotic, subtle South Indian flare. I am not sure where the "milk" part comes in, but maybe it has something to do with the buttery crumbles. They were very good, and an interesting departure from the stand-by of salt and pepper shrimp.

We ordered some fried duck to go with the seafood, which was a mistake at a restaurant that specializes in seafood: overcooked and too tough, except for the drumstick, which naturally I got when my parents weren't looking. Skip it. A better side dish is spicy fried morning glory, which was very good the first time I was here, and is a natural, nutrient-rich accompaniment to seafood dishes in Southeast Asia.

Palm Beach does nickle and dime, as many Chinese seafood places do. Being charged extra for a supposedly complimentary plate of prawn crackers and pineapple sambal is a bit tacky: if something is on a table in front of you at most restaurants, it is a tacit agreement that it's free, or at least it is in my book.

The place was chock-full when we arrived and the hostess put us in a rather lame seat right next to the door, which incensed my father since we did arrange through the hotel concierge and called in advance in the morning - and a walk-in group got a nicer table immediately upon arrival.

After some poiteish posturing on the matter (well, polite as posturing about table location gets, I guess), we were put somewhere nicer. If you book far enough in advance, you can also be seated outside with a view over Marina Bay while you do horrible things to innocent sea creatures, which does sound pretty salubrious.

Addendum: I have always wondered why human beings love to gaze wistfully over the sea from whence the creatures they are messily devouring came from. Maybe it makes us feel like we are the brave fisher-people our ancestors hailed from. Maybe gazing over the sea makes us feel like conquerors of what lies beneath, never mind that the vast majority of the under-sea species we eat really aren't much brighter than, well, a lobster. (Exceptions made for octopi and whales. I'm sorry, guys. Real sorry.)

Or, maybe people just really dig a sea-view and like to assume that what they are eating was pulled wriggling and feisty from the very ocean they are looking at, even if in reality, dinner came from somewhere far away and was (if it was lucky) dumped into a holding tank before the inevitable end. This is rarely the case, of course - except in Cambodia, where crabs, fish, and prawns are kept in wicker boxes tied to over-the-water restaurants, and are fished out as need desires. Convenient enough in its way, except for in a typhoon.

Sup Tulang: Singapore's Most Obscene Food (And Possibly The World's)

Haji Kadir & M Baharudeen Sup Tulang
Address: 505 Beach Road, #B1-13/15 Golden Mile Food Centre, Singapore
Tel: +65 6294 0750
Opening Hours
Daily: 12pm – 1am

This is a blog post about Sup Tulang, which is one of the more viscerally carnivorous things I've ever eaten, and in the incredibly civilized locales of Singapore, to boot. It's a Malay-Indian dish of beef or mutton bones, which are cooked in a spicy cumin and chili infused (and BRIGHT red) stew until the marrow inside gets soft and spreadable. You may have seen Anthony Bourdain slurping down the marrow with a plastic straw on TV, which is where my Dad got the idea from.

Hell bent on consuming sup tulang in his lifetime, my father put me to the task of finding out the best place to eat it. The Internet food oracles told me that would be the Golden Mile Food Center, closeish to Singapore's Little Arabia district. After an Indian breakfast and a morning spent wandering Little India and buying all manner of counterfeit shirts, we headed for the food court and the Haj Kadir food stall.

The stall, thankfully, is easy enough to find - bottom floor of the shopping center, to the right of the entryway - and is advertised with big, slightly green-tinted pictures of gory looking marrow bones. The elderly stall-men took our order, we sat down at a picnic table, and ordered fresh lime juice and lemon tea, as well as a serve of chicken-rice for my mother, whose sensibilities are more delicate than those of my father and I. Soon enough, a plate of four marrow bones for 7 Singapore dollars were plonked down on our table. We were given plastic straws for the marrow and some bread for the sauce.

It's a pretty obscene food. Tasty enough, but pretty obscene. The sauce is delicious: it's got some gamey, mutton infused, smoky flavor, with chunks of chopped chili floating in it. The bones don't have much meat on them, but the meat isn't the point, really, it's the marrow inside.

I decided to go for the marrow first - the sounds you make when sucking marrow out of a big-ass bone in a public place, well, I'll leave those to your imagination. Then, I picked up the bone, which was really very slippery, and gnawed off the meat. I don't think I made any growling sounds while I was doing this but I also can't say I didn't.

It was a very happy experience for me, as I am a dedicated carnivore and everyone who knows me is pretty sure I retain ancient race memories of Stone-Age ancestors. In that I'd be super happy crouching by a fire tearing big chunks off a mammoth haunch while snarling and snapping at the semi-domesticated wolf pack that might bother me for scraps. Napkins, what are those?

The old men who ran the stall sat at the table next to us and watched me eat the marrow out of the bones while talking animatedly to each other in Malay. According to my mother, they appeared to be somewhere in between profoundly disgusted and impressed by the enthusiaim and verve with which I went at the marrow bones. Probably more disgusted.

Two cute little Singaporean ladies were eating sup tulang at a table near us, wearing cute little clothes, and they were somehow eating sup tulang *delicately*. I have no idea how but am fairly certain whatever dark magic they had been trained in to pull this off is far, far beyond my meager powers.

The real problem with sup tulang is encountered after you're done with it, when you realize that the red dye they use to color the sauce doesn't come off your fingers, even if you scrub them really hard with liquid soap in the cleanish dining hall bathroom sink. It sort of comes off your face, but only sort of.

Therefore, every Singaporean will know for the rest of the day that you have eaten sup tulang. This is not exactly embarrassing, but few foods we encounter in the Western world actively mark you for the rest of the day. I ended up taking a long bath with a lot of intensive scrubbing, and my fingers were still stained red for a couple days. Although at least it took care of the facial Marks of Doom.

Anyone even vaguely squeamish about eating meat should probably steer well clear of both sup tulang and the people who are willing to eat it, is what I'm getting at. I suffer from no such moral compunctions and think most cute animals are preferable roasted on a spit with a nice marinade, but I know I'm not speaking for everyone.

Some Thoughts on Singapore Food Halls

You can't go to Singapore and not eat at food halls. This is both because it's a cultural touchpoint and a Quintessential Experience, and because it is practical: Singapore is an expensive-ass place and food hall meals tend to be at least cheapish.

There are a lot of them, and some are renowned for a certain speciality, some are beloved by tourists, and some you stumble across in little back-alley neighborhoods. I am of the opinion that you can get pretty good food in all of them if you've got a nose - Chowhound.com and a cursory Google hunt are all you need to find the good stuff.

Further, as insofar as I can determine Singaporeans don't actually cook, food halls are usually great spots for people watching, as people of every imaginable ethnicity chat, bicker, and pontificate over large portions of....just about everything. You can get anything from Mexican food to Bengali food to New York cheesecake at the largest of these institutions, but it's the street dishes you should be looking out for.

We paid a visit to the Lau Pau Sat Festival Market nearish to Raffles Quay, which is set in a gracious old building and is a big favorite with power-lunchers from nearby high-rises and office buildings who are the mood to slum it. I was looking for a couple specific Singapore dishes and zeroed in on the Char Kway Teow hawker stand roughly in the middle of the hall, which had a couple of classics on tap....



I would like to disabuse the general public of the notion that Singapore carrot cake has anything to do with carrots or cake, or cupcakes, or dessert. This curiously named street food dish par-excellence is in fact sliced radish cake, stir-fried with sweet soy sauce, egg, and onions, in the "black" variant - a soy-sauce free variant exists that is called, shockingly enough, "white." It's a bit odd at first to the Western palate, but I've developed a real liking for the stuff and consider it a first-rate breakfast meal.



This is a Singapore-style oyster omelet with a bit of onion, and it's a nice greasy, salty, slightly funky bite - perhaps best avoided if you're not already the kind of person who goes nuts for oysters (me) and to be sought out if you are (me). Singapore has a way with grease for a place with such an at times noxiously squeaky-clean reputation.

Oysters have a dodgy reputation just about everywhere in Asia - my family had to stare me down from eating one the other day in Cambodia, but I like to live dangerously. However, Singapore is a place with food safety standards, and, even more pleasingly, graded ratings placed in prominent positions behind every food stalls counter, which makes your choices easier.



Then there's Singapore chicken rice, a classic breakfast in these parts, and really quite fiendishly simple: rice cooked in chicken stock served with boneless chicken (boiled or fried, most often boiled), a sweet soy sauce of some type and a hot chili sauce of another, and a bowl of chicken stock soup. It's just about the best thing possible for a weird stomach (and it will happen to you in Southeast Asia) and is available just about everywhere, usually at reasonable prices.

I like to get fresh fruit juices or sliced fruit for snacks on ridiculously hot days in Singapore. Thankfully, food halls are fully aware of how goddamn hot their homeland is, and getting a nice fresh electrolyte-loaded beverage is an easy matter. They'll mix your fruits for you or blend in some ice if you ask nicely. I also have a real thing for sweet fresh lime juice - they call it nimbupani in India, which is a delightful word - and it is easy to obtain here. Sugar cane juice is a bit cloying for my taste, but someone will happily press you some for a buck or two at the stalls: look for the guy with the sugar cane stalks. (I know, I give such useful, specific advice).

Finding out what is good and what is not at food halls is easy: who is being mobbed by hungry Singaporeans, and who is not? Rocket science, it isn't.

Komala Vilas: Real Indian Breakfast Food in the Heart of Singapore

Komala Vilas Restaurant
76/78 Serangoon Road
Singapore 217981
Tel: +65 6293 6980



Singapore's Little India neighborhood.

I love South Indian breakfast food, I really, really do. Started when I lived in Bangalore in college and has persisted ever since, coming to a boil whenever I go back to India (like last year). The rarity of good dosas, vadas, uttapham and other AM Indian delicacies in places not India kills me inside. Phnom Penh does have a pretty good little dosa-slinging joint, but it's not quite the same. Thus, I was very happy to come across Komala Vilas in Singapore's Little India, a restaurant that effectively transports you to a busy morning somewhere near Bangalore or Chennai.



We had a rava masala dosa, an Indian crepe made with semolina flour and stuffed with potatoes, fried onions, green chili and spices. Like most South Indian breakfast items, it's served on a steel plate with small cups of tomato and coconut chutneys and sambar, South India's ubiquitous tamarind vegetable stew. You eat with your hands, ripping the dosa apart and dipping it in the little cups of flavor: it's really pretty perfect. Would only be enhanced by the addition of a smidgen of melted cheese - why can't you find a cheese dosa outside India?



We sampled an uttapam as well, a pancake with red onion and chili mad with a fermented rice and daal batter. Uttapam is in essence a thick, flat variant on the dosa and is eaten with the hands in approximately the same way: the red onions weren't too sharp and made a nice counterpoint to the sambar.



Komala Vilas also does excellent, flaky, hot samosas, which are served with chutney and provide a spicy, interesting AM departure from a boring ol' crossiant. Great with chai tea, but everything is. There's also fresh juices and good, strong, super sweet South Indian coffee on offer, just like I fondly remember it.

Komala Vilas has been doing its thing since 1947, serving cheap and simple South Indian breakfast items to a diverse crowd of Singaporeans. It's a bit of a zoo on weekends, but the people watching is, to me, a real perk - you can pour your tea from saucer to cup and listen to the cacophony all around you. "Quiet" and "Indian" don't go together. Saunter down the street after breakfast, buy some knock-off junk and tasty food products in the Indian run shops on Serangoon road, and pop your head into the Hindu temple if you're feeling nostalgia for the subcontinent. This is the fun part of Singapore.

SINGAPORE CHILI CRABS: OH GOD YES

Singapore style chili crabs are my favorite food in the world. The confluence of fresh delicious Dungeness crabs, spicy-ass chili sauce, and snappy green onions is magical for me, pure alchemy, the sort of thing I can see myself chomping through endless servings of in some unnamed and undefined Elysian Field after I am dead and gone. I am considering a journey to Singapore for the primary purpose of eating crabs until I am throughly sick. I badger my poor long suffering father constantly to make them for me whenever I am home.

This has taken on the ken of ritual, to me: the visit to the local Asian market, where we jockey for position at the aquarium table (the one with the tank of live frogs) to get our live crabs, the purchase of a long French roll from the bakery next-door. The rustling of the live crabs in the plastic covered brown paper bag we receive them in. When we come in with the crabs and put them in the fridge, my mom inevitably repeating the old story about her cook in Hong Kong long ago, who enjoyed placing the crabs on the kitchen floor then going to get the family cat (always named Sam, as was family custom), who would become petrified with fear at the sight of enormous crustaceans on his very own kitchen floor.

















My dad boils the crabs until they stop scrabbling at the sides of the stockpot, of course, that's something you can't avoid. I'd like to believe there's something elemental there, like what a hunter supposedly feels after stabbing a wild boar to death or whatever, then sitting down for a nice dinner of its prepared and deliciously braised flesh. But I suppose it isn't really the same, with crabs from the Asian grocery store. Not really.



SINGAPORE CHILI CRABS


Dungeness crabs (as many as you'd like)
Onion
Red bell pepper
Green onions

SAUCE:
Tomato sauce
Sambal chili-garlic sauce (not sricha)
Garlic
Sugar
Salt
A little bit of corn starch


















To make the sauce, combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. This is a very subjective thing, so tweak ingredients according to your taste and personal proclivities.

Boil the crabs until they dead, then take them apart. The Chinese style of "whacking apart with a cleaver" works tolerably well in this instance.

Get out your big-ass wok and add the garlic, the onion, and the red bell pepper. Cook for a while until soft and fragrant.

Add the crabs en-masse. Stir-fry until they're just done (you don't want to overcook them). This usually takes around four or five minutes, but keep an eye on things. Once that's achieved, add the sauce ingredients and stir well. Finally, add the chopped green onions and serve.

I usually make Chinese broccoli, greens, or stir-fried long beans with pork to accompany this dish. Fried rice would also be a delightful addition to the menu. Serve with sake or beer, and don't forget to spread out some newspapers - you won't regret it.