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.

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.

Bayang: Fancy Indonesian Food in Singapore, Food on Sticks

Bayang
3A River Valley Road,
#01-05 Clarke Quay, Singapore

Indonesian food: a cuisine that's just about impossible to find in most of the USA, and for reasons I find unfathomable - peanut sauce, fried rice, fresh ingredients and less aggressive spicing than Thai food, what's not to love? Thankfully, I live in Southeast Asia now, and we decided that we'd pay a visit to Bayang in Clarke Quay for our final dinner in Singapore.

Clarke Quay is a bit of a zoo at night, full of US marines on the hunt and young Singaporeans dressed to kill and backpackers really feeling their vow of partial-poverty, but it's kind of a fun vibe - the same as any Where Young People Go pre-fab destination in any major, wealthy city. As a resident of Phnom Penh, it felt rather exotic.

Bayang is also a bit of a pre-fab restaurant, with a chic and subdued interior, an English menu that explains things, and friendly waitstaff. The food is more than serviceable and attractive (though I'd like to go to some sort of po-dunk authentic Indonesian joint in Singapore, someday), and the location is convenient for a post-or-pre meal wander along the river on a busy weekend. I dock them some points for a curiously beat up menu - time to print out some new ones, tiger - but there's a nice selection of Indonesian classics with a special emphasis on grilled stuff.



We very much enjoyed the satay sampler with beef, chicken, and shrimp. All three meats were very tender and nicely marinated, and the lemongrass skewers were an attractive touch. Something about satay is bizarrely charismatic. I chalk it up to a nigh-universal human love of Food on Sticks and peanut sauce. Well, except for those of you with food allergies. Guess it sucks to be you.



Whole grilled marinated fish was also done nicely, with tender meat that didn't require rocket-scientist levels of precision to fillet. A delicately seasoned marinade with lemongrass, ginger, and chili gave the white flesh a nice additional kick - the three house-made dipping sauces on the side were another nice touch.



Nasi goreng, Indonesia's ubiquitous fried rice with Stuff on the Side was on offer, complete with a shrimp cracker, sambal chili paste, and an additional stick of chicken satay. It had an appropriately smokey, coconut infused flavor and was quite tasty - there's a reason one of the planet's biggest countries is absolutely nuts over the stuff. I still haven't tried the epic Dutch-influenced Rijstaffel spread, which all my expat relatives grow a bit misty about when discussing the dish, but someday, someday, someday.



And then there's gado gado, Indonesia's classic mostly-boiled warm salad smothered in delicious peanut sauce. Another dish I'm astounded hasn't hit big in the US - are we THAT scared of peanuts? It's made differently just about everywhere, but the regular players are hard-boiled eggs, cashews, green beans, cabbage, shrimp crackers, bean sprouts, cucumber, tofu, and whatever else happens to be lying around the kitchen that would taste good with spicy peanut sauce on it. I love the stuff and could probably eat it from mixing bowls.

I can suggest Bayang for upscale and reasonably priced Indonesian food in a pretty setting in a great location - good for a meal and a stroll. Probably worth looking elsewhere for true authenticity when it comes to Indonesian cuisine in Singapore, but hell, do you need that all the time?