Thursday, August 03, 2017

Folklore

Chef Damian D'Silva jumped back into the fray with new restaurant Folklore, located at Destination Hotel at Beach Road between Golden Mile Complex and Golden Mile Tower. The casual restaurant is on the second floor, right at the lobby reception counters.

I'm a huge fan of Chef Damian D'Silva's take on Peranakan-Eurasian cuisine from his private kitchen to hawker stall, gastrobar and strange hipster foodcourt Timbre+. But I hated his now-defunct stall at Timbre+. The chef himself was rarely there. Minions ran it. Gave it three chances. It served up terrible food and the worst mee siam I've ever tasted in my life. Needless to say, after three mouthfuls, the food was left unfinished, and I never returned to the stall at Timbre+ again.


Thank goodness Folklore is rather wonderful. Its menu is pretty similar to what we knew when he ran Immigrants gastrobar. There was a bit of a wait since it was a full crowd at peak dining hour. The dishes we had tonight was so good. Spicy and full of homecooked awesomeness. Make a table for four, that would be optimal to sample more than three dishes and not be too stuffed.

Liver balls. Four giant balls chockfull of diced up meat (pork) and liver. I'm not a fan, but the table loved it. The sambal belachan that night was a little dry and held less belachan than usual. But that could be easily rectified. Couldn't help ordering the chap chye. This version is slightly dry, but just as tasty because the stock boiled down into the vermicelli and ingredients. The chilled tofu with pidan (century egg) was beautifully executed with crunchy bits of chye poh. Mmmm.

I loved the spicy dry 4-angled bean salad; which are winged beans with ginger flowers, kaffir lime, red and green chillies, dried shrimp tossed with a belachan sauce. That buah keluak was superb. Worth S$22 for a small bowl. We know exactly the tedious work it takes to scrape out the black gold from the nut to make edible buah keluak. There was definitely more black gold than minced meat. Buah keluak with plain white rice. Good lawwwd. An absolute food coma. It's been a long while since I've eaten this much white rice.

3 comments:

Su-Lin said...

I need to go check out this place! That bowl of buah keluak!

Cavalock said...

Just a short walk from my place. will try!

imp said...

Su Lin: if you liked his food at Immigrants Gastrobar, then Folklore would make you happy. Make reservations!

Cavalock: Yeah, his cooking mojo is back again after the nonsense that's Timbre+.