Beach Road Kitchen

Beach Road Kitchen
30 Beach Road, 189763
6818 1913
facebook.com/beachroadkitchen

With the rebranding of The South Beach Hotel as JW Marriott Singapore, along with it have been a slew of new F&B spaces opening. Among them is the hotel’s Beach Road Kitchen, a restaurant intended for the public, as well as being for the guests of the hotel – you wouldn’t imagine it would be, considering it’s not attached to the hotel, but that’s the charm of it.

Part of what makes for a good hotel restaurant buffet is choice, and there are stations all around – from local dishes, Indian, Chinese, carved meats, desserts, a wall of lollies and a laksa station where you pile your chosen ingredients into a bowl and let the chef turn it into a spicy masterpiece. The seafood section has pieces of Canadian lobster and crab, oysters with an on-hand shucker, and plates of smoked and spicy salmon.

The cheese and charcuterie area had duck rillettes, pork chorizo and more, with the cheeses being varied (and a proud addition for the Italian head chef).

The vertical salad wall alternates between chopped and whole veggies – just in case you’re the type to eat a tomato like an apple. The shelves of lolly jars by the dessert area are so alluring. The nearby pizza station was making white truffle and mushroom pizza – a favourite so far at the restaurant.

There’s a takeaway part for people to grab a la carte choices during the day, with a play on the whole ‘fried chicken and waffles’ thing by using chicken from the chicken rice stand – handy for visitors wanting to try it who don’t have the time to get the authentic hawker experience. The dessert station has a mixture of French pastries, local treats and a few quirky extras. There’s a machine that coats different nuts every day to make chocolate covered snacks. There’s a crêpe part, waffles, a soft serve machine with a choc chip ice-cream and a lemon sorbet, ice cream in little tubs – choc chip or black sesame – and things like strawberry sponge cake, choux and tiramisu.

Having worked in Seoul’s JW Marriott for almost a decade, Executive Chef Stephano Di Salvo is now in Singapore. Coming to the table with a giant bowl filled with sole fish just flown in from France, he asks if we’d like one cooked up. Considering it’s a buffet, having something cooked fresh seemed too good to pass up, even if the stomach had no room for it.

The meat section had beef tomahawk, cooked rare and a generous portion, and a giant seabass with hollandaise sauce. The meat was tender and rare, and I refrained from using any of the sauces on offer. The seabass had a feathery light tenderness – not too fine that it would dissolve, but close. There’s even a roasted duck hawker stall at the end – hanging ducks and all – for a nice touch of authenticity.

The buffet goes for $42++ for breakfast, $58++ for lunch and $78++ for dinner – with the option of $29++ extra to get free flow of red, white and sparkling.