Chicken wings and mashed potatoes get the star treatment at Poise

NEW RESTAURANT

Restaurant Poise 6 Teck Lim Road Singapore 088384 Tel: 8894-4118 Open for lunch and dinner Tues to Sat (except Thurs): 12 pm to 3:30 pm; 6:45 pm to 11:30 pm. Dinner only on Thurs.

TECHNICALLY, Poise isn’t new. It’s already spent a year in its little corner of Teck Lim Road – low-profile, yet surprisingly resilient against a slew of fellow new entrants pushing storylines from Asian heritage to modern Indian/Middle Eastern, and a sudden obsession with the Malay archipelago. 

Next to all that, mod-European sounds positively plain vanilla. But chef-owner Steve Lancaster parlays his inner rebel, love for vintage rock and a penchant for pickling things to give Poise a spin of its own. 

Visually, the restaurant seems to be plucked straight from a Michelin star how-to guide. Cue the quiet luxury of dark-grey-muted-lighting interiors. Add Chan Soo Khian to its design credits. Little details like cold towels and free Wi-Fi. Pick from the bigger tables in a quiet dining section or the compact ones close to the action in the open kitchen. Ex-Odette staff serve you. 

But Lancaster’s personality soon kicks in. Rousing rock music makes you veer between heart palpitations and asking for his playlist. Next to the kitchen, a tall shelf filled with a mad professor’s laboratory’s worth of bottled specimens is a tribute to his time in Sweden, where vinegar was his friend. Here, assorted roots and shrubs float in ominous amber liquid. A bottle labelled “koji” is particularly scary, the grey-white matter inside not so much fermenting as festering. 

But they all have a less-than-nefarious objective – to give everything a light, fresh acidity to counter the heaviness of European fare. He’s well aware that Singapore diners are not partial to curing their insides the way the Scandinavians might be, so there’s never any point that your eyeballs feel the need to escape their sockets.

Pricing is par for the course for the fine-dining scene: lunch clocks in at S$128 for four courses and S$198 for five, or you can go for the full repertoire of seven courses for S$288 at dinner. There’s also an interesting wine pairing, where sommelier Ruby adjusts to your tastes with either familiar varietals or novel blends and styles from the new world that are refreshingly different.

Our seven-course meal starts off a little slowly with snacks that are pretty but not assertive; there’s a mild-mannered marron and pea tart that’s seasoning-averse and shy unagi on slightly greasy toast. But the crunchy potato nest under a ball of whipped chicken liver parfait deserves its own snack category.

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Lancaster’s strength is riffing on familiar classics, like a dressed-up prawn cocktail of kuruma ebi and lacto-fermented cubes of crunchy Jerusalem artichoke under a layer of prawn head jelly and covered with an airy veloute of the same fermented sunchoke. It’s fresh with a slight tickle of acidity and subtle brininess of the shrimp. Caviar adds a luxe touch.

It’s a pattern that will continue as he takes relatively humble ingredients and elevates them through technique and embellishment. No chicken wing ever commanded as much attention as here, with its meat carefully separated from bone and skin, blended and steamed to achieve the texture of the fluffiest fish ball in the shape of a lollipop, and then broiled for a golden burnished finish. It’s set in a frothy emulsion of fermented white onion with bits of bacon and mushroom. The result? The signature yet unrecognisable coq au vin.

In between, there’s a pull-apart loaf that’s milk bun-based, but with brioche genes, so it’s light and airy-dry rather than dense and pillowy. Glazed with mushroom garum and sprinkled with dehydrated chicken skin, it’s served with two kinds of butter to smear and mop up the onion sauce.

Potatoes, too, get the red-carpet treatment, prepared table-side as he siphons an airy mousse of creamy potato over cubes of confit spud, topped with a dollop of fancy caviar. But it’s still the humble tuber that stands out. 

Techniques he picked up in Sweden beyond fermentation also come into play when he finds new uses for beeswax beyond eco-friendly food wrappers. Fat Australian marron cuddled in this bee-made blanket for a few days results in firm and succulent flesh with pronounced flavour. All it needs is a gentle bath of clarified bisque, split with herb oil. 

Finally, slow-roasted pigeon breast marinated in shio koji gets a lift from pickled rhubarb and mashed peas. Piping hot pigeon broth laced with mint is the perfect pick-me-up.

The good thing is that the food doesn’t weigh you down, and a sweet ending is complete with a sweet-savoury-tangy ball of chocolate mousse covering hazelnut sponge and paired with sea buckthorn sherbet on shiitake-chocolate crumbs.

It took a year to discover Poise, but better late than never to learn that even if it seems that mod-European may well be an overused trope, all it takes is a new perspective to make it fresh again.

Rating: 7.5