Foodie finds in Seah Street

NEW RESTAURANTS

Restaurant SELA

32 Seah Street

Tel: 6337-6358

Open for lunch and dinner Mon to Sat: 11.30am to 2.30pm; 6.30pm to 11pm. Closed on Sun

Tess Bar & Kitchen

38 Seah Street

Tel: 6337-7355

Open Mon to Thurs from 11.30am to 1am (until 2am on Fri). Lunch from 11.30am to 2.30pm. Sat from 5pm to 2am. Closed on Sun

BACK in the day, when restaurants didn't have the benefit of PR consultants or social media, the way they did business would sound horribly archaic now: they opened their doors, and you know, hoped that people would come in and discover them.

Back in the day, when diners hadn't yet discovered TripAdvisor or the concept of "trending", the way we ate would sound horribly archaic now: we would actually go into a new restaurant without knowing who was cooking.

That sense of deja vu comes back now in Seah Street, where Restaurant SELA and Tess Bar & Kitchen have popped up like unidentified foodie objects in terrain once known for Hainanese pork chops, chicken rice and an old-fashioned baking ingredients shop. SELA who? Tess what? Are they part of a big restaurant group? Do they have a celebrity chef consultant? Did their chefs do stages at any Michelin-starred restaurants? Are they run by hipster ex-bankers looking to unleash their home cooking skills on a bigger audience? Do their Facebook pages have more than 1000 likes?

No? Huh. Is that a bad thing? Not at all.

Restaurant SELA and Tess Bar & Kitchen are almost-neighbours that you're hard put to give a second glance to in the middle of a hot afternoon on your way to stock up on paper doilies and generic brand bags of mixed fruit from the baking shop. It looks like the lunchtime crowd packing the coffeeshops - but not either of these restaurants - also don't want to take their chances with a near-empty restaurant that hasn't been blogged about yet.

If they did, they'd realise what we did - that these two are solid entrants to the dining scene who fill a nice gap between "concept" restaurants and the ubiquitous cafe. Both boast comfortable pricing and reliable cooking that doesn't surprise in the creativity stakes, but score points for earnest execution. At SELA, we find out that the chef once worked in the kitchen of indie favourite Lolla, although you won't find anything remotely close to its signature sea urchin pudding here.

But you do get easy-on-the-palate fare such as an unpretentious salad of roasted pumpkin and beetroot, slicked through with a sweet balsamic dressing and huddled in a gathering of arugula and pine nuts. A thick mushroom soup has a slightly raw edge which keeps it from being totally satisfying, but two chewy potato croquettes tip the balance back in its favour.

Good preamble

The two starters are from the $35 set lunch, which is all you can get in the day time - which works best for them logistically but not so favourably for those who want more variety. For that you'll have to come back for dinner - when it's the coffee shops' turn to be quiet and SELA becomes more hotspot-appropriate.

Still, lunch serves as a good preamble with an adequately turned out roasted seabass and clams comfortably cloaked in a creamy lemon sauce and skinny sticks of asparagus for company. A heavy hand with the salt shaker detracts from the enjoyment a little, but even in its imperfect state, it overshadows the pale, dry porkloin which may have come from a weight-conscious pig that didn't go out without sunscreen.

If you're lucky, you might be able to pick something off the dinner menu. In our case it's the baked lamb ribs ($30) - the gamey cousin of the baby back ribs that's suitably fork tender and doused in sticky-sweet glaze that isn't as offensively fake-tasting as at your average ribs joint.

While SELA sticks to a more straightforward guise as a modern European eatery, Tess Kitchen & Bar sets itself apart with an emphasis on the bar as well as the kitchen. That means you can show up as early as 6pm and there will already be people there, taking advantage of happy hour while nibbling on a decent sized menu of bar bites to large plates of 1.2kg prime rib or whole roasted salmon.

Like SELA, lunch at Tess is deafeningly quiet, but comes to life closer to sundown. While drinks are a big part of the menu (jars of candy at the bar counter are condiments for the cocktails), the food is no pushover.

This is where we find out that chef Martin Wong not only has full-arm tattoos, he was also part of the opening team at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Resorts World Sentosa. Which also makes us regret not ordering the Tess signature mashed potato, since he would naturally have mastered Robuchon's trademark side dish.

But we're perfectly happy with what we have - from the crispy-but-slightly-hard pork belly ($10) slices that you dip into chilli-enhanced kicap manis; deep-fried popcorn chicken-like karaage dusted with a spicy powder; full-bodied briny clams ($9) sauteed with a heady shot of booze set back by the too-hard baguette slices to dip into the salty sauce.

While bars notoriously amp up the salt content in their food to make you drink more, we're glad that chef Wong tries to keep a balance, such that the food is salty without being disagreeably so.

And he cooks with care, whether it's the house special wagyu cubes pan-fried and served with roasted bone marrow ($28) that is unabashedly dripping with fat - as molten liquid or wobbly, oozing cubes of it; or tender smoked duck breast ($16.80) with crispy thin slices of foie gras.

As both SELA and Tess show, no news is still good news, and if the Internet crashed and we had to get our information the old-fashioned way by actually discovering things on our own, it wouldn't be a bad thing. We might even be able to make up our minds about a restaurant on our own, instead of letting others do it for us.

jaime@sph.com.sg

@JaimeEeBT

Rating: 6.5 (Restaurant SELA)

Rating: 6.5 (Tess Bar & Kitchen)

WHAT OUR RATINGS MEAN

10: The ultimate dining experience

9-9.5: Sublime

8-8.5: Excellent

7-7.5: Good to very good

6-6.5: Promising

5-5.5: Average