Former Zouk morphs into mod-Asian Jiak Kim House, serving laksa pasta and mushroom bak kut teh

NEW RESTAURANT

Jiak Kim House 5 Jiak Kim Street #01-17 Singapore 169425 Tel: 9831 5430 Open for lunch and dinner Mon to Sat: 12 pm to 3 pm; 6 pm to 11 pm.

LOOKING at Jiak Kim House from the outside is a bit like seeing your life flashing before your eyes without actually dying. A rewind back to the days when Zouk was a rite of passage; when Mambo Jambo nights were your preferred form of exercise; when you thought one day, you too would own the same kind of Lamborghini you always saw parked outside Velvet Underground. 

Oh, don’t kill yourself just because you’re still driving a Honda. Zouk has grown up and changed its priorities, just like you – the equivalent of a sedate, middle-aged person for whom a night of excitement means sneaking a couple of negronis without telling your health practitioner.

Zouk, a. k. a. Jiak Kim House now, looks like what it did in the 1920s when it was part of a trio of riverfront godowns used to store grain and other raw materials. It’s been given a nice scrub, so the facade is pristine white, all the better to show off its clean, colonial architecture. 

Inside, it’s like a dramatic concert hall, but with diners wielding cutlery instead of violins. High ceilings, timber rafters, hanging lamps and rattan furniture all come together for a pleasing, nostalgia-inspired feel. 

The food falls into the genre of mod-Asian, but is more of a jumble of ideas that veers from promisingly innovative to kitchen sink overkill. The menu is the work of head chef Seow Tzi Qin, who’s clearly trying to break out of the mass market image associated with Brewerkz – which owns Jiak Kim House. He has some good ideas, but there are little niggly things that tell us something is still wonky in the QC department. 

We’re there for the same reason most people go to a certain restaurant in the first place. We heard it was good; we have photos of golden brown, plumped up mini loaves and bolo bun lookalikes. But we get what tastes like hastily microwaved, shrunken, oily, cheesy popovers with a relatively chewy centre that hints at what it could have been if someone had done more than just flick a reheat button.

We didn’t get any bolo buns either, which, for bread fiends, is like deliberately refusing us a complimentary parking coupon. Instead, we get a pat of smoked butter and an apologetic “No, we don’t have any other kind of bread”.

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They’re also out of mushroom herbal tea – its version of bak kut teh supposedly served like a cappuccino with yutiao. 

But they do have chilled crab and jellyfish (S$32) which shows some clever thinking on the chef’s part to pair the two with a soursop sorbet spiked with Thai green chilli. It’s refreshing, tangy and unpredictable, but it needs better-quality jellyfish.

Seow’s strength lies in true-blue Asian cooking, which makes the Tingkat of Memories (S$36) the soul of Jiak Kim. A pile of stacked wooden containers hold his greatest hits: chilli crab stuffed kueh pie tee, a crackling croquette filled with spicy curried lamb, bouncy prawn-and-fish paste otak that’s hawker-worthy, and a packed crab cake fragrant with ulam-like herbs that you dip into a tom yam-like spicy mayonnaise. 

He does go overboard with the laksa fettuccine (S$42) – you can’t tell where the hokkien char ends and the laksa begins in this dish, which tries to prove that you can’t be too rich or too thick. A curious mix of pasta and konjac noodles drowns in a gravy of prawn bisque cooked with laksa paste and a good pinch of ulam herbs. There are squiggles of prawn paste, two larger prawns and a dollop of sambal for good measure. If this were food porn, it would be X-rated, leaving nothing to the imagination. The sambal is seriously legit, though.

The portions are large, so come hungry or share. That goes for Madam Lee’s lotus leaf rice (S$38), named after a quintessential matriarch who doesn’t let you leave the table till you’re fat enough to slaughter. The rice is comfortingly like steamed glutinous rice, but with regular rice that’s soaked up a mushroom broth with bits of sakura ebi. It’s served with marinated grilled chicken that tastes almost satay-like. There’s spicy turmeric sauce on the side, and anchovy sambal that’s also a winner.

If not for the unnatural pink of rose-shaped raspberry-lychee mousse that looks like it’s AI-generated, the Garden of Naomi (S$22) holds an intriguing combination of fruit, sorrel granita and juniper parfait. It sounds like a comedy of errors, but it actually works. However, we still prefer the familiarity of black forest (S$22), which layers dark chocolate with buah keluak ganache, ice cream and kirsch-soaked cherries. 

Familiar with a touch of zaniness, the food can sometimes get in your face. But if Seow streamlines it and works on the consistency issues, Jiak Kim House could be a place to come home to.

Rating: 6.5