Chilli Crab as an Ice Cream

Asking a Singaporean to pay three hundred dollars for chilli crab is, in this city, a small act of provocation.

Labyrinth has been provoking for over a decade. The argument is that Singaporean food, the hawker dishes and Peranakan plates and the daily food the city eats at coffeeshops and family kitchens, deserves the same plating discipline, kitchen technique, and tasting-menu format as French haute cuisine or modernist European cooking. The position is not, on its face, controversial. Many cities have built fine-dining restaurants around their local food traditions. Lima has done it with Peruvian, Tokyo with kaiseki, Bangkok with Thai. The local-cuisine fine-dining move is well established globally.

In Singapore, it is harder. The city's food identity is rooted in cheap, casual, accessible eating. Hawker centres are part of the everyday infrastructure. The dishes that define the cuisine, chilli crab and chicken rice and bak chor mee and laksa and char kway teow, are priced under twenty dollars on most days of the week, served on melamine plates with disposable cutlery. A restaurant that takes these dishes and asks a guest to pay several hundred dollars to eat them as a tasting menu is asking the guest to revalue the cuisine in a way many guests instinctively resist.

I went on a Wednesday at lunch, the $208 menu, three hours, single tasting format. I went to test whether the chilli crab ice cream that everyone talks about is still doing the work, or whether the kitchen has, after eleven years, started coasting on the dish's reputation.

The room as a counter

Labyrinth sits at 8 Raffles Avenue, #02-23 Esplanade Mall, near the Esplanade MRT entrance on the waterfront. The restaurant opened in 2014 under chef-owner LG Han (Han Li Guang), who has, since then, built the room around the mod-Sin tasting menu. The layout places the open kitchen at the centre with most of the seating facing it. The counter is the room's primary seating. There are tables behind, but the counter is where the kitchen's work is most visible.

That layout is the kitchen's editorial decision. The diner is being asked to watch the cooking, because the local-cuisine fine-dining argument is really about labour. A modernised hawker dish that arrives on a plate without context can read as overpriced or overproduced. A modernised hawker dish that arrives in front of the diner after the kitchen has visibly built it is a different proposition. The interior around the counter is modern but restrained: dark walls, soft lighting, warm ambient music that does not insist on itself. The room is sized for intimate service rather than for large volume.

Han has also, in recent years, repositioned the kitchen toward a more aggressive locavore programme, sourcing the majority of ingredients from Kranji farms and Singapore waters and leaning into the local-supply argument as the menu's secondary defence. He is now as much an advocate for the city's small agri-supply chain as he is a chef. That move is consistent with the original argument: if the cuisine is going to be argued at fine-dining level, the ingredients should come from the cuisine's actual ecosystem, not from imported substitutes.

The chilli crab ice cream

The restaurant's most-discussed signature has, for years, been the chilli crab ice cream. The dish takes Singapore's most famous restaurant dish, chilli crab, the tomato-and-chilli-laden whole crab served with mantou, and translates it into a small composed plate that uses the chilli crab flavour profile as the centre of a savoury ice cream course. The current form has refined the dish further than its earlier iterations: locally-sourced flower crab, steamed with salted-fish powder, dressed with egg-white ribbons and a Shaoxing and chicken-fat emulsion, served alongside the ice cream. The mantou has been reframed from a sand bed to a small crouton element on the plate.

The course arrived as a small porcelain dish with a single quenelle of chilli crab ice cream alongside the dressed crab, the supporting components arranged around the central object.

The first taste decided it. The ice cream tasted, recognisably, of chilli crab. The tomato sweetness was present. The chilli warmth was present. The crab character was present. The whole flavour profile of a Singapore chilli crab dinner had been compressed into a single cold spoon. The salted-fish powder on the warm crab was the small move that made the dish work: it carried the chilli-crab flavour without the sauce, so the dish read as the idea of chilli crab rather than as a miniature version of it. The cold ice cream and the warm crab in the same bite created the temperature collision the kitchen had built the course around, and neither component would have worked alone or at the same temperature.

By the second bite I had stopped analysing the construction. A fine-dining version of a hawker dish has to clear two bars: it has to be recognisable as the original, and it has to justify the new format. The chilli crab ice cream, on the day I ate, did both. What surprised me was how committed the dish was to being a single coherent course rather than a chilli-crab demonstration. The ice cream and the warm crab were one dish, not two. The construction worked because the kitchen had stopped serving the dish as a parlour trick years ago and committed to it as a working course.

The other dishes on the menu showed the same instinct with mixed success. The Ang Moh Chye Tow Kway, braised seabass fish maw stir-fried in place of kway teow, with house-made liver sausage and house oyster sauce, was the most ambitious translation on the day and the most surprising: the fish maw took on the kway teow's texture without losing its own character, and the liver sausage carried the smokiness the original dish gets from the wok. The grandmother's Ang Mo Chicken Rice, truffle rice, chicken, chap chye, was on the menu as a comfort course, the kind of plate that justifies the locavore programme without needing the ice cream's drama.

What the kitchen has had to refuse

The friction with Labyrinth is the same friction faced by any local-cuisine fine-dining restaurant. Some guests will find the format and the pricing inappropriate for the cuisine. A guest who has eaten chilli crab at a hawker centre for forty dollars cannot easily revalue the same flavour profile at a tasting-menu price point. The mental adjustment is hard. The restaurant has, mostly, made peace with this. The kitchen has continued to refine its argument over years. The audience that values the format has grown, slowly. The audience that does not value it goes to the hawker centres.

The other friction is structural. Singaporean food is communal food, and a tasting menu is, by format, individual. The restaurant has to make individual courses out of dishes that were never designed to be served individually. Some translations succeed and some struggle. A bak chor mee course is harder to translate than a chilli crab course, because bak chor mee is a noodle dish whose pleasure is, in part, the physical experience of eating noodles, and a tasting-menu version cannot deliver the eating experience, only the flavour profile. The kitchen has, over the years, refined which dishes translate well to the format and which do not. The menu, on the day I ate, was made up of dishes that translate well, with the more difficult translations either retired or rebuilt into a workable form. That curation is the kitchen's editorial discipline.

The new pressure is category competition. Modern Singaporean is no longer Labyrinth's sole territory. Every hotel in the city now runs a mod-Sin tasting menu. The kitchen's locavore-100% position is the new differentiator, but it is also the cost ceiling: local ingredients are not cheaper, and the supply chain is small enough that the kitchen has to plan menus around what is actually growing on which farm.

Labyrinth is one of the few restaurants in Singapore where the city's everyday food has been taken seriously enough to be argued at a tasting-menu level. The chef has not been embarrassed by the cuisine. The kitchen has not flinched from the format. The chilli crab ice cream and the fish-maw Ang Moh Chye Tow Kway carry the menu's working argument, and the salted-fish powder on the warm crab was the small invisible move that, on the day, made the most-photographed dish on the menu hold up against its own years of press. The argument is not finished, and the restaurant continues. In a category where local-cuisine fine-dining experiments often close within their first three years, that continuation is the strongest evidence that the argument is a real argument and not a marketing exercise.