The McNuggets Are a Serious Dish

The Chicken McNuggets at RVLT are a serious dish disguised as a joke, and that disguise tells you most of what the bar is doing.

Natural wine carries reverence. The category takes itself seriously: the funk-as-virtue purism, the sommelier's lecture, the preciousness of a movement that arrived as a corrective and then hardened into orthodoxy. RVLT, the Carpenter Street bar that pioneered natural wine in Singapore back in 2016, helped start that wave, and then refused to be precious about the thing it had pioneered. It pairs serious organic and biodynamic bottles with house-made Chicken McNuggets, in a no-frills neon-and-disco-ball room with an "(in)famous wine wall." The McNuggets are the anti-reverence statement. The only real question is whether they amount to anything, or whether they're a trying-too-hard-casual pose.

They amount to something. RVLT makes them seriously: fresh-ground chicken breast and thigh, hand-chopped soft bones for texture, fried to order, served with a fermented sriracha. The most un-precious food imaginable, made with real care, paired with the most precious wine category, also made with real care. The pairing is how the bar shows it is sure of itself.

A serious dish, a real pairing

The first bite of the house-made McNuggets, taken with a funky natural wine, was the test.

The McNuggets were genuinely well-made. This was not a frozen-nugget joke. The fresh-ground chicken and hand-chopped soft bones gave them a texture and depth no industrial nugget has, fried to a real crust, the fermented sriracha adding a tangy heat. And the pairing worked: the wine's funk and acidity cut the fried-chicken fat, the fat rounded the wine's wildness, and each made the other more drinkable. The anti-reverence had substance behind it. The most un-precious food, made seriously, poured alongside the most precious wine, without a sermon. The joke turned out to be a real dish, and the pairing turned out to be a real pairing.

That is the pioneer's confidence. RVLT could easily have been the reverent natural-wine authority. It has the credentials, the founders are veteran sommeliers, and it was there first. It chose to be unpretentious instead, which is the move a pioneer with nothing to prove can afford to make. A newer natural-wine bar still has to establish its seriousness: the funk performed as virtue, the bottles presented with reverence, the customer taught to appreciate. RVLT, having helped build the scene, can skip the reverence and serve McNuggets, because its seriousness is already established and doesn't need performing. The anti-reverence is the earned ease of a pioneer, and the McNuggets are the proof of it: a serious bar confident enough to look unserious.

The service carried the same ease. The team poured serious biodynamic wine without the somm's lecture, paired the McNuggets with a funky bottle and explained the funk-and-fat logic without turning the wine into a sermon. The anti-reverence lives in the service as much as the food, with natural wine treated as a pleasure rather than a doctrine.

Where the room over-performs

The neon-and-disco-ball styling is where the un-pretentiousness occasionally tips into a pose.

The food earns the un-preciousness. The McNuggets are genuinely good, and the anti-reverence is right there in the cooking. But the room sometimes over-signals it. The neon, the disco ball, the deliberate no-frills styling all work a little too hard to announce "we're not precious," which is its own kind of preciousness. There's a version of anti-reverence that simply is unpretentious, and a version that performs the unpretentiousness, and RVLT's room occasionally tips into the second. The McNuggets carry the ease on their own, while the disco ball is busy advertising it.

That is the bar's one wobble. The food, the wine, and the pairings don't need the room to announce their casualness, and the styling's over-performance slightly undercuts the earned ease the food has already demonstrated. A drinker should focus on the pairings and read the disco ball as the bar trying a little too hard to prove a point its McNuggets have already made.

The friction

The friction with RVLT comes down to the over-performed room and the divisiveness of the category itself.

The neon-disco-ball styling over-performs the un-pretentiousness, so a drinker is better off focusing on the food-and-wine than on the room's slightly try-hard casual signaling. The food earns the ease; the styling occasionally poses it.

There's also the price. Unpretentious doesn't mean cheap. The wine is still around $90 and up a bottle, and the McNuggets-and-disco-ball casualness can disguise that this is a real spend. Anyone reading the room as a cheap casual bar will be surprised by the wine list.

And then there's natural wine itself. The funk divides opinion, and a drinker who dislikes the wild, funky, biodynamic register won't be converted by the McNuggets. RVLT pairs the funk with un-precious food, but it doesn't soften the funk, and the funk is a love-it-or-leave-it proposition.

What the bar is for

RVLT is the natural-wine pioneer that refused to be precious about what it pioneered, pairing serious biodynamic bottles with house-made McNuggets in a disco-ball room, the anti-reverence substantive rather than posed. The McNuggets are a serious dish disguised as a joke, the funk-and-fat pairing is real, and the over-performed room is the one wobble.

The house-made Chicken McNuggets, fresh-ground with hand-chopped soft bones and paired with a funky natural wine that cut their fat, were the dish that proved the anti-reverence had substance. A natural-wine pioneer with nothing to prove, pairing serious wine with un-precious food because it can afford to be unpretentious, has built the more confident kind of natural-wine bar, one that treats the category as a pleasure rather than a doctrine.

So the McNuggets are a serious dish. That they come disguised as a joke is the pioneer's confidence, and the disguise is worth seeing through. The food and the wine both hold up, and the disco ball is the only part of the room doing any performing.