Eating it While it's Hot | Timbre+, Singapore

Timbre+ is a 24,00 sq.ft modern hawker hosted in a graffiti-covered container park. It has live music concerts, many different food trucks and restaurants, alcohol and lively hip atmosphere. There’s one thing it’s sorely missing though: air conditioning. The place is packed full of people, all of them sweating, and those include yours truly. I’m sorry for the graphic picture, but I would be having hard time enjoying even the most ambrosial food on earth when sitting in a pool of my own sweat.

On the surface level Timbre+ has all the ingredients to turn me to a happy camper, however, I wouldn’t say I can recommend a visit to Timbre+ wholeheartedly. The place has indeed a great industrial vibe that I like with fitting background music. Having that said, the food didn’t blow me away. Yes, some of the food items we sampled were very tasty, but not enough so that it was worth the extra discomfort and travel time outside of the city center.

Here’s what we sampled:

Teppei Daidokoro

The Japanese chef Teppei Yamashita offers some Japanese staples at his kiosk. You can find dishes like Yakitori skewers, different Donburi (rice bowls) as well as Katsu (deep-fried chicken cutlet). Besides the chef’s dishes, you can also assemble your own bowl by choosing a base (rice\tofu\salad), fish, sauce and toppings of your liking.

We had the Kaisen Don (16 SGD / $11.5 / 41₪) – a bowl of rice topped with salmon row, seaweed and a variety of sashimi: salmon, tuna, swordfish, scallop and shellfish. The portions are very generous, the dish is aesthetic, the rice is properly done and the flavor is wonderful. The huge chunks of fish were fresh, juicy and tender so really what’s not to like here?

The World is Flat

Forget all you know about food. This place took it as a mission to create over the top, crazy dishes. Their truck will be hard to miss and the dishes hard to forget (but not always for the better).

The first thing we tried was the Fat Samurai Pizza (9 SGD / $6.5 / 23₪). Can you understand what’s the dish from looking at the picture below? That’s ok, I wasn’t able to grasp what I’m eating even after chewing on it. Let’s count all the ingredients dumped on the deep dish umami charcoal crust: duck confit, bacon, prawn, burnt onions, smashed US beef, roasted cabbage, konbu mayo, balsamic okonomiyaki sauce, crispy bonito flakes and mozzarella. All of these flavors and components amount to basically a weird, inchohesive blend. Not something we enjoyed eating, unfocused with just too much going on.

The other dish we tried was the Wham! FRIES (9 SGD / $6.5 / 23₪) – sweet potato fries with glazed marshmallow, melted Gruyere cheese and sour cream. Though the combination sounds impossible, it somehow works and we found ourselves finishing it pretty fast.

Portico Platos

This place had already closed down. They used to serve Spanish dishes such as paella and churros.

Just before we headed out, completely stuffed, we ordered the Damn Good Churros (9 SGD / $6.5 / 23₪). I was told this would take around 5-8 minutes, but eventually it was close to 20 minutes. Was it worth a 20 minute wait? Not really. The Churros were quite nice though, and the Salted Caramel and Naphung Honey Kaya sauces were great. The downside is that the amount of sauce served was minuscule.

Food Anatomy

Their motto is “where design meets culinary” or as they elaborate on their website “We define beauty not from the conventional way of culinary plating. Instead, the aesthetic of each dish is developed more as a graphic design project” – Pretentious much? 🙄

If you ask me, ‘aesthetics’ doesn’t mean forcing different food items into the shape of a cube but ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ etc. Personally, I like it less when my food looks like a cross section diagram.

The cubes are sold for (3 SGD / $2 / 7.5₪) each, and you can find dishes like Teriyaki Chicken, Rice Dumpling, Yuzu Salmon Rice, Laksa Pasta, Korean Braised Pork Rice, Bacon Mashed Potato and more. I tried the cold Cha Soba with soy sauce jelly which was pretty bland.

Two Wings

Armed with a 40-year old secret recipe, Jeremy Loh started Two Wings, which is often considered to be the best chicken wings in Singapore. The wings, fried for 9 minutes upon ordering, come in a few flavors: Salted Egg Yolk, Chilli Crab and Heritage.

Of course I went for the Salted Egg Yolk Chicken Wings (8.9 SGD / $6.5 / 23₪). What started as a gravy for a common Singaporean crab dish caught on like fire to become a nation-wide craze in the form of, well, everything edible!

A few minutes later I received this wooden board with golden and crispy wings. They were not too greasy and the chicken was juicy and tender on the insides. It went great with the beer we ordered and the only thing I felt missing is a live concert to go along with it all.

Bottle Shop

All this food requires some good beer to drink it down with.. Bottle Shop offers a rotating beer selection from all over the world.

I was in the mood for something light and fruity so I got myself the Honey Apricot Ale by Brewerkz, a Singaporean micro brewery. It was perfectly refreshing for the humid evening we had inside Timbre +.