Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong at Bar Stories

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong

Ah Hua Kelong is a local fish farm. They've a couple of cooked food restaurants showcasing the seafood they work with and Scaled (55 Haji Lane, tel : +65 98300117) is something new these guys are trying out with styles and flavours that are a little more borderless and progressive. The last part is relative though. 

If anyone's wondering why the picture up there looks like a bar, it is because they're sharing their premise with Bar Stories.

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong, smoked seabass pate

The menu is a literal handful of small plates and big plates. From what they're described, everything is still pretty experimental. The above is smoked seabass pate. The texture reminded me more of rillette than pate. It's smoky as the name implied but the portions were a little tiny to go around those toasties. Those pickled cucumbers that came with them were more sweet than sour and I found them quite addictive.

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong, prawns seaweed butter

There's prawn with seaweed butter. Too little butter in my opinion because I couldn't taste any of it. Their house pickled konbu's quite nice. Prawns were a little skinny and somewhat lacking in sweetness for such small prawns. 

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong, seabass

The only big plate item we tried was their confit seabass with hummus, caramelized onions and lemon dill vinaigrette. The pairing of hummus and seabass was quite unusual but I couldn't say that I didn't enjoy it. Textures were mostly soft and creamy with crunchy bits from....I dunno, cookie crumbs? More dill would be nice. Onions tasted like raisins. I liked this.

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong, clams

There was a complementary bowl clams in sake going around. The broth was pretty tasty but nothing that's not already out there.

Bar Stories, cocktail

Bar Stories make their drinks based on the flavour profiles that one requests for. I'm sure they have some formulaic templates for common requests but there's nothing on the menu. They drinks are made according to how you think you want them, how well you can articulate that and how the bar guy interprets. I got some yuzu stuff with torched rosemary.

Scaled by Ah Hua Kelong

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