House of Peranakan Petit, Eng Hoon Street

House of Peranakan Petit (42 Eng Hoon Street, tel : +65 6222 1719) is part of the House of Peranakan Group of restaurants. The group, which has begun from humble beginnings back in the 80s have apparently a number of accolades representing their culinary achievements for Peranakan food. This particular outfit as I was able to determine attempts to carry on that tradition with a contemporary spin for some of the dishes. 

That's their ngoh hiang - minced pork and prawns with chopped water chestnuts stuffed in a bean curd skin that's deep fried. I've personally had excellent home made ones so while this was pretty tasty, I couldn't say that it was a stellar representation of the snack. 

The grind of the minced meat was a little fine - a little too refined if I might add compared to the ones my grandmother made. The water chestnuts were also a little too finely diced to the point where they could barely be discerned. So I suppose the sin here was a loss of two contrasting textures that provided bite and a soft crunchiness which made these rolls what they were. At $12 a roll, this was probably the only time I'm ever ordering it. 

HoPP's chap chye was quite garlic-ky. Now I do like garlic in general but I think prefer the renditions of this particular dish that are less brown, more lightweight in flavour and have cabbages that have been stewed for a longer time. The kind that's commonly found in Hainanese curry rice stalls. That's just me.

Truthfully, this crayfish curry was my first crayfish anything in Peranakan cuisine. The gravy tasted like assam fish curry without the assam if you catch my drift. Am at a loss for a better description at this point but the flavours were nice. There was a bunch of wilted cabbage and what might have been a sunny side up on top of it. Awesome stuff altogether. If there were to be room for improvement, it would be an additional egg for the cabbage and perhaps larger crayfish.

These was appropriately named scallop lemak. The operative word here is lemak. Which means 'fat' in Malay but is synonymous to mean 'enriched' as well. Usually with coconut milk. The tender scallops were smothered in a heart clogging coconut milk laden gravy which was topped with laksa leaves. Pretty sure this was Peranakan inspired as opposed to being a traditional recipe. And damn it was good. It's a "tempted to lick the plate clean" kind of good if I had to be more precise. Made me eat more rice than I'm normally comfortable with.

Dessert was durian chendol. Pretty good stuff. The shaven ice with coconut milk was replaced with coconut ice cream. While it appeared deconstructed, it tasted like the actual stuff once it was all mixed up with the gula melaka.