Kite, Craig Road

I took notice of Kite (53 Craig Road, tel : +65 9729 7988) when they opened up late last year as they were by the same owner of SPRMKT. For some reasons, the restaurant went out of mind until recently so here's what we had from the visit. I was trying not to use the fusion tag but in the end, made peace with myself in agreement that they are fusion in many ways like many of the small plate joints that have been thriving in recent years. There's Japanese, Indian and even local influences in their food.

The other thing I learnt was that Leandros Stagogiannis is involved at the helm. Sounds familiar? Yeah, because he is.

Kite offers Tennent's beer aged with whisky oak. A smooth ale-ish brew from Glasgow of moderate bitter, some maltiness and interestingly beyond the other subtle complexities which I didn't bother with - a hint of whisky that came just before the aftertaste. I'm not sure if I had imagined the last part but that was what I thought registered. I liked it.

chicken skins, bourbon glaze, juniper salt

The chicken skins were quite nice. Crisp, flavourful - but not necessarily of the obvious ingredients that were mentioned. To describe it simply, it was salty and savoury. 

char siew wagyu

This did taste like char siew marinate and pretty much the only thing wagyu about it was the texture. Couldn't taste any of the natural flavours of the beef through the marinate. I don't think char siew flavour works so well with wagyu.

bread & butter

Actually, brioche and seaweed butter. The butter was nice in a salted umami kind of way, but I couldn't actually tell that there was seaweed. 

salmon trout 42Deg, seaweed, apples, sesame

Trout was very good. Tender, flaky and full of flavour. The sesame description from the menu was a bit of a misnomer as the dominant flavour on the presumeably sou vide fish is the furikake, not just sesame.

mentaiko somen, Hokkaido scallops, unagi, tobiko

The somen was also pretty good. I'm not sure what about it was mentaiko though. The torched scallops were awesome, cubes of unagi very nicely charred and flavourful as well while the spicy noodles kept us digging in until the very end. While this was a unique dish from Kite, the approach and flavour profile isn't so. Other restaurants have created similar noodle dishes with varying amounts of success simply because this flavour profile is well received.

Mangalica pork collar, you tiao veloute, spiced broth

The pork was buttery tender and I thought the creamy you tiao veloute was pretty impressive. If the idea was to create a progressive/contemporary update to ba kut teh, they've succeeded rather well.

lamb saddle chaat potatoes, spiced jus, tamarind mango chutney

I thought the Indian flavours were quite nicely done here. The lamb saddle was wrapped in a thin layer of fat which brought a nice lamb-y flavour together with the char on the exterior.