The menu at Lion City Kitchen aims to blend the bold heritage flavours from Singapore’s famous hawker centres with the decadent burgers, tacos and wraps familiar to London’s own, more recent streetfood legacy.
The results are, and you’d expect, a mixture of inventive hits and a few slight misses. But overall it’s the ideal, slightly daring kind of food to accompany a jar or two of really decent beer, which make the current three-month kitchen residency at Torriano Avenue’s Rose & Crown a winner.
Our favourite item had to be the special Singapore chilli crab burger, a crunchy deep fried soft-shelled specimen, gangly limbs tumbling out of a sweet brioche bun alongside a zingy slaw and a slather of seriously uncompromising fresh chilli sauce.
The Singaporean native (otherwise known as the wife) I’d brought along to lend rigor to testing the authenticity of flavours actually found it too spicy, the chilli too raw, but washed down with my pint of passionfruit-heavy Granadilla Guerilla from Aberdeen’s suitably titled Fierce brewery, in my mind this was an eye-wateringly tasty combo.
Up against such unrestrained heat, the Hot Chick burger, a buttermilk thigh inspired by Singapore’s famous nasi lemak dish, proved much less remarkable. Meanwhile, the winner among a trio of soft tacos was the beef rendang, surprisingly heavy on the star anise, with nice colourful picked veg.
The kids tucked in to sambal honey wings, before the creeping chilli heat of the sauce defeated them and they moved over to demolish the katsuobushi fries. These are served with a topping of those beguiling bonito flakes that carry on writhing about all over the place, making for a truly animated, fun side.
This is ambitious streetfood, even more so for pub grub. We’d wager though that the punters that frequent this boozer for its renowned selection of robust beers will also be the types likely to appreciate the spicy creations currently emerging from the hawker-style garden kitchen.
