Roland Restaurant

The original chilli crab is lighter than you think, and the inventor's son is in the kitchen to prove it.

Roland is where to take anyone who thinks chilli crab means a thick, sweet, eggy gravy. The sauce here is the original style, lighter and less rich, and the claim to the word original is better than most: Roland Lim, who runs the kitchen, is the son of Madam Cher Yam Tian, who worked the dish out in the 1950s. The compromise is the setting, the sixth floor of a Marine Parade car park complex; the next step is to book a big table and bring the family.

The story, briefly, because it changes how you taste it. Her husband brought crabs home from the sea; when he tired of them steamed, she stir-fried them with chillies and tomatoes. Together they opened a roadside stall on Upper East Coast Road with two tables, no electricity and a charcoal fire, and by the 1960s it was a proper restaurant called Palm Beach, after the coconut palms on the shore. In 1985 the couple sold up and emigrated to New Zealand, and the name went with the sale. Lim told the Michelin Guide in 2018 that it was a waste he could not take back the Palm Beach name. He opened Roland in 2000, taking over a restaurant run by his godfather, the chef Sin Leong.

Now the crab. Lim keeps the recipe secret but has said it involves sambal chilli, tomato and egg, and the restaurant says it sticks to Mdm Cher's original. If you grew up on the heavier versions, this is a useful lesson in where they came from, and the sauce is no less worth mopping up, so order fried buns for exactly that. There is black pepper crab too, for the person at every table who always orders black pepper crab.

The rest of the menu is a classic seafood-restaurant spread, and the dishes Lim kept from Palm Beach are the ones to build around the crab: black sauce prawns, baby squid, spicy chilli cockles and seafood hor fun. Steamed pomfret from the daily catch is there for anyone who would rather not have sauce on their fingers.

To do it well, ask the price before you choose a crab: it is charged by weight and season, so size the crab to the table rather than the other way round. The room seats about a thousand, which makes it the place for the three-generation dinner no fashionable restaurant will fit, and the restaurant lists a private room for events. It is the opposite of a tourist strip, and Marine Parade MRT is nearby.

Bring the eldest at the table and let them tell you about the old East Coast seafood days. On this subject, they are usually right.

Good to know Crab prices are seasonal and by weight, so ask when you order. The restaurant lists a private room for events. Marine Parade MRT is nearby.

Roland Restaurant | #06-750, 89 Marine Parade Central, Singapore | Nearest MRT: Marine Parade