No menu has tickled our tastebuds as much as it scratched our brains as Labyrinth’s recently did.
After a successful decade in Singapore’s cutthroat fine dining scene, chef-owner Han Li Guang proves that he still has plenty of new tricks up his sleeve. Labyrinth first came to light for pioneering what is called Neo-Sin cuisine, a modern expression of Singaporean dishes that sees everything from chendol xiao long bao to chilli crab ice cream. It’s this unconventional approach to food that won Labyrinth its first Michelin star in 2017.
The latest menu “An Ode to Singapore” (from $298 for dinner) is what happens when you combine quasi-obsessive research on food history with heaps of culinary precision and Labyrinth’s trademark brand of playfulness. It also helps that its location in Esplanade Mall and black box-esque interiors play in nicely with the idea of the restaurant as theatre. You’ll see what we mean when the first four snacks are rolled out…on a makeshift hawker centre table that doubles up as a placemat.
Reinvented yet uncannily familiar hawker flavours are the star here. Ramly burgers made of tomato meringue buns; fluffy oyster buns inspired by those sold at Maxwell; Hainanese curry puffs with Japanese sweet potato; and reimagined satay sticks taking you back to the Satay Club days of the early 2000s. Everything is delivered with thoughtful storytelling, picture cards, and if you demonstrate the faintest curiosity, they’ll even show you video clips of how the oyster buns are fried up in a ladle, Disfrutar-style.
In the following courses, we see how Chef Han reaches back into history with each dish, considering its origin, flavour profiles, and cooking techniques in order to re-present it the Labyrinth way. With the char kway teow, every component represents painstaking effort and skill. Liver sausages are homemade, and so is the oyster sauce. The South African abalone that crowns the dish is tasty albeit a tad superfluous — a reminder that you’re in a fine dining restaurant after all.
Most interestingly, instead of regular kway teow noodles, seabass fish maw is braised, steamed, then stir-fried to achieve a texture that exceeds kway teow itself. Inspired by how kway teow is historically used as a cheap replacement for fish maw, Labyrinth then does the opposite. Why the complex reverse engineering? Well, because they can.
And since part of Chef Han’s quest is to uncover forgotten Singaporean dishes, we’re also introduced to the elusive Laksa Siglap – a dish only sold in two remaining hawker stalls in Singapore. Fun fact: there are over 10 types of laksa across Singapore and Malaysia. Here, fish stock and coconut milk are mixed with tamarind and rempah for the broth, Medai fish slices are ‘velveted’ the traditional Chinese way, and vermicelli is swapped out for lesser-seen rolled laksam noodles.
This modus operandi trickles down to the desserts. We’re met with a trio of surprises: azuki bean-filled rice wine tang yuan, cereal prawn ice cream, and kaya ‘toast’ – yes, dinner ends with breakfast.
In this day, putting out a prix fixe menu with Singaporean flavours and motifs is a risk in itself. How does Labyrinth do it while avoiding being labelled as ‘kitsch’? Chef Han credits it to the ability to “tiptoe the fine line between what is actually authentic in flavour, and what is the refinement of those flavours”. And in our view, what he does is beneficial, if not necessary for our food scene.
No matter how you look at it, a $300 meal is a splurge. But for anyone who considers themselves a foodie – and particularly if local food is your jam – we’d say do it if you can. That’s because dining at Labyrinth feels less like dinner and more like a delicious three-hour intellectual experience for the food geek. We’d also recommend this to tourists looking for a true deep dive into Singaporean cuisine, not without conquering some of our best hawker centres first of course.
In a time when fine dining is starting to dwindle and even award-winning restaurants are struggling to stay afloat, the fact that Labyrinth’s new menu charges ahead with no sign of slowing down is truly encouraging to see.
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