Chilli Crab
by Kenneth Lyen
Yesterday my Rotary Club friends decided to have dinner at Roland Restaurant in Marine Parade. I knew nothing about this place, and I found it bizarre to have a restaurant on top of a rather humorless Housing & Development Board (HDB) carpark block. However, the food was good. I especially enjoyed the chilli crab. I thought nothing about it, and absent-mindedly took a name card on my way out.
When I got home, I noticed that the name card boasted: “Roland Restaurant: The Creator of Chilli Crab Since 1956”. I had no idea where chilli crab originated, other than the fact that in September 2009, Malaysia's Tourism Minister, Ng Yen Yen, controversially claimed that "Chilli crab is Malaysian", and she accused Singapore and other countries of hijacking Malaysia’s food. So I did a bit of internet research.
I discovered that the creator of the chilli crab was indeed the Lim family that owns Roland Restaurant. What I also found out was that according to Dawn Seow, it was concocted “by a woman trying to please her husband during dinner time.”
Mr. Lim Choon Ngee and his wife Mdm Cher Yam Tian lived in a kampong near the shores of East Coast in the 1950s. During low-tide, prawns and crabs swam close to the shore, and could be scooped up and steamed for dinner. Apparently one day Mr Lim grew tired of eating the same old steamed crabs, and asked his wife if she could invent a new way of cooking them. Mdm Cher experimented with tomato sauce and chilli, and “hit the jackpot”. Both husband and neighbors loved the chilli crab, and encouraged them to set up a stall.
So they started selling the chilli crab from a pushcart along the Kallang River, cooking the stir-fried crabs on an open charcoal fire. The customers sat on wooden stools, and kerosene lamps were placed on the wooden tables. As the number of seafood lovers grew, the restaurant relocated to Bedok Beach (before the reclamation of land, now the East Coast Park) along Upper East Coast Road.
The little stall grew and became the well-known Palm Beach Restaurant, which was sold when the Lim family moved to New Zealand where they lived for 15 years. But the Lim’s soon found the slow pace in New Zealand not conducive for doing business, and they returned to Singapore.
According to ieatishootipost, when the Lim’s came back, their son Roland started working at Palm Beach Restaurant before joining his godfather at Sin Leong Restaurant which at the time had shifted from Serangoon Road to the top of the Marine Parade Central Multistorey Carpark. When Mr Sin Leong retired, he passed the restaurant over to Roland who, with the blessing of his godfather, subsequently renamed it Roland Restaurant in 2000.
Roland Restaurant is now owned and managed by the son Roland Lim. Born one year after Mdm Cher started her business, he remembers the fishermen coming by with fresh catch, and asking if his mother might want some of it. He said “I started helping out at the stall full-time when I was just 13 years old. My mother put me in charge of cooking the cockles.” He added, “The cockles cannot be too cooked so that requires skill. I slowly moved on to learning to cook noodles, and finally the Chilli Crab.”
Roland has kept to the original Chilli Crab recipe at Roland Restaurant. However, the recipe has been modified by other restaurants. For example Dragon Phoenix Restaurant added eggs and sambal to the recipe.
The original Chilli Crab, says ieatishootipost “is a tad sweeter and less rich than the current version, but it was this version that made Mdm Cher’s recipe so popular."
In 2011, CNN Travel readers voted Chilli Crab as 29th in the "World's 50 Best Foods". Roland Restaurant is included in the Michelin Guide to Singapore restaurants 2016. I agree with ieatishootipost’s conclusion: “This dish is well worth a try, if not just for the sake of being able to experience a piece of our culinary heritage.”
Let us ensure that we Singaporeans hold onto our rightful claim for first rights to Chilli Crab, and not allow other countries to hijack our heritage!
Kenneth Lyen
26 November 2016
References
http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/eat/readers-choice-worlds-50-most-delicious-foods-012321/
