De’Beer Seafood Restaurant Review: Crazy-looking Flaming Chicken Dish At Clementi

You know, the ones that serve peanuts and have a glass turntable in the middle to move dishes around with. These days, seafood restaurants seem to exist as an afterthought on the first floor of principal hotels.

With a starter of braised peanuts – a dish that only the most traditional of Chinese restaurants still serves – I found myself in flashbacks of reunion dinners from back when I was too short to reach the floor while sitting on an adult chair. De'Beer Seafood Restaurant - Flaming Chicken Found At Clementi Food at De’Beer Seafood Restaurant Like an Asian version of spaghetti vongole, the De’Beer Speciality Fried “La La” Bee Hoon ($18++ for 500g, $34++ for 1kg) was largely visually unappealing.

But there was more in the cloudy broth than meets the eye. We didn’t eat the dish immediately, but that meant our bee hoon was allowed to soak, making them slippery and even more flavourful than intended. Per to You can’t dig in immediately though, the waiter, before first day, and steam with the earthy aroma of Chinese herbs kicked off wafting out.

Like in a sauna, the prawns were cooked beside heated stones and finished off with a splash of Chinese wine. But De’Beer’s Salted Egg Crab with Crispy Cheese (seasonal rate) might just resurrect this trend. Unlike other versions of salted egg sauces, this sauce doesn’t drip, and is more of a glaze over the flash-fried crab pieces.

The grainy, salty, and slightly spicy sauce paired well with the sweet freshness of crab, but we wished there was more of that sauce for us to dip into. After all, there isn’t much of a point in coating crab shell in sauce, no matter how good this sauce is. Its initial form is far more impressive: a whole chicken, standing in the middle of a seafood and vegetable broth, set on fire .

Carved into slices and placed all around, each piece of meat was uniformly oval and ridiculously tender all around – even the chicken breast! Coupled with a flavourful skin, this was the most well-cooked whole chicken I’ve ever tasted.

Ambience at De’Beer Seafood Restaurant With heavy, metal-rimmed chairs, tables draped in gaudy maroon cloths. A lazy Susan on some tables, this is a traditional Chinese restaurant stuck in the ’80s my parents would love. Live seafood is displayed along the walls for you to choose the animals you will soon eat.

While we were indoors however, there were flies that kept landing on the dishes. Having experienced meals on roadsides and over drains in other parts of Southeast Asia, I don’t mind a little grime on my food, but that’s probably not the impression they were going for.

That said, prices are steep – as is to be expected of a seafood restaurant – so I’d probably only visit for the occasional treat. Address: 262 Jurong East Street 24, #01-485, Singapore 600262 Operating hours: Daily 11am to 3pm, 5:30pm to 11pm Tel: 6464 1365 Website This was a media tasting at De’Beer Seafood Restaurant.