Private kitchens are all the rage now and we checked out Lucky House Cantonese Private Kitchen, run by Mr Sam Wong from his corner terrace home in Upper East Coast Road. The self-taught chef prepares the traditional home-cooked dishes with local ingredients and also produce from his own garden! 2 lucky groups (8 and 12 pax) could dine at Chef Sam's each night. For $80, we had 8 dishes for sharing. And if you are part of the larger party, you'd be entertained all night by the cooking action out in the backyard.
We started dinner with a charcoal boiled soup, boiled for 8 hours over 6 batches of charcoal. Soup for the night was a pork shoulder with arrow root and peanut soup, which is naturally flavored, with no added salt, soy sauce, or pepper. The light sweetness comes from the added sea coconut and honey dates.
Boy was the soup creamy and delicious. We also had to stop ourselves from gorging on the tender meat.
Next, Concubine Chicken. This chicken was braised in the claypot with Chinese wine, galangal and rose liqueur. Gosh that light floral perfume of the chicken wafted in from the kitchen and had our drooling before the dish was finally brought to the table. And that sauce would have one finish a bucket of rice, though i must say that the rice available was way mushy.
Next, juicy Fried Prawns with Rose liqueur, which smelled a lot like cuttlefish or some fermented seafood paste. I suppose that's where the saltiness of the dish came from. I'd advise eating this wrapped up in the sweet lettuce to combat the sodium.
Fresh fish is best eaten steamed and we had a fatty 1.9kg wild caught red grouper from Batam, drizzled with a fresh batch of shallot oil.
The simple omelette is taken to the next level with this crayfish version. Chef cracked a whole tray of 10 eggs into this one, fried with the juicy chunks of crayfish (the heads are just for plating) and flavored with fish sauce.
Then, the signature Lucky House roast duck, which is marinated with five-spice powder, fish sauce, soy sauce, rice wine for two days, then sun-dried for a day before it is roasted in a charcoal oven for slightly over an hour over charcoal. Chef slices the ham-like bird tableside, and we were rewarded with juicy smoked and spiced meat.
Instead of carbs, we ended with a simple dish of fried sweet potato leaves from Chef Sam's garden. The vegetables, simply fried with some fish sauce, was fresh, crunchy and sweet, and not at all slimy.
For desserts, a simple Shandong peanuts and kidney beans was served.
Is it worth paying the the money for a meal at Lucky House Cantonese Private Kitchen? Well we feel that it is, knowing and seeing the amount of work that goes into the execution of these dishes. The dishes are certainly not as refined as that of a Chinese restaurant but the gu zao wei (taste of nostalgia) would be hard to replicate in a commercial kitchen. Looking forward to the next visit here (the wait list is likely past Sep/Oct 2018 by now) as Chef Sam shared with us his moreish curry dish that doesn't use any coconut milk/cream at all.
267 Upper East Coast Road Singapore 466413
Tel: +65 9823 7268
Weekdays: 6.30 - 10pm
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