A Taste of Singapore(1)
One bite of Singapura's tangy-sweet chili crab, and you're hooked. The new Tumon restaurant lures guests in with a new kind of island flavor -- Singaporean.
The Southeast Asian cuisine is a product of natural fusion that evolved over centuries. As people of Malaysia, India, China, Indonesia and other Asian countries migrated and intermingled, so did the food.
Savory garlic, roasted pepper, spicy curry and coconut milk are deliciously blended. The result is unique food that tastes familiar but with explosions of new flavors.
"This isn't your average Asian restaurant. It's unique to Guam," says general manager and part-owner John Trinidad.
"The flavors are different, and we enjoy educating people about the food. They ask if it's like Thai food or Chinese food, and it is, a little, but it's so evolved and fused with different genres," Trinidad says.
One of the most popular dishes is the Hainan chicken and rice, a Singaporean favorite. The island off the Malay peninsula is covered with stalls dedicated to the simple -- yet tasty -- dish.
Executive Chef Walter Cortes gives plain rice a boost by cooking it in chicken broth with ginger and garlic. A chicken breast is then poached with the same flavors and served with three sauces -- sweet soy sauce, spicy chili sauce and ginger sauce.
"You can eat the sauces individually, or you can mix them up. Then, you take a spoonful of the fragrant rice and a sip of the broth that's served on the side. The broth is the essence, and eating it this way is a flavor experience," Trinidad says.
The restaurant serves a little of everything, including five different types of seafood -- lobster, crab claws, whole crab, prawns and scallops.
After you choose your shellfish, then you pick one of four irresistible sauces. The chili sauce is a sweet, tangy mixture of chili and tomato. The pepper sauce is a light gravy with roasted peppercorn flakes. The coconut curry is rich and creamy, and the garlic butter has hints of coconut and Chinese wine.
"You can't go wrong with these sauces, but the garlic butter with the scallops is impressive," says Sims Cabrera, advertising manager at Docomo Pacific.
