Redpan Marina Square (Closed)

Redpan Marina Square is a new restaurant that opened in March 2016. It is a collaboration between an architect firm and a restaurant company. According to the Redpan website, the restaurant is “…a brainchild of DP Architects x GRUB …  Through this collaboration, redpan aims to redesign the culinary experience. Red represents Singaporean and passion, and celebrates our food and design heritage; Pan refers to the culinary essential, and alludes to the crucible of this creative and culinary experiment.“

First impressions were good. The involvement of the architects can be seen in the clean lines and efficient space utilisation. One feature we thought was quite ingenious was the extensive use of the humble plywood to make beautiful sculpted surfaces for the wall panels and fittings.

Redpan Marina Square serves a mix of Western dishes as well as some Singapore local dishes, some with creative names. Here are pictures of their lunch, dinner and drinks menus.  We could not resist ordering the Tuckshop Fried Chicken Wings ($7), Temasek Chicken Chop ($11), Hainanese Pork Cutlet ($13) and Prawn Hae Bi Hiam Pasta ($15).

The Tuckshop Chicken Wing was a platter of nicely seasoned, crisp chicken wings. They were good and certainly worth trying but there was nothing “tuckshop” about them.

Prawn Hae Bi Hiam Pasta was another dish that we ordered out of pure curiosity. How did this East meets West combo turn out? Not bad but below our high expectations. The Hae Bi Hiam (shrimp paste) was too mild to make an impact. The overall dish was a tad too oily and salty.

The Temasek Chicken Chop was a good dish. The chicken was nicely grilled and the mushroom gravy was tasty. A good dish overall but we could not spot any connection with the “Temasek” name of the dish.

The Hainanese Pork Cutlet was thankfully spared from any cutesy name. It was a large portion of pork served with a cup of gravy. It was a decent Hainanese pork chop but we think a notch below the classic one served at Han’s Cafe.

After all that heavy food, we only had limited place for the sweet stuff. We ordered the Sticky Red Date Cake ($8) and Gooey Banana Donuts with Milo Dinosaur ($7) with coffee ($4) and cappuccino ($5). Both the desserts were exceptionally good. The Sticky Red Date Cake had bits of red date embedded. The flavours blended well with the caramel date sauce, vanilla ice cream and sesame seeds.

Gooey Banana Donuts with Milo Dinosaur was a big bowl of donuts with banana filling inside and milo chocolate coating outside. The “donuts” were a version of the Malay deep fried banana balls known as kueh kidik. A thousand calories, but this is worth going to the gym for.

Overall, we were not impressed by the dishes with the overly localised names, but we appreciated the effort to inject a Singapore feel at the Redpan Marina Square. Fortunately, the desserts saved the day and the meal ended on a sweet and high note. I should also mention that the Lemongrass with Gula Melaka ($5) and the Lychee Earl Grey Tea ($5) were also fantastic and are highly recommended. The pricing at Redpan Marina Square also seemed reasonable considering the overall dining experience.

Finally, the choice of “Redpan” as the restaurant name was a clever one as the “dp” initials feature prominently  in the centre. There is however one downside as the too clever software keeps auto-correcting it to “Bedpan” as I write. I have tried my best to manually rectify all of them but if there is any that I may have left out, please be assured that it is unintentional.

Ratings:
Food: 4
Service: 4
Value: 4
Atmosphere: 4
Overall Rating: 4 TOPs  

Redpan Restaurant
6, Raffles Boulevard #02-03/04
Marina Square
Singapore 039594

Nearby Stations: Esplanade, City Hall, Promenade

The Ordinary Patrons
Singapore Food Blog by Ordinary People looking for Places to Eat