Kota88 Restaurant Revisited 2022 : Chinese Indonesian Food at Siglap

Kota88 Restaurant is a laid back restaurant along East Coast Road serving food that is described as “Chinese Indonesian Cuisine Hailing from Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown”. We first visited them when they opened in 2018. It was time to revisit them in 2022.

Masakan Tionghoa Indonesia

Kota88 Restaurant serves Masakan Tionghoa Indonesia (Chinese Indonesian Cuisine). It is a mix of Chinese dishes with local Indonesian culinary characteristics, apparently started by Chinese immigrants in Indonesia many years ago. For more info on Kota88, you can read our post on our first visit. Kota88 is located in the same building as the Greek restaurant Blu Kouzina’s new outlet, a small residential and commercial building known as Springvale Centre along East Coast Road.

吃得满足

” 吃得满足 ” (eat till you are satisfied) is the exhortation posted on the wall of the Kota88 restaurant and on its website. The restaurant decor has remained largely the same. It looks like a mix of dark industrial with a Beauty World coffee shop of the 70s.

Kota88 Restaurant Menu 2022

Here are pictures of some portions of the Kota88 Restaurant Menu 2022. The restaurant specialty is pork satay which is available in a few variants – sweet or savoury marinated, pork intestine, pork skin or pork liver. They cost $17.88 for ten sticks with the option to mix and match. Being rather unadventurous folks, we decided on 5 x sweet and 5 x savoury marinated sate babi. Looking back at our previous post, the price of satay was $15.88. A small increase, which is not too bad in today’s circumstances.

One thing has however remained constant – all the prices still end with 88 cents. The need for auspicious numbers is timeless I suppose.

What We Ate

Our lunch at Kota88 started with the signature satay. The sweet ones are darker in colour. Instead of the peanut satay sauce that we are used to, a mild chilli sauce was provided. Another difference from our usual local satay dish is the very limited amount of onion and cucumber provided. Both the sweet and savoury satay were very good are both worth trying. The sweet ones combine well with the contrast of the chilli sauce. Satay and beer are great companions. In this case we had Guinness draught ($10.88 for 500ml) which worked very well too.

The wanton soup ($5.88) was a nice simple soup with lots of vegetables and five small wantons. It provides a good accompaniment to our other dishes.

Bee Hoon and Long Beans

For this visit we also tried the Bihun Goreng Spesial Kota88 招牌炒米粉 (fried bee hoon, $11.88) and Cah Kacang Panjang Ebi Terasi 干扁四季豆 (fried long beans, $9.88)

The special fried vermicelli noodles were prepared with a number of ingredients such as beef, chicken, pork, chinese sausage, chye sim and bean sprout. Although these items are present in very small amounts such that we might even not notice them individually, they add up to make a delicious plate of bee hoon. The stir-fried long bean was very well done. It was fried with shrimp paste and dried prawns to a very dry result with no sauce or gravy at all. It goes very well with the bee hoon. The soup was useful to balance out the dryness of these dishes.

We are glad that Kota88 Restaurant has remained largely the same. A Siglap restaurant with a relaxed cosy atmosphere with friendly staff and quick and good service. We still find the food to be quite enjoyable and the prices reasonable. One change since our last visit is that they no long open till 3 am, The current Kota88 hours are more mainstream these days. Cheers!