Welcome to lunchtime at Kim Eng Seng kopitiam at Blk 168 Toa Payoh Lorong 1. The kopitiam is home to the popular Benson Salted Duck Rice, and now houses another contender in the food stakes: the corner stall is the site of the recently opened Lai Bao Fish Head Steamboat, a zi char stall that specialises in, you got it, fish head steamboat. 

Lai Bao is not your typical kopitiam zi char stall. It’s Baoshi F&B Management Pte Ltd’s first self-built brand and the newest addition to their portfolio, which includes restaurants like Founders Bak Kut Teh, Wee Nam Kee, Ah Chiang’s Traditional Porridge and Monga Taiwanese Fried Chicken stalls. Baoshi founders James Peck, 35 and Lem Cheong, 37 are on a mission to preserve Singapore’s most important heritage — its food — for future generations. This focus on safeguarding the past as inheritance for the future could explain why Baoshi’s first self-built brand is a zi char concept that is meant to be both familial and familiar. Set in a gritty kopitiam too because they felt that "a zi char concept has to start and be developed [at a kopitiam] to give it roots and authenticity."

Cooked by a team of "experienced chefs", the dishes on the menu span Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese cuisines, as well as classic zi char offerings from the 1960s. Many of the dishes are given a traditional-meets-mod twist. For example, the traditional zi char fave of yam ring is livened up here with the addition of a pomelo salad, and the sweet and sour pork is made with charcoal batter. The menu reads in parts like a long lost kungfu manual in a wuxia TV series. Take for example the somewhat mysterious description of the sweet and sour pork: “A recipe by one of the famous chef [sic] passed down by his master”. If there ever were to be a biopic of Baoshi and Lai Bao, perhaps Hong Kong auteur Tsui Hark could direct. James and Lem bring a mix of business and operational savvy to Baoshi. James was previous a COO in a Chinese company while Lem had business and investment interests in the F&B and other industries. In order to come up with the menu for Lai Bao, the duo went on a quest to collect heritage recipes passed down from their grandmothers and from the families of their friends. 

Indeed the name Lai Bao (Lai ‘to come’, and Bao ‘treasure’ in mandarin) is a testament to these precious recipes and James and Lem hope that “each customer who comes to Lai Bao discovers rare treasures through the food we prepare for them.”.

The waitress sets the steamboat on the table, the smell of burning charcoal trailing softly in her wake. This is Lai Bao’s signature dish, inspired by popular charcoal fish head steamboats from the 1960s and based on “grandma’s secret recipe”.  It comes in two variants, made with either grouper ($15 to $35) or snapper ($10 - $24). We order the grouper version and large chunks of the fish, with bones and skin, swim alongside cherry tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, black fungus, yam sticks, and tofu in a collagen soup that’s been simmered over charcoal for over 10 hours. The grouper is fresh, its flesh firm and bouncy, but watch out for bones. The intriguingly named meat pie from the add-on menu (from $5 for 5 pieces) turns out to be handmade cakes of fresh minced pork that’s formed into blocks and sliced. The collagen bone broth is cloudy and velvety, with natural sweetness from the fish and an earthy heft from the seaweed. $15 serves one to two pax.

These chopstick-tender slices of kong bak (we tried picking up a slice using chopsticks and it promptly fell apart) have been slowly braised over a low fire until the meat is yielding, the fat wobbly and voluptuous, and the sauce sticky and slurpsome. Good, rib-sticking home-cooked comfort that’s yes, just like grandma used to make.   

These are lovely, if a tad salty. Parcels of smoked duck and hand-mashed yam are wrapped in popiah skin and deep-fried. What you get are essentially duck ngoh hiang soldiers, lightly crisp on the outside, tender on the inside and pocked with chunks of duck and crunchy water chestnuts.

It’s strange that these charcoal-battered, QC-inspected (yes, they’re inspected for consistency in size and rotundity) sweet and sour pork… cubes? Balls? are called “old school” when they look anything but. The charcoal batter may seem like a gimmick but whether by design or not, what the charcoal does, beyond imparting a faint charcoal flavour and novelty colour, is to render the batter less porous, so it doesn’t soak up as much oil as traditional sweet and sour pork batter is wont to do. Which means you can eat more before the jelakness sets in. Yay. What this also means however, is that the punchy, vinegar-spiked sauce for the dish doesn’t quite permeate the barrier of the batter, which is a pity. Not bad, but we prefer the next dish...

This was a crowd favourite. Thinly sliced rectangles of battered and deep-fried aubergine are stacked on a plate and heaped over with a mound of pork floss, curry leaves, and chilli slices. Eaten hot, the aubergine slices are delightful — crispy and creamy, with a slight and pleasing chewiness we found addictive. We find the pork floss topping to be too sweet but were assured that this is how their patrons like it. Little wonder it’s meant to be a hit with the kids.    ​​​​​​​

This was the surprise hit of the day. Young green beans are fried with dried cuttlefish, lup cheong, cai poh and topped with a scattering of fried yam strips. The beans were perfect — sweet, tender and with a good snap when bitten into, their freshness a perfect foil for the lovely preserved flavours of the lup cheong and cai poh.

Two words: wok hei. The breath of the wok weaves its magic through the dish, infusing the seafood-y gravy made sweet with fresh lala clams, fish slices, and prawns, with its charry goodness. The dish is topped with a tumble of deep-fried hor fun (basically kway teow keropok) which is the yang to the ying of the silky hor fun noodles (or is it the other way round?). $5 gets you a generous serve that could possibly be shared between two.

The tender chicken slices are moist, not overly pink on the inside, and topped with a bright and fresh-tasting young ginger and garlic sauce that doesn’t overpower the chicken. We were advised to pair the dish with Thai-inspired green chilli sauce that was delightfully pungent, with a lovely, lip puckering astringency.

Lai Bao fulfils its mission to “[bring] affordable traditional food for [sic] the masses” with more than a little creative flair (you can book a table via Chope). It serves zi char food that is thoughtful and competently executed. And it does this at prices that are affordable and with portions that are generous. Go with the fam. Bring your grandmothers.  

Lai Bao Fish Head Steamboat is at #01-1040 Blk 168, Toa Payoh Lor 1, S310168. Open daily 12pm-10pm. Last orders at 9.30pm. Tel: 6261-5825 https://www.facebook.com/Laibaosg/​​​​​​​

Photos: Alvin Teo