“I’ve been an avid cook since I was about 14 or 15. I'd make things like pasta or steak and picked up recipes and tips from TV shows like Jamie Oliver and from watching YouTube. After my parents asked me to help with the barbecue, I continued barbecuing simple things like frozen foods and from there explored what I could cook over fire and how I could get better at it,” he reveals 

After two years, my sister and girlfriend pushed me to take it further, like go work in a restaurant or something. I saw that a lot of people were doing private dining, so I thought why not?” says the soft-spoken man. 

He held his first dinner last November and for the first few months, his clientele was made up of family friends and friends of friends. It wasn’t long before word of the rather reasonably priced (see below) The Humble Pit reached Singapore’s ever-eager foodies and he's now booked almost every weekend up to March next year. Keep your eyes peeled on his Instagram page for when he resumes reservations. 

Eugene only hosts dinners on weekends as he has a full-time job in his father’s automation company. So weekday evenings see him fermenting vegetables, smoking meat and making stock in preparation for the weekend meals. His private dinners cost $80 per head for about six courses of mostly smoked and grilled meats, with a minimum of four people per group and a maximum of five.  

The name The Humble Pit is a nod to the simple Weber Original Compact Kettle BBQ grill on which he cooks almost all his food. For the uninitiated, this $420 grill is the stock-standard basic backyard barbecue grill that most foodies use. Which is why the cooking is impressive despite using this relatively basic device. Eugene doesn’t just slap some marinated meat on the grill and cook them to a char, though. Rather, he brines, smokes and grills his food over charcoal and wood chips to precise internal and external temperatures to yield the smoky, succulent results he’s after.    

Dinners are held at his home’s fourth-storey roof terrace, which means you’ll be dining with a bird’s eye view of the surrounding suburban neighbourhood. The set-up is simple yet elegant — a long wooden table framed by benches beneath a canopy in case it rains. “So far we’ve been lucky. It hasn’t rained heavily during one of my dinners, but if it does, the canopy provides shelter and I move my grill to the covered area by the doorway,” says Eugene. The roof terrace is quite large, so guests can walk around and watch Eugene work or take in the night sky. Because you’re eating al fresco, the smoke from the grill doesn’t permeate your clothes and hair much.

A typical dinner at Eugene’s includes these dishes:

Every meal here begins with a loaf of homemade sourdough that’s lightly warmed over lychee or apple wood in the grill before serving. This gives the light, sturdy loaf a pleasant, sweet-smoky aroma when it is served sliced, with some butter on the side. Yes, Eugene bakes bread too.

This eats like Chinese roast pork but tastes like bacon. That’s because the slab of pork belly is first cured overnight like bacon, in equal parts salt and brown sugar, and smoked for up to four hours at a low temperature in the grill with apple or lychee wood. Before serving, the meat is flash-grilled over high heat to crisp up its skin. The boldly seasoned and delightfully tender pork is served with grilled mushrooms, which balances out its robust flavours, and a good pat of Dijon mustard to cut through the richness. You also get Taiwanese short grain rice and some crisp sheets of seaweed, with which to accompany the pork and the rest of the meal.

Eugene dry-brines the chicken in salt overnight, which makes the chook juicier and dries out its skin for a better crunch when cooked. He then smokes it over charcoal for about two hours before serving it with a piri-piri-inspired sauce made from chilli padi, fermented bell peppers (which he makes himself), garlic and smoked paprika. The resulting bird is tender and infused with a gentle heat, like a great roast chicken. The piri-piri sauce is tart and garlicky, similar to a full-bodied hot sauce.  

This tasty rump with MB5 marbling is also dry brined for 12 hours and smoked at an extremely low temperature over lychee wood to slowly break down its proteins and render it tender. It is then seared over hot coals and thinly sliced. These velvety slivers are served on a delicious pool of tart-savoury sauce made from yuzu kosho (fermented Japanese peppers with citrus), butter and soy sauce. They are then topped with delicate slivers of fried garlic, which impart textural contrast.

The hearty slab of grilled cod gets its meaty texture from a shio koji (fermented rice) brine that helps firm up its flesh and add umami. It is then grilled over coals so that it emerges buttery, rich and super moist. We also love the accompanying cabbage, which is grilled over coals and seasoned with salt so that it's smoky, sweet and juicy. A simply flavoured but winning combination.

The cod is cooked over hot coals.

This is another labour of love. Eugene makes the ramen from scratch using whole wheat and vital wheat gluten (the natural protein found in wheat), which gives the noodles added texture. The tori paitan broth (white chicken soup) is made from smoking old hens and then boiling them for eight hours with aromatics like garlic and ginger to form a rich, milky stock. The resulting soup has a lovely flavour and body, with a sharp zing from ginger. It is comforting and just tasty enough thanks to a drizzle of aromatic oil made from more ginger, garlic and onions, which are fried over low heat for an hour to really draw out their flavours. The noodles, however, are not as chewy as we’d hope. Still a nice, comforting dish after all that smoky fare.

This smooth ganache-like dessert is a great ending to the meal. Made using 70% chocolate from Valrhona, the rich quenelles are topped with pine nut brittle and flakes of sea salt which give this uncomplicated dessert a lovely complexity of flavour.

Don’t come expecting American-style barbecue. Eugene has created his own version of east-meets-west smoked/grilled grub that’s delicious and easy to appreciate. We also like that he bothers to make his own bread, noodles and fermented veggies from scratch. Dining here is like going to the home of a food geek friend who’s offered to cook you a barbecue meal except instead of chicken wings and sausages, you get smoked whole chicken, beef and bacon-cured sio bak. 

To reserve a seat, fill up the Google Drive form on The Humble Pit’s Instagram account @thehumblepit.

Photos: Kelvin Chia

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