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Look at this. Amazing. Welcome to King and Key Seafood here in Singapore. We're here to check out an iconic crab dish, chili crab. This restaurant is called at Za. Has an analog in Hong Kong to the Daai Dong to Thai stirfry places. Open air walk forward stirfried restaurant. Big menu, lots to choose from, a little bit of innovation, a huge amount of evolution. Here's a massive kitchen. There are walks everywhere. There are aromomas and there are flavors everywhere. But starting to the right, noodle and rice station as well as a gar prepping, cutting things to order, garnishing here, a lot of the classic Han dishes are made. As you pan over,
you'll see the frying station, some slightly larger walks for specific dishes, and then coming into the middle, the main kitchen area. And basically they're lined up sort of like an order of seniority where chef Wayne here is right at the end in charge of most expensive, most delicious dishes at the restaurant. This is executive chef quarter in the back. He's got his walks. He's got some preparation for blanching and water and oil. This is what I love about these restaurants. K serves at least 200 tables a night. It is one of the busiest restaurants in Singapore. In order for that to happen, the food needs to come out quickly and the food needs to be hot. All of these little preparations in French we would call this mison plus ready to go. The
setup of the kitchen is specifically so that preparation comes from one chef, cooking comes from the other way now is starting with the crab. Fresh mud crabs from Sri Lanka. They're gigantic. This one's about 900 g. It's a very fresh crab. I mean, it's all these crabs are cut to order. It was literally alive, you know, 15 seconds ago. So, the job here is to make it properly cracked and nice and segmented. Hammering it just ever so slightly so it's easier to eat when it goes out to the customer, but also so that the flesh inside can infuse the sauce with flavor and vice versa. He's going for the two halves of the main body, the head and the two claws.
The first step of chili crab is to fry the crab. Crab goes into the hot oil. Quick deep fry. Basically, an oil blanch. Immediately the dark blue crab has turned orange. Beautiful. I remember when we first started this street eat show. We were at Oman in Hong Kong watching that Thai food and shelter crab. The technique is pretty similar but the flavor profile totally different. First in sambal. Sambal made from ginger blossoms, lemongrass, shrimp, and a bunch of other secret ingredients. Something to make in house every single day. a little bit of stock over the top just to bring all those flavors together and to give it
that liquid base that the gravy is going to be built off of. Chili crab is actually a brazed crab dish. So, you're slowly infusing the flavor of the sauce into the crab as you're extracting the flavor from the crab and bringing it into the gravy itself. Because of the high temperature that the chefs are cooking at, oils and the water is going to emulsify into a nice creamy sauce. Occasionally, chef is pushing the crab around to make sure that every single piece of crab is coated evenly so that it cooks just enough. You want that crab cooked through. You want to be flaky and you want that sauce to be most of the
flavor, but you also need to make sure that you don't overcook the crab so that it gets mealy. Shell for garnish. This also has my favorite raw lettuce just for color, not for taste. This is where you know the Chinese roots are the useless garnish. Even though the dish is called chili crab, the most important flavor profile here is actually sweet and sour sauce that they make. Very similar to a guloyok sauce according to chef. In fact, kuloyok, that's sweet and sour pork from the Cantonese tradition reinforced with a little bit of ketchup. Add a little bit of cornstarch to thicken it. Question you may ask, why does sauces have to be thick? Sauces have to be thick because otherwise they don't stick to the ingredient itself and
they don't coat your tongue in the appropriate way and you won't be able to taste all those flavors. This is egg drop. It's a classic egg drop. He ladles it over the top with the heat off. Brings the heat back up. Lets the egg slowly come up to 10 and then he starts tossing. Unlike a lot of places that's looking for a pure silky egg drop, he actually is looking for a little bit of ribbons, ketchup colored, nice and glossy, chunks of egg. Chef, you're very good at this. How many crabs do you think you've cooked? Yeah. Wow. Maybe so nice. Amazing. Beautiful. Look at this.
Chili crab is not the only thing to get here. In fact, they have a lot of signature dishes, a lot of which they invented, if not invented than perfected that are worth eating here at KK. One of those dishes is what I think what's happening here, which is a clay pot liver dish. He's got the burner out. Look at that temperature. Unlike a lot of Cantonese restaurants where clay pot dishes are stirfried on the walk first, this dish is cooked actually entirely inside of this sizzling hot clay pot. So chef, what's happening? This is liver. Yeah, liver. The clay pot liver. And then what's the seasoning?
We have oyster sauce, soya sauce, black soy sauce, cooking oil. Yes. Yeah. And garlic. Wow. That liver needs to be very clean, sliced thin because the cooking is going to be very quick. One of when I look at this, what I get excited about is one of the first thing. Oh my god. Take a look. Sorry. Oil's in. Catches fire. Caramelization is going. Ginger is in. Shallots are in. Look at all that color that's building so quickly. It all begins to sizzle. The water hits the hot oil. A little bit of extra sauce. Crank up the heat. Whole thing lights on fire. That smokiness is an iconic flavor profile in a lot of Singaporean cooking. Unlike a lot of the use of light soy sauce in Cantonese cooking, dark soy sauce has a higher
caramel and molasses content and so it's very nice and sweet and it carries that walk very well. Stirring constantly to make sure that all of those slices of liver are cooked evenly and that all those flavors are emulsified. You want to make sure that the sesame oils, the oils coming out of the liver and the water and the fat is all brought together. Heat is off. residual cooking. Clay pot is really, really good at keeping that heat. He turns the heat back on. A little bit of shaing wine over the top and that's it. The residual heat is gonna finish cooking those livers and soften all of the vegetables
over the top. It's time to eat. Let's get out of the kitchen. Thank you, chef. I cannot emphasize enough how crazy of an operation this is. We've seen a lot of busy restaurants, but none as busy as Kang Ki. 10 15 cooks inside. Dishes are flying out. They're going to serve between four and 600 people here tonight. The food's always going to arrive quickly. It's always going to arrive hot. Quickly about these clothes spins. Each of these clothes spins identifies the table that they're in. These are the refrigerated room table number 12. And with that clothes spin, they know which table the dish is supposed to go to. Clip ticket. Dish out to service. I almost feel silly that we're here. Covered by Netflix. Anthony
Bourdain came here. Michelin recognized. Everybody knows this place, but when you look around and you see the families and you see the locals, you know that they are the greatest testament to what good food is. Thank you. That's our menu. Take a look. What are the signature musketss? So, definitely clay pot flavor moonlight fun. We're here for chili crab. So, we must get chili crab. And because I am a solo diner, but hopefully the crew will eat some of this food. Yam basket cuz it looks crazy. Get a coffee pork ribs. Yeah, that's the smell in the middle of the air is of nest cafe. Yes. And some other things.
Sure. Okay. Round out a good meal. I feel like we probably need a regular vegetable dish, too. What's in season today? Chinese spinach. Okay. Maybe we do it with three eggs, something starchy, with some gravy. Perfect. Oh, next thing already. This is a bit of a dinner in a show, right? Uhhuh. All right, next. There's the clay pop flavor. Wow. God. Ridiculous. God, that is so alluring. Big bowl of rice. Oh my god.
Get out of here. This must be your favorite thing to do, watching everyone looking at this, right? Yeah. Are you done, Mo? Are you done? Yeah, it's true. That will take my time. Oh my god. Tossing every grain of rice with a sauce. And when I'm tossing it, I also can look at the dness of the liver. Still hot, sizzling. That's what the clay pot's good at doing. Takes a while to heat up, but it's going to hold on to that heat. Oh, more food is coming.
Oh my god. The base is a dark soy caramelized stir or fried rice noodle. It's traditionally really difficult to cook because it can be very sticky. So the noodles themselves have to be very fresh and the control over the time and the temperature of that walk cooking are paramount. Cantonese culinary school graduation exam often times surf. There's the yen basket. The next one, coffee ribs. This is a ridiculous dish invented by chef Sam Lung not that long ago. pork cooked with Nes Cafe and a bunch of other things, but it's got coffee essence in it. No idea what to expect.
It's fragrant for sure. Let's start with the liver. 605. Actually, so good. The sweetness inherent in the soy sauce. Plus the essence of the pork liver that's been cooked into it with the onions, all those aromatics. It's just very thorough through and through. The perfect pairing of ginger and scallion where one is the earthiness and the other is a little bit of fresh green brightness together and the rice. Outstanding. Main event. Wow. So nice. Those are the fried buttons. Oh yeah, baby. I knew I was going to do a little bit of chili crab, so I didn't wear a white shirt, but the bib has been provided by KK anyway.
Crazy. When the crab hits the table, the first thing that you smell is a little bit of freshness and acidity and sweetness. It's called chili crab, but the main flavor profile isn't chili. It's sweet and sour. M brilliant acidity balanced with that sugar and that ketchup. Irresistible in any dish whether it's sweet and sour pork or chili crab. But what makes this special I think is that Malay inspired flavor so to speak inside of that sambal that lemongrass nice herbal tones ginger blossom very fragrant very floral tied together with the prawn paste the shrimps ocean on ocean tied together by a very thick luxurious gravy yummy good golden fried manto basically a deep
fried bow fluffy in the middle slightly crispy on the outside. It's going to mop up and soak up that sauce. No way that's bad, right? There's no way that doesn't taste good. Of course, it's going to be So yummy. All the flavors on the outside of the shell. So after you've peeled it, have to get it with a little bit more sauce. Look at that oil gloss. Gorgeous. Gorgeous dish. M. Yummy. Moonlight Hoffan. Look at this brilliant, beautiful dark brown consistent color. Little bit of squid, fish. The egg becomes a sauce. Little bit of residual heat from the han.
Doesn't fully cook the egg through, but it heats it up just enough so it becomes a sauce. It should be nice and slippery, but that slipperiness, that gentleness of that raw egg should really complement the charredness and the aggression and the bitterness that comes from that uh whole itself. That's good. That's really good. All the little components, the bounciness of the shrimp, the sweetness of the Chinese sausage, even the fattiness of this. I think it's carp of this fish. And then the slipperiness of the noodles, the crunch of the red onion. It's all like all different dimensions of flavor all brought together in one dish. Let's try some of the other ones.
I was kind of interested in coffee ribs that I don't understand. Okay, moving on. Taro, I'm very excited about this. Oh, look at that. That's fun. These are one of these like funny show off Chinese technique dishes that I'm a big fan of. Good. This is a dish that has echoes of that imperial Chinese cooking. Steam taro, beat it to a paste, add starch to it, form into a mold, fry into a nest, make another stir fry, put in the middle. It's a silly thing, but it's awesome and the presentation is incredible. Last thing, just a little vegetables. This is just to balance out the palette, There's a Cantonese dish called gold and silver eggs over rice. The gold is the salted egg yolk. The silver is the egg white drop. This is an evolution of that
dish. What I love about KK is this reads poken, this reads Cantonese, this reads hakka, this reads Cantonese street food elevated, this is maybe Eurasian, and then there's gigantic luxurious dishes like the chili crab. It seems as if this is the type of restaurant that can only exist in Singapore, where Singaporeans are perhaps uniquely good at combining a huge array of cultural influences into one delicious meal. Alfresco dining, get a couple of beers. This is an outstanding restaurant. And maybe we've just picked one of my favorite places I've ever been to in Singapore. Come to K. We want
