Chefs have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves for impressing diners with looks alone. Show me a customer who doesn’t smile at the sight of a drink trailed by smoke, a dessert ignited tableside or a steak knife plunged into the center of a $65 sandwich, and I’ll show you a jaded restaurant-goer.
There’s nothing on the menu at the new Jiwa Singapura in McLean to suggest that the chili crab is the most interactive dish on the menu. When you order the $38 main course, no one tells you what comes first. Let me do the honors: Everyone at the table gets a little wooden box, inside of which await a fancy black bib and matching plastic gloves.
“Huh?” participants typically wonder in unison.
Then it dawns on the foodies in attendance: Without protection, hot snow crabs doused with lava-colored chili sauce equal a big mess. After recipients of the extravaganza have had a go at the sweet-spicy crab, which they dispatch with a metal cracker as well as their hands, they roll off the gloves and remove the bib. A server erases any remaining specks of sauce or crab on the table with a wet cloth.
The only remaining evidence of the feast, accompanied by milk buns a server calls “Chinese doughnuts,” are the looks of contentment on those who dueled with it.
The talent (and sense of humor) behind the showy crab — and so much else at Jiwa Singapura — is Pepe Moncayo, 44, the Barcelona native behind Cranes, a fine-dining, Spanish-Japanese restaurant in Penn Quarter. Before he arrived in Washington in 2018, Singapore was home for a decade. “I planned to stay a year,” to open a restaurant in the luxe Marina Bay Sands hotel at the request of his mentor, the late Catalan master Santi Santamaria, Moncayo said during a recent phone conversation. Instead, he met his wife, had a child and “became part of a Singaporean family.”
The name of Moncayo’s new restaurant, which unfolds in Tysons Galleria, translates to “the soul of Singapore,” and it introduces a rare taste of the super-clean city-state where food is a national obsession. Moncayo had a chef in mind to lead Jiwa Singapura, but when that didn’t pan out, he took the helm of the open kitchen, fronted with marble and animated with a crew of 20 and the leap of flames from the woks.
As in so many restaurants about which I could copy and paste the words “dishes are meant to be shared and come out as they’re ready,” a server also lets us know that the beef rendang, a dry curry made with coconut milk, takes 30 minutes.
The one dish every staff member insists you try is salted egg shrimp, a small plate. “It’s the chef’s wife’s recipe,” diners are told. Lightly sauteed shrimp show up coated with a puree of brined duck eggs and evaporated milk, showered with scallions and fried shallots. Garlic and Thai chiles in the seasoning give each bite a racy edge. From just a half dozen or so ingredients, a delicious personal statement. The chef credits Aishah Moncayo — “my boss everywhere,” he jokes — with keeping his food true to its inspiration. (His wife serves as general manager.)
Has she tasted the chicken skewers? Save for their chunky rich peanut dip, other places do the street food snack better. However, no restaurant in my orbit offers a steamed fish cake to rival Jiwa Singapura’s otah. Packaged like a gift in banana leaves, the pale orange mash of dorade bound with eggs pulses with lemongrass and chiles and eats like a dense custard. A garnish of threadlike fried shirashu (baby anchovies) gives each spoonful a light crackle and distinct umami.
If there’s one dish you’ll find just about anywhere in Singapore — hawker stalls, hotels and restaurants of all stripes — it’s chicken and rice, a dish introduced by long-ago Chinese immigrants from Hainan Island off the mainland’s southern coast. Abroad, the chicken is poached and hung to dry on the street. Moncayo says “they’d shut me down” if he followed suit; instead, he sous-vides the chicken for a similarly velvety effect. The chicken is sliced, draped with a gravy of soy sauce, sesame oil and chicken stock, and garnished with cured cucumbers. The other half of the pleasure is the accompanying rice, cooked in both chicken broth and fat — hence the creamy mouthfeel — and fragrant with ginger and pandan leaves. Bright dots of chili sauce on the plate add both eye and tongue candy — spark — to the assembly.
The guides here are terrific, good at making recommendations and quick to pitch in, as when an order of black pepper skate comes out and a server volunteers to free the flesh from the bones of the kite-shaped fish, glossy and luscious from their brushes with black pepper, soy sauce and lemon juice. A dollop of sambal, the Indonesian chile pepper paste, gives each bite a nice blast and a little funk.
Advertisement
My first visit had me focused on signatures. Subsequent reservations found me grazing on dishes I thought I knew, but fell for anew. Take sweet-and-sour pork, which starts with a cure of aromatics and cooks to tenderness overnight. The balancing act between sugar and vinegar rates a 10.
Patiently, I anticipated the beef rendang. Honestly, though? It’s a less exciting version of a concert I’ve enjoyed elsewhere. The priciest dish on the menu tastes like roast beef with a little helicoptering from ginger and turmeric. I’m all about the shank’s marrow, though — soft, spoonable, spice-swollen fat.
Jiwa Singapura offers a whopping eight desserts: positively pre-pandemic. Two delights are the sundae — layers of chocolate cake, malted ice cream, meringue and more, served in a glass globe — and ice cream loti, pandan-fragrant brioche stuffed with same-flavored ice cream. (The leaves of pandan, a tropical plant common in Southeast Asia, color things green and impart a vanilla-laced-with-coconut note.) The crisp-soft ice cream sandwich, sweetened with candied citrus, looks like stuffed French toast.
The curvy dining room, which extends to an outdoor terrace, makes a modern statement with thick columns, pillow-cozy banquettes and a constellation of glass “orchids” floating above diners’ heads in the center of the restaurant. (The orchid is Singapore’s national flower.) Little touches — a box for purses and bags, metal rests for silverware — add to the interior’s appeal. BUT! (You can guess what follows.) Dinner also feels like eating in a boombox; for a few minutes one busy night, my decibel app recorded the sound equivalent of a lawn mower. Lunch is a bit easier on the ears. Moncayo says the noise pollution is being addressed. As this review was poised to publish, an acoustics engineer was planning to add sound sponges to the 30-foot ceiling.
A chef’s chef who’s adding something different to the food scene, Moncayo is packing 'em in at his latest dining destination. (Hello, Vikram Sunderam. Nice to see you, Erik Bruner-Yang.) Be sure to book early, bib up, and possibly rethink the rice you make at home.
Jiwa Singapura
2001 International Dr. (Tysons Galleria, third floor), McLean, Va. 571-425-4101. jiwasingapura.com. Open for indoor and outdoor dining for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday and for dinner 5 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, 5 to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Prices: appetizers $9 to $25, main courses $15 to $56. Sound check: 77 decibels/Must speak with raised voice. Accessibility: Diners reach the restaurant via escalators or elevators; ADA-compliant restrooms. Pandemic protocols: Staff are not required to wear masks or be vaccinated.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLOwu8NoaWlqY2R9dXuRcWajoaeWerS1zaCYqa2ilnqzsdKtmK6qkaPBbr7Er6Cer18%3D