Try the Ground Beef Rendang Pot Pie ($24), which features the time-tested combination of flaky and buttery pastry with tender ground beef. Tucked away inside NTU's Alumni Building in One North, this casual dining restaurant serves tasty Asian fusion plates that hit the spot, and its spacious interiors make it perfect for large group gatherings. This was a hosted Eatup, courtesy of the good folks at Coalesce and Burpple! Perhaps Coalesce could look into replacing the ground beef with cubes/slices of beef instead. It really is quite unfortunate, because this dish is flawless in terms of taste. The replacement of the traditional, stewed-till-tender hunks of bovine with ground beef resulted in a lack of bite and character to the dish, and as such, satisfaction levels plummeted. After chowing down on this bowl of beef rendang, I can quite confidently identify the fault. The immediate solution was the addition of the potatoes into the luscious mixture. However, Jin, the manager, explained to us that while experimenting with their dish, the team at Coalesce decided their dish just felt lacking in satisfaction somehow. Of course, the buttery, flaky puff pastry just made everything just so much better. The inclusion of arugula leaves within was a brilliant play, as the peppery flavor of the arugula counterbalanced the rich, heavy flavors of the beef rendang. The rendang itself is thick and less on the gravy-like side, and it cocoons every single element of the beef rendang, from the ground beef to the chunks of potatoes. It's all loaded into a behemoth of a bowl that's filled to about halfway before it's sealed beneath a layer of buttery, addictive puff pastry. Generally an all right attempt in creating a vegetarian chili crab pasta, but being a seafood lover, I would still stick to the conventional chili crab pasta for my crab meat.Ĭoalesce's signature dish is their Ground Beef Rendang ($24++), which is essentially a piquant portion of ground beef that's been fried in a redolent rendang that everyone will relish. The pasta was finished off by topping a jiggly poached egg. I enjoyed initially, but was too oily towards the end. What's uncommon was the addition of deep fried croutons slices, which were rather greasy and tasted like deep fried mantous.
Probably added for its unique and intense peppery taste, the wild rocket helped in balancing the thickness in texture and flavour of the sauce but I would still think that it's an acquired taste as I am really not a fan of it. Linguine was a good choice of pasta to absorb the flavour of the chili crab sauce. Unexpectedly, it got pretty spicy gradually, leaving tongues on fire. My first try on a vegetarian version of chili crab pasta! Tastes really similar to a non-vegetarian version, alike to the usual pasta sauce of a sweet spicy tomato base, except that there was no crab meat.