JL Studio - Taichung
Tables that mostly stayed empty during our dinner
Rating: 17/20
Where: Taichung, Taiwan
When: Dinner for 2 on 23 September 2023
Cost: Tasting menu NT$4280, Wine pairing NT$1600-2200
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars
Why: Exciting and creative journey through Singaporean cuisine(s)
“JL Studio” is a restaurant in the city of Taichung, which is about an hour south of Taipei by high-speed train, or (as in our case) two hours by car from Taipei’s main airport. A few weeks before our visit, JL Studio had made history by becoming the first three-Michelin-starred restaurant that serves Singaporean food. Ironically, all three-stars located in Singapore itself serve Western cuisines (see here, here and here).
The restaurant is located near Taichung's Qiqi district, a relatively new redevelopment zone that turned what was mostly farmland into glitzy modern high-rises and skyscrapers. So it's no surprise that the restaurant's building is quite new as well. On the ground floor is a bustling Italian restaurant, and we had to walk through it in order to take an elevator to the much quieter second floor. Led past JL Studio’s open kitchen, we came to the main dining room. The tables, chairs and benches were wooden, with the walls painted in similar earthy colors. Clay flower vases on the tables and - I'm not making this up - piles of beige rocks under the benches continued the visual theme.
Surprisingly, only four of the nine tables in the dining room were filled during our meal. But that was not a sign of waning popularity, but rather of capacity control. The kitchen was able to comfortably handle 25-30 guests per night, so when either of the two private dining rooms is filled (as one was during our visit), then tables in the main dining room would have to remain empty. A sensible way to avoid getting overwhelmed by the influx of diners that come with a third Michelin star.
JL Studio (JL are the initials of the chef, Jimmy Lim) serves only a single tasting menu, but dietary restrictions are taken into account. We were offered upgrades for our main course: replacing lamb with wagyu for NT$1080 and/or adding foie gras for NT$400-ish. I went for the wagyu, but skipped the foie gras. There were also wine pairings consisting of either three or five glasses, as well as a non-alcoholic pairing. Ordering a beverage pairing is optional for lunch, but mandatory at dinner time. The wines in the pairing were decent, but not terribly memorable. Our pairing also included a gin-based cocktail, and (for the longer pairing) a lychee-flavored sake. Quantities were a bit lower than what we would have liked, especially since not every course received a paired beverage.
Once the beverage decisions had been made, our dinner started promptly. A printed menu was already on the table when we arrived, and it contained pretty much exactly what we would be served. No amuse bouches or appetizers here, JL Studio started directly with the first course.
The evening’s first dish was inspired by Rasam, a spicy soup from South India. A clear cup contained cherry tomatoes, burrata cheese, cubes of smoked water bamboo, and pieces of fried lentils, all placed atop of layer of tomato water jelly. Wow, what a start. This was an amazing mix of flavors: sweet, slightly sour, spicy, with a hint of smokiness from the water bamboo. The smokiness was quite pronounced (almost too much so) when eating the bamboo by itself, but melded perfectly with the other ingredients. The burrata had a crumbly texture similar to paneer, and the lentils added some nice crunch. It was possible to detect all flavors and textures individually, but they also came together elegantly as a unified whole - that's a really hard balance to get right. A delicious dish 19.
Our next course was an example of nyonya cooking, which combines the cuisines of Malaysia and China. “Hot and sour fish”, usually a hot dish, was served cold here. Raw amberjack was surrounded by strips of white radish that formed a pretty leaf shape. Jackfruit replaced the more traditional tamarind ingredient in the dish, and it was used both in a yellow salsa and in the orange soup surrounding the “leaf”. Also in the soup: star fruit, and drops of a clarified sambal hot sauce. Tastewise, this dish was both sweet and spicy. In fact, a bit too spicy for my taste, overpowering any taste that the fish might have had. The radish cooled the dish down a bit, but there wasn't quite enough of it to make a huge difference. Tasty? For sure. But letting the flavors shine a bit more by toning down the spice level? Even better 17.
Continuing our tour of the cuisines of Singapore, the next stop was Indonesia, in the form of a gado gado salad. Usually, this is a vegetarian salad finished with a peanut dressing, but here it was re-imagined as a seafood salad with a sesame sauce. A local prawn had been poached and topped with herbs and seagrapes, and its head was served as tempura. Lettuce leaves had been layered with sesame sauce and little pieces of summer fruit. Scallion oil and dollops of sesame sauce completed the dish. The use of sesame was a winner here - the sauce was so good that one totally forgot that there might have been another choice (i.e., peanuts). The salad was especially delicious. Given the presence of fruits, we had expected it to be too sweet, but it turned out to hit just the right balance between savory and sweet. The presentation of the salad as a stacked series of leaves, with the sauce and fruit hidden in-between them, was particularly nice. Every level seemed to taste slightly differently. A bit like a preassembled lettuce wrap (19 by itself). The seafood was not quite as stellar. The prawn was good, especially with the sauces, but could have been a bit more flavorful. The tempura was tasty and crunchy, but at the same time pretty heavy and fatty 17. My wife would have given this course an 18.
A perennial favorite at the hawker stands of Singapore is chicken rice, and this is exactly what the next dish recreated. But it did so without using any chicken or any (solid) rice. The protein on the plate was grouper fish, topped with thin slices of jicama and bamboo shoots. Next to it was a sauce made from powdered rice as well as a dollop of green chili sauce. (The hawker stand version would probably have come with a red chili sauce, so this was another twist.) Crazily enough, this dish actually did have the taste and, dare I say, texture of chicken rice. The fish was cooked to a consistency that was flaky and a bit crumbly, more similar to chicken and rice than to fish. Together with the rice-flavored sauce, this was surprisingly close to the original. The chili sauce was excellently made, and much more elegant than regular chili sauces. But it was also extremely spicy - minuscule amounts were enough to season the dish (my wife declared the sauce to be worth a 20, so there might be a worthwhile side business in selling it by the bottle). I was a bit confused about what the jicama and bamboo shoots were supposed to add to the dish - maybe a bit of sweetness and texture? This dish would have been great even without them. Overall, a clever and very impressive dish, recreating a food staple without using any of the customary ingredients. But in the end of the day, no matter how difficult it was to prepare, this dish tasted “just” of chicken and rice 17. The pescatarian menu used scallops instead of grouper, in order to save the latter for the main course. The scallops were perfectly cooked, but their firm texture didn't have the same effect of recalling chicken and rice, making for a somewhat less exciting dish 16 (not pictured since it looks almost the same as the grouper dish).
Another street food staple inspired the next course: curry puffs. But (not surprisingly at this point), there was no curry in this puff. Instead, it had a seafood flavor. The deep-fried Chinese-style puff pastry was filled with a small abalone, some parma ham, greens and (we thought) radishes. Next to the pastry were a sauce made from abalone and clams as well as a thicker, darker sweet sauce made from jujube and goji berries. Overall, this was a slightly sweet dish, first from the puff pastry itself, and even more due to the jujube sauce. The abalone was delicious, cooked perfectly with a light bite. The other fillings and the puff pastry itself were nice enough, but not as amazing. The pastry was also underbaked, so that its inside was a bit doughy. I didn't mind that, but my wife was decidedly not a fan. Maybe this was a conscious choice, or maybe fully baking the pastry would overcook the abalone 16.
Time flew by, and it was already time for the main course, which in my case was wagyu beef (upgraded from lamb). The inspiration for this dish were Indian spices (masala). The pan-fried wagyu steak was served with bok choy, a coffee sabayon, beef jus, and some crumbles made from coffee, butter and flour. Two thick sauces, a masala-spiced chickpea sauce and a grilled vegetable puree, were present as well. The beef was decent, but I would have preferred it to be a bit more tender. Oddly, the steak's taste was overpowered by the chopped greens that had been placed on top of it. Maybe less would have been more. The sauces were quite nice, in fact, the quality of all sauces tonight was uniformly excellent. Not all combinations of ingredients worked well, however: for example, the smoky green vegetable sauce went great with the bok choy, and the masala and beef jus were excellent with the beef. The bizarre outlier on the plate was the coffee sabayon, which was so sweet that it might have been more at home in a dessert. The coffee crumbles added a nice texture, and were thankfully light in sweetness and coffee flavor. Curiously, when considered individually, all components of this course would rate a 18 or 17. But not all of them seemed to work together, leading to a somewhat disjointed dish 16.
The pescatarian main dish replaced the beef with grilled grouper. The masala and green vegetable sauces stayed the same, and in addition there was a shrimp and fish sauce, as well as some grilled white asparagus. Even though this was the same grouper that had appeared in the chicken and rice dish, its consistency was very different here thanks to how it was prepared. The fish was firm with a smoky flavor - delicious. The grilled asparagus was also nicely flavorful. Overall, a more cohesive and somewhat better dish than the beef version 17.
Traditionally, many Asian cuisines end a meal with a noodle or rice dish. JL Studio's version was not listed on the menu: soba noodles with laksa leaves were served in a sauce made from coconut milk, anchovies and dried shrimp. The noddles were topped with crunchy fish roe. Served chilled, this was a nice combination of soba, seafood and coconut; a good balance of rustic and elegant. There was an aftertaste that I couldn't quite place, and wasn't a big fan of, but otherwise it was a great conclusion to the savory part of our dinner 17.
The palate cleanser (or pre-dessert) was a play on a cocktail made from calamansi, a south-east Asian citrus fruit. A sorbet of calamansi and pickled green chilis was placed on top of lemon curd, and decorated with a meringue made with dried plums. A bright, fresh, citrusy dish with a hint of spice. It hit the perfect balance between sweetness and sourness. Delicious 18. Or 19, if you asked my wife.
Our main dessert was called "mung bean garlic", a lightly sweet dish that thankfully didn't contain any actual garlic. The name come from the fact that some of the mung beans in the dish look a bit like fried garlic. At the bottom of the bowl was a soup made from mung beans and pandan leaves, and a clear jelly made from figs. In the middle of the bowl was some mung bean pasta that was topped first by a gin granite and then a mung bean ice cream. Adding more texture were a clear sugar disc on top and some crunchy bits of youtiao. The sweetest part of the dish was the excellent ice cream. The solid beans were nutty and almost a bit al dente. Overall, this was not a particularly sweet dessert, but rather light and refreshing. The many different components were close enough in taste profile that they went well together. The paired lychee-flavored sake was not a great match, unfortunately, since it was much sweeter than the dish 17.
Two small sweet bites concluded our dinner. Rose water ice cream was covered in a white sphere. Pretty nice, but less of the fatty shell would have been even better 17. A black tea and black pepper cake was topped with a ginger/milk tea cream. Much heavier than the rose ice cream, it reminded me a bit of gingerbread 15.
Before coming here, I was surprised that the Michelin's highest rated Singaporean restaurant was in Taiwan and not in Singapore. It is exactly the kind of restaurant that I would have loved to have visited on my first trip to Singapore. But in hindsight, it makes sense. Someone living in Singapore would probably rather go to restaurants representing a single cuisine at a time, instead of going for this comprehensive cross-section. But for a foreigner to Singapore (which includes most of the local Taiwanese customers), this sampling approach to Singaporean cuisine is much more attractive.
Overall: An impressive and educational journey through the different cuisines and flavor profiles that make up Singaporean food. Every dish was tasty, but unfortunately only a few of them were truly outstanding. However, with the excellent service, and the detailed descriptions of the motivations, inspirations and culinary references behind each and every dish, this was a wonderful experience and definitely worth the trip here 17.
