Former Naked Finn chef Marcus Leow to head ‘new-Gen Singaporean’ restaurant Belimbing

When Marcus Leow joined The Coconut Club as R&D chef in late 2024, his job was to expand the restaurant’s take on Singaporean comfort food. This kind of quiet work rarely makes headlines, yet when done well, impacts how diners eat and think. Leow must have been particularly good at it because it didn’t take long for managing partner and chef Daniel Sia to realise that keeping Leow behind the scenes was limiting his potential. Sia appreciated how Leow’s creativity is largely driven by the question: What would Singaporean food look like if it stopped trying to prove itself and just evolved? The answer will soon play out at Belimbing, the new restaurant opening on Apr 15 above The Coconut Club’s Beach Road flagship.

Leow described the food at Belimbing as “new-gen Singaporean”. Think of it as a remix of memory, ingredients and instinct, if you will. “We’re not trying to do nostalgia,” Leow explained. “I want the food to taste like home, but not necessarily in the way your grandmother made it.”

The name Belimbing itself is a quiet manifesto. The sour fruit can be found in many home gardens across Singapore, yet few people know what to do with it other than pickle, fry it in sambal, or eat it dipped in salt. “It’s kind of the perfect metaphor,” Leow said.

The same could be said of Singaporean cuisine, he postured. Despite our global culinary reputation, Singaporean food and ingredients are often celebrated in hawker centres but rarely afforded the space for reinterpretation. To that end, Leow hopes Belimbing will convey what happens when local flavours are allowed to explore worldly influences and return with a new viewpoint on life. “I really feel like Singapore cuisine has a lot more potential and I can harness it in my own way to present a new take on Singaporean food,” he said.

Plenty has been said about Singapore's few natural resources, leading to restaurants leaning on imported produce. But Leow feels that much in our backyards holds immense potential if we only give ourselves the time and space to explore their possibilities. To return to the belimbing metaphor, one of the reasons why it is used in such limited ways is its sharp astringency that leaves a tannic coating on the palate. Leow works his way around it by fermenting the fruit with red chillies before tempering its acerbity with creme fraiche. The result is a rounded condiment piped into kueh pie tee shells with raw Argentinean red prawns, gong gong clams and pickled honey melon.

Pink guava, another oft-ignored local ingredient, is worked into a compote-like rempah which offers gentle spice and sweetness to a cold curry of mussel jus and The Coconut Club’s cold-pressed coconut milk. “So it’s like a cold laksa,” Leow explained. This goes beneath slivers of aged amberjack brushed with a soy sauce made from fish bones and trimmings.

Another starter is a delicious riff on rojak, with fried kailan stems and firefly squid dressed in a fermented prawn paste caramel made with prawn shells and white pepper. Pickled jambu and strawberries add a lovely brightness, while tendrils of fried kailan leaves provide crunch.

All this goes towards contradicting what Leow sees as the idea that Singaporean food is static. “Like it can’t evolve. But why not? Why shouldn’t we use new techniques, pair ingredients differently, or present dishes in ways that make people rethink what’s possible?”

Somewhat ironically, Leow says one of his greatest influences is the Australian chef Sam Aisbett, whom he worked under at Whitegrass in 2016. “He paired foreign flavours with a lot of local ingredients like duck with a white fungus salad and pork with roasted fatt choy (black moss). Honestly, for a foreign chef to do that so well, it was almost…” he paused, struggling to find the right word, “embarrassing. It really made me think about what could be done with local ingredients.”

Leow took this inspiration to his stint at the young chef incubator Magic Square, where along with chefs Abel Su and Desmond Shen, he served what was then already considered a different facet of Singaporean food. He continued the thread at seafood restaurant Naked Finn, which he headed for four years before coming to The Coconut Club and Belimbing. “Now I get to think about the flavours I want to build first instead of considering what seafood is currently in season. Not being limited by protein brings a different dimension to the flavours and what I can do,” he said.

Leow certainly isn’t the first to try to evolve Singaporean food. Other mod-Sin restaurants like the now-defunct Wild Rocket, Mustard Seed, and Foliage have been doing it for years. How will Belimbing differ from other Mod-Sin restaurants? “Everyone’s doing it differently and that’s what makes it exciting. I’m just trying to tell my version of the story,” Leow answered.

Belimbing’s four-course dinner is priced at S$88, excellent value for the amount of food each course delivers. We felt like we’d eaten plenty by the time our main course of fried chicken with yellow curry and tempra sauce arrived on a tray with bowl of rice and other little bites, a neat play on scissors curry rice. A S$58 two-course menu is available at lunch, along with a small a la carte menu, with dishes priced between S$18 for an assam pedas clam custard and S$45 for grilled short ribs with black garlic percik and green curry.

Reservations for Belimbing open on Apr 14.