The Michelin Guide Street Food Festival 2019 gathers the exclusive family of Singapore restaurants and food stalls anointed by the esteemed Michelin Guide. The Festival lets visitors enjoy an array of spectacular multi-cultural dishes from all over the island, all in one convenient location, in perfect sampling portions. These decorated, Michelin-starred restaurants and Bib Gourmand eateries are guaranteed to provide gastronomic delicacies that will delight your tastebuds this weekend.

…or so they’d like you to think.

(Full disclosure that we ate four dishes, and none of them were technically street food, sorry.)

My companion and I went to the first session of the event on Friday. If you, like us, haven’t been to The Coliseum at Hard Rock Hotel before, make sure you ignore the vague signs and instead focus on finding Hard Rock Cafe’s entrance for the ticket collection section outside the hotel. Do not attempt to enter the Coliseum any other way, because that will involve climbing a flight of stairs twice.

The booths are lined up along the perimeter of the area, with scattered seats in the middle. The area is solely serviced by fans and can get fairly smoky from the stalls. When you enter, find the plainest table on the right to nab your bottle of Badoit (sparkling water, 330ml) or Evian (ye ole soft Evian, 500ml) with the drink coupon from your coupon book.

Burnt Ends (1 Michelin Star)

Burnt Ends – holding one Michelin star – had a snaking queue that eventually took 20+ minutes in total. A cursory look revealed most people got the Sanger slider (it ran out of stock by the last half-hour of the session) and once you see the portion sizes, you’ll understand why. The Sanger has the most volume: palm-sized and sized up with the bun. The Steak Frites is not as advertised per se – instead of two as displayed in the photo, you get one the size of half a(n average) finger. The Jamaican Chicken with Lime Crema, comprising of two pieces of bone-in chicken wing charred on a charcoal grill by the side, fit in one palm. You have to adjust any expectations of size for your decisions.

The Jamaican Chicken was excellently seasoned and the generous portion of lime crema is smooth and flavorful, unmistakably lime without being overtly citric or sour. The tastes put together are seamless, an elevated buffalo wing experience. The one ding on it – maybe I’m too much of a pleb – is that the chicken was definitely pinky inside. I’m genuinely unsure whether that’s supposed to be the case, or whether it’s the hurried grilling to move the line along. If you’re adverse to rawer chicken, you may not want to risk it.
Max rates 3.5/5.

The Steak Frite is a little (emphasis on little) marvel. The potato base is fried delicately with crispy edges, and the taste is remarkably clean, smooth and slightly sweet. The steak tartare is meaty without pungency, and tastes surprisingly clean and fresh as well. The caviar brings the heavy salty taste that informs the rest of the steak frite. It’s excellently put together but it is very much meant to be one bite for 21 dollars (we spread it to 2 bites per person), so it might not fit your notion of worth and value-for-money. I can see how and why they arrived at this price point and quantity – let’s be frank, for a high-end fine dining experience, there wouldn’t be many steak frites in the first place, and certainly it would cost a lot – but I can’t say for sure whether it feels like it’s worth 21 dollars without rational analysis.
Max rates 4/5 with the caveat that it’s $21 for a bite.

Soon after we moved on to Char’s Signature Char Siew, and two Michelin-starred Shisen Hanten’s Mapo Doufu with Hokkaido Rice. Neither booths were very occupied and I received instantaneous service.

Char (Michelin Plate)

Char’s fatty pork belly cut of Signature Char Siew felt quite generous in serving, and turned out to be interestingly tender, especially around the melting fat. It’s a strange but good feeling to bite into char siew and have it be so much less leathery than we’re used to. Unfortunately the tenderness varies in each piece of the length of meat used, so you might want to sample both ends and determine which style of meat you prefer. The starting end on our plate was the softest. The sauce is strong with a dark soy flavor, and a slight smear of their tangy, intensely spicy chilli sauce brightens the profile of the pork considerably. (The chilli is seriously sharp and spicy, if you’re not much of a chilli eater, ask for it on the side.)
Max rates 3.5/5.

Shisen Hanten (2 Michelin Stars)

Shisen Hanten‘s Mapo Doufu was incredibly smooth and consistent throughout the little palm-sized bowl, with chopped spring onion adding a gentle crunch. The mapo is less spicy than it looks (with that orange-red chilli oil sheen), tending toward a sour, just slightly spicy first note with the subtle tingling hotness spreading out in your mouth after the bite. The rice was firm enough to handle the mapo without disintegrating, and yet soft in that fluffy, short-grain way. A beautiful and carefully crafted complete bowl of mapo that prioritises a holistic taste profile over numbing spice. It’s small but well-seasoned with intense flavour, and ended up surprisingly filling.
Max rates 4/5.

After sharing four dishes, we were out of our $54-worth of coupons. Maguro-Donya Miura-Misaki-Kou had completely sold out by last half-hour of the session, and though we were somewhat interested in other options, we weren’t invested enough to casually drop the cash on another $30 set of coupons. If they’d been selling them at lower prices (each coupon is $3, so a $12 set of 4 coupons, for example), I would have bought it.

As it is, we were full enough and unwilling to dole out the dosh, so that was the end of our little Michelin Guide Street Food Festival experience. I have my gripes, but I don’t regret it.