Impossible Foods launches in Singapore with a bang! Carefully crafted to be as close to beef as possible, Impossible’s vegetable-origin meat-free meat will surprise and please your palate alike. Partnering with four eateries of different cuisines, Impossible Foods’ one-day-only celebration at Lau Pa Sat Festival Market introduces you to the Impossible.

…or so they’d like you to think.

My companion and I had business in the region so we managed to drop by Impossible’s little food festival early enough to wait in queue. It turned out to be a wise choice – it took a while for me to nab all the dishes for both of us, but by the time we were seated and eating, the queue stretched across the Festival space, and back to the start of the street.

Aside from a sturdy tote bag with a few can-badges, there were four dishes and one drink redeemable for $5 – all of them being the standard food festival sampling size, so that’s quite a lot of food for your dough. (We did see that they’d started chopping the burger in half later thanks to Instagram posts, but that’s still a lot for $5.) All of them featured Impossible meat, which seems to come in mince form.

Impossible Foods: Burger ‘Meat’

Being the gimmick, we’ll have a look at Impossible itself as a beef replacement first. There was some vegan upset about the fact that it’s not actually vegan, only vegetarian in nature, but I get the feeling from its efforts to mimic beef that Impossible is more targeted towards regular meat eaters. With that said, we thus judged Impossible on its mock-meat quality.

Impossible Burger ‘meat’ seems to pack looser than beef meat patties that I’ve had, and texture-wise is soft but not unlike ground beef. It manages to look the part inside when done medium-rare, and seems to take a sear. I’m impressed there can be a doneness-level in the first place, but when it’s medium-rare, it clearly does not taste like medium-rare meat. It lacks the distinctly meaty taste and juices of actual beef. In my opinion, it doesn’t stand as well on its own as a burger (irony), but it passes muster as a medium to lower grade mincemeat replacement, and I can’t say I can tell the difference in more sauce-intense dishes. As a day-to-day mincemeat, it works! As a gourmet meat, I don’t think it does.
Max rates 2.5/5.

Park Bench Deli

From the meat review, you might have deduced that for us, Park Bench Deli‘s Impossible Burger was the disappointment of the lot. The amount of food at the point we redeemed it was surprisingly large – I’d expected it to be slider size instead of standard fast-food burger size. It came with cheese, several pickles and a toasted bun. Given that the Impossible Burger meat isn’t strong on its own, and the heavier cheese and pickles were overwhelming it, the burger as a whole became increasingly hard to finish and was unimpressive. Disappointing, but those with a higher tolerance for mediocre burgers might have liked it better.
Max rates 2/5.

Empress

Empress‘ Impossible Crispy Pancake was an intriguing dish on paper. We have a weakness for those gummy Chinese ‘pancakes’ with chives and pork filling, so it was exciting up until eating it. The crisp was good, so were the rest of the ingredients, but the Impossible meat within was dismally tasteless. Not sure if it was under-seasoned or just what it was.
Max rates 2/5.

Lai Heng Fried Kway Teow

Lai Heng’s Ginger Kway Teow, a resident of Lau Pa Sat itself, had the Impossible meat covered in a heavy soy gravy that we enjoyed and gave the beef more flavour (or at least, made it the carrier of flavour). However, the kway teow wasn’t very seasoned, presumably to offset the saucy Impossible meat. In its entirety though, it was pleasant.
Max rates 2.5/5.

Sunny Viet Vietnamese Cuisine

Sunny Viet Vietnamese Cuisine‘s Impossible Crispy Spring Rolls were our favourite – the eatery itself is also a resident of Lau Pa Sat. The second plate of Crispy Spring Rolls was definitely more deflated than the first, but the seasoning of the mince and the crispy exterior were spot on. We haven’t eaten that much Vietnamese cuisine, but of what we have, these were some of the best Vietnamese rolls we’ve had locally (so far). The Impossible meat in here slipped into ‘I can’t tell the difference and I don’t give a damn’ territory.
Max rates 3/5.

Heineken 0.0

We’re not big beer drinkers, so I don’t think we exploited the free Heineken as well as some would, and I’ll refrain from reviewing Heineken itself.
The non-alcoholic Heineken 0.0 though, is unfortunately awful. I know the dryness and the hoppy taste is to make it taste like beer, but it doesn’t, and tastes more like absurdly dry bitter mineral water – that still doesn’t taste like Heineken. It was an awful accompaniment alongside the sodium-heavy dishes here. We gave up and bought some ice lemon tea that thankfully had a good punch of calamansi in it.
Max rates (Heineken 0.0) 1/5. The ice lemon tea felt like a 3 at that point.

My companion was deeply interested in how Impossible Foods would be like, and I think we’re ambivalent about it as an adequate beef replacement. I would be more convinced to use it in day-to-day cooking as a consumer than eating out. That’s the end of our Impossible journey, for now!