Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow

I almost never use the word “gastronomy” in any reviews because too many people have used it in frivolous ways and because it seems few restaurants in Singapore are worth the epithet of “art of cooking and eating good food.” But I shall use it on The Nomads at Telok Ayer.

By the people behind Five Ten Holdings and Kazakhstan native Olzhas Zhiyenkulov, The Nomads serves Modern Central Asian cuisine (anything along the Silk Road from Southern Italy to Western China) on a bar counter for fewer than 20 people.

There is a secret bat cave, a panic room, a private dining area, behind a bookshelf. In this private room, you dine directly on the table (without plates) like people in Kazakhstan.

On top of the a la carte menu, there are three tasting menus (by reservations) at $98++, $148++, and $188++.  For the purpose of this review, we sampled The Odyssey of Fire ($148++), a 17-course meal.

A disclaimer first. Food reviewing is about experience; the more you eat, the more knowledgeable and qualified you are to write about food. But I’m not widely travelled enough to know about food on the Silk Road. So I will be first to admit that I am not qualified to review the food in this restaurant.

That said, the food in this restaurant seems very familiar. The cooking methods are Westernised and the flavours could be found in a Western kitchen. Familiarity is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it can help you relate to the food here. Also, it is a Modern Central Asia restaurant, not a traditional one.

Most of the courses come in bite size but you will be stuffed by the end of the meal.

Side note: kudos to the chefs for the arduous tasks they have accomplished here. Each dish consists different components, and each component takes so much effort. Let’s estimate 17 dishes x 4 components in each dish x 20 minutes for each component. That’s about 1360 minutes (22 hours!) of cooking for each guest.

I won’t talk about the entire 17 courses but will talk about the outstanding ones and then a flaw with the food.

The traditional lamb samsa from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Indians also have their own version called the samosa) is transformed here into lamb samsa cones, rare Mottainai lamb short loin tartare in handmade cones coated with coffee sugar.

It’s a little scary to eat rare lamb since we seldom do so, but it is not gamy at all. Quite tasty.

The salat or in English, salad, is adapted from the grilled fruit salad found in Almaty, Kazakhstan. It consists pears glazed with cherry vinaigrette in an anchovy sauce but the dominant flavour here is smokiness from the grilling.

Eating what you expect shouldn’t be smoky be smoky gives you a surprise.

Beshbarmak is Kazakhstan’s national dish of beef noodles. Here, they substitute the noodles for potato sheets (like potato chips). The 48-hour wagyu beef cheek is super and the broth delicious, but I thought I would have enjoyed it more as a noodle.

Similarly, the squid laghman (or read in Chinese, la mian), a native noodle dish from Uyghur (sad about their current situation), uses grilled squid instead of noodles. I thought it would be better if it was noodles.

The only body of water near the Silk Road is the Caspian Sea so The Nomads serves Sturgeon although they also serve scallop which is nowhere found near the Silk Road.

The foie gras in ash is an interesting interpretation of people cooking meat in the ground.

So after all the interesting and delicious food, some of the dishes can be quite confusing to us. There can be all sorts of flavours in a dish–sweet, savoury, smokey, pungency–and there is only so much the human tongue can handle.

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The Nomads
70 Telok Ayer St Singapore 048458
T: +65 6977 7057
11.30am – 2.30pm, 6pm – 9.30pm daily
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Food: 6.5/10
Price / value: 6.5/10
Ambience / decor: 7/10

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You may be interested in…
–Akira Back, South Beach: Excellent Japanese-Inspired Food Made Better by Amazing Service
–Caffe Cicheti, South Beach Tower: Straight Up Italian Cuisine for Seafood Lovers
–Coucou, Craig Road: Rare Swiss Restaurant in Singapore Serving More Than Just Rosti
–Six Senses Brasserie, Maxwell: Almost a Weekend Brunch Buffet

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Written by Dr. A. Nathanael Ho.