BBraise Review: $5 Braised Meat Rice And Deep-Fried Lor Bak At Maxwell Food Centre

BBraise at Amoy Street Food Centre

Update: BBraise has relocated to 1 Kadayanallur Street, #01-43, Maxwell Food Centre, Singapore 069184.

Braised meat, when done right, is thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a sum of several key factors: the braising gravy, the texture of the meat, and the accompaniments. The hunt for a good bowl of lu rou fan never ends, so when we heard of BBraise in Amoy Street Food Centre, which served not just a short menu of braised meat bowls, but deep-fried braised pork belly as well, I knew we had to give it a try.

Formerly a home-based business, BBraise is helmed by ex-cabin crew Alvan Chew, for whom this is wholly a passion-driven enterprise. His is no family recipe, since none of them cooks—rather, it’s his very own, based upon the technique and interest he’d discovered while helping out at his friend’s hawker stall after he’d left the airline industry.

Food at BBraise

There are only three main items on the menu at BBraise, all priced at $5 a bowl: Belly, Trotter, and Chicken. Each comes with rice, braised meat, and boiled vegetables. The optional add-ons, priced at $1 a pop, include Tau Pok, Tau Kua, and Egg—all steeped in the same braising gravy.

We started off with the Belly, which was my favourite of the lot. Each meat gets a turn of at least two hours in Alvan’s lush braising gravy, and the pork belly with its alternating layers of melt-in-your-mouth fat was rendered super tender.

You get jasmine rice with the bowls here, but I would’ve preferred pearl rice instead. In spite of that little setback, what I did enjoy was how the deeply flavourful meat and fat melded easily with the rice in my mouth. This, versus the less enjoyable experience of having to chew through unyieldingly tough, stringy meat or solid, icky fat.

Plus points also go to BBraise for being sufficiently generous with the gravy that is ladled over each bowl—there’s enough to stain almost all the rice in the bowl a deep brown, but not too much that the bits at the bottom of the bowl are swimming in it.

Made with almost 20 different herbs and spices, the dark brown gravy is kept on a constant simmer, with the master pot of gravy being enriched at the end of each day with the day’s braising liquids. Unlike the lu rou zhup you mostly find elsewhere too, the one at BBraise is on the viscous side, which I appreciated for the way it drapes itself over the food.

As much as I liked the braised pork belly, BBraise one-upped it by battering and deep-frying it as a side dish. The Authentic B’Fry, AKA Braise-Fry, can be added on to your bowl for $1, or ordered as a side dish for $4.

The braised pork belly on its own is tasty, and it avoids being let down by a tasteless crumb by being dipped first into a batter comprising its own braising gravy, and then into a breadcrumb mix, before it’s deep-fried. This was super moreish, with the added contrast in textures of the melting meat against the light crust.

Like the pork belly, the Trotter was well-cooked, with my dining companions enjoying the gelatinous bits and slight chew they got from the pig skin on this.

Not everybody enjoys pork belly and pig trotters, so the final item on BBraise’s menu sees a whole braised chicken drumstick. Relative to the other two, this was our collective least favourite item on the menu.

Don’t get me wrong, the chicken was tasty, as was the braised pork, but we found it less tender, without the plump smoothness of dark meat we had expected.

Similarly tasty were the braised tau kwa, tau pok, and egg, although we would’ve preferred a soft-centred egg for its creamy yolk. Personally, I would also have liked it better if the savouriness of the meat and gravy was complemented with preserved vegetables, but Alvan shared that his choice of boiled vegetables to cater to health-conscious office workers who would want greens with their lunch.

Ambience at BBraise

Amoy Street Food Centre is a 400-metre or five-minute walk from both Tanjong Pagar MRT Station and Telok Ayer MRT Station. The food centre gets extremely crowded at lunchtime, so it’s advisable to visit before that, since BBraise closes by 2:30pm.

If you’re having your meal there, there are lots of seats spread over the two floors of the brightly lit food centre, with plenty of fans ensuring you won’t sweat up a storm. If the space looks refreshed, that’s because they only just reopened earlier this year after several months of renovation work.

The verdict

At $5 for a full bowl of carbs, proteins, and greens—slightly more if you go for the add-ons—this is a pretty reasonable and satisfying lunch to grab in the CBD. With BBraise being quite new to the scene, and Alvan still figuring out and finetuning the various elements on the menu, do expect changes to the line-up, with improvements such as onsen eggs said to be on the way. One thing that I sure hope doesn’t change is the B’Fry: it’s what my dining companions and I agreed would have us coming back for more.

Frequently mixed up with BBraise is Braise Lu Zhi Jia at Golden Mile, which serves various cuts of braised pork, including pork cheek. If you’re looking for Taiwanese lu rou, consider Want Food Taiwanese Delights instead.

Address: 7 Maxwell Road, #02-131, Amoy Street Food Centre, Singapore 069111
Opening hours: Sun-Fri 9am to 2:30pm
Tel: 8884 2796
Website
Bbraise is not a halal-certified eatery.

Photos taken by Hui Hui Lau.
This was an independent review by Eatbook.sg