The Boxing Crab, Underwater World Sentosa

Situated behind Underwater World at Sentosa, just beside Shangri La’s Rasa Sentosa Resort, The Boxing Crab is a seafood restaurant with dishes cooked in various styles such as Indonesian, Western and Singaporean.

There is a private room with its own private balcony and outdoor seating with a seaview.

Homemade fresh mango prawn bar ($12)

Crispy peppered white bait ($8)

Stir-fried french beans with dried shrimp ($14/18/22)

Skip the mango-prawn bar (tart and oily) and the desiccated french beans. The salty white bait was addictive on its own–could be crispier–but if you’re drinking beer, it’d wash down even better.

The wok fried prawns with salted egg yolk ($24/34/54), which I’ll order wherever I go, were a bit of a let-down. It could have been wetter and the salted-egg-yolk flavor didn’t come through.

After the first few lackluster dishes, the signature braised claypot crab with superior broth and pumpkin (market price) wow-ed us. The sauce was sui generis, can’t find anywhere else. It tasted like salted egg yolk with a hint of curry. We drained the sauce and still couldn’t get enough of it. A must order if you like crabs.

Charcoal grilled King Prawn with Mousseline Sauce ($19/pc)

Charcoal grilled marinated red snapper ($28)

Charcoal grilled marinated squid ($14/18/28)

From the claypot crab onwards, the food took a turn for the better. The grilled dishes were king, accompanied by three very, very spicy (but delicious) condiments by the side. The grilling was beautifully done, retaining the dignity of each meat, enfolding them with its charcoal fragrance. The grilled red snapper was crispy at the skin and its meat, moist and tender. Anyone who has cooked squid before knows that it is a meat that is hard to handle: too cooked, it becomes hard; undercooked, you’ll get a belly ache. Here, the grilled squid was just perfect: bouncy with a bite. The grilled dishes are a must-order too.

The desserts were, like the mains, uneven: we tried yam paste ($5), almond paste ($4.50), chilled mango cream with pomelo ($5), sesame paste with tang yuan ($4.50), and only liked the first two.

We went during the soft launch, and the service wasn’t up to par yet. The restaurant was too huge, and there were too little servers or too many untrained servers who didn’t know what to do. Because only the manager and a few servers were handling most of the work, they were very busy and might come across as brusque even though they didn’t mean to.

The Boxing Crab holds great potential. They have a charming location and nice decor; they have special dishes–such as the claypot crab and grilled seafood–that are their best selling points and couldn’t be found anywhere else; even the rest of the dishes could be tweaked to be better since they only had minor faults; the service could be better by hiring more and experienced staff. Given time to mature, Boxing Crab would make an excellent restaurant.

The Boxing Crab

80 Siloso Road
Singapore 098969
T: 6274 7760
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Rating: 2.917

PS: Thank you, Pansy and Irene, for the invite.

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