Food Review: Beach Road Kitchen at JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach | Gorgeous space, and the best Chocolate-coated Macadamia Nuts

Posted on April 3, 2017 by theRantingPanda in Food

The Place JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach was launched late in 2016, taking over the now-defunct South Beach Hotel after barely nine months of operations. Count ourselves lucky though, with our little red dot now enjoying the hospitality of all three of Marriott’s luxury brands (including St Regis and Ritz-Carlton). Beach Road Kitchen is the hotel’s all-day dining concept, and if you are walking into the hotel’s main lobby expecting to locate it, you will be re-directed out. In fact, the restaurant is located in a separate building, just about 20 steps away from the hotel’s main entrance.

Done up with frame-less glass walls, the space at Beach Road Kitchen gets lit up with nice natural light during the day. The clever play of soft colours and wooden finishings also help in creating an inviting space for diners. This is probably one of the prettiest hotel’s buffet restaurant around at the moment.

The Food Well, it is a buffet. And perhaps by nature of the hotel’s branding, we have to admit we walked in with high expectations. The weekday lunch buffet is priced at S$58 ++ per pax, and the daily dinner buffet is at S$78++ per pax.

Starting from the entrance, you will find some of the widest spread of Italian antipasti selections, courtesy of the hotel’s Italian Executive Chef Stefano Di Salvo. Complimenting the appetisers here, the seafood items will be one of the crowd favourite. From fresh oysters, which diners can request the service staff to shuck for you, to a wide array of crustaceans – although we must confess that we are less of a seafood fan sometimes, so we did not manage to sample any of the selections here with our limited capacity. Having said that, make sure you go for the fresh cherry tomatoes and dried tomatoes here, which went very well with the other mains.

Strolling down the restaurant, there is the live noodles station, dishing out Laksa with a self-selection of specific ingredients to include into your customised bowl of laksa. Be warned though, the laksa here came across as rather spicy, though definitely shioks for those who prefer that spicy “kick”.

At the far end of the restaurant, you will find an assortment of Indian, Oriental and Western options. The centrepiece here is the Pizza Oven, with our favourite being the Truffle Mushroom Pizza, freshly made and baked in the open-concept kitchen. Make very sure you get yourself to this thin-crust pizza, together with the other breads which are made in-house.

The live grill station is always the highlight for me at any buffet. One highlight at Beach Road Kitchen is the tomahawk steak, which is served up as the main grill during every dinner buffet. We strongly recommend you to go for this; juicy, tender and well-seasoned grill, and make very sure you request for at least an order of the foie gras served with a lightly grilled brioche, prepared à la minute – now your meal is almost complete. There are other selections at the grills on a rotation basis, such as the lamb and chicken.

We can’t end our meal without desserts, or perhaps, no one should. The dessert spread here has a good mix of cakes, ice cream, pastries and waffles, although the overall quality could be much better. Most of the cakes and kuehs seem to be catered from elsewhere and was hardly enticing. The saving grace was the soft-serve ice cream, where you can top it with the highlight of the desserts here – the chocolate-coated macadamia nuts. I lost count the insane number of nuts I popped that evening, but no regrets about it.

Rants Our main qualm about Beach Road Kitchen wasn’t the lack of spread, but the quality of their offerings. For a luxury hotel, they should impress even with the least of options.

Will I Return Again? The space here is gorgeous, but we found that the restaurant could do better with the buffet quality – it is JW Marriott afterall. Having said that, it’s still early days for Beach Road Kitchen and once the crowd starts rolling in, we are hopeful that the chefs here will add the sparks needed to give its diners ‘The JW Treatment’.

This was an invited tasting, though all opinions expressed are our own.

Make your reservation instantly at Beach Road Kitchen here. Discount dining vouchers available here.

TheRantingPanda says:
Taste bud: 3.5/5
Hole in the pocket: 4/5
Ambience: 4/5
Overall Experience: 3.5/5