When you step into Marcy’s, Duxton’s newest kid on the shop house block located right opposite the Duxton Reserve, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that you’ve entered another world. Perhaps a quaint bed & breakfast or a boutique hotel somewhere down south, where the decorations are quirky, the trinkets eclectic and the furnishings – including the lampshade chandeliers – a transportive wink to an era past.
By no means an inn even if it looks the part, Marcy’s bills itself as a contemporary seafood restaurant and its menu, which is eclectically Italian, Latin American and regionally inspired, attests to it : small plates and large plates, plus desserts, all except two to three of which are seafood-based.
From the small plates menu, there’s a warm disc of tuna tostada (toasted tortilla) topped with barely-there cured XO sausages and shavings of foie gras. Also evenly-brown slabs of thickly toasted brioche topped with a towering mound of shredded blue swimmer crabs scented with lemon butter. But my greatest rave is reserved for the riveting dish of bincho flash-grilled butterflied red prawns ($16) served in a shallow pool of sweet and tangy aguachile spiked with jalapeno and refreshingly perfumed with torch ginger flower. That distinct smokiness that envelops the palate is transcendental.
While not all the small plates work, know that It gets better as you progress to the large plates. Case in point is the tubular rigatoni pasta ($31) served in a rich and mellow slow-cooked red wine tomato sauce with slices of braised octopus and bits of hard-to-find beef tendons – it feels like a heartwarming treat from an Italian nonna, one who thinks you need a dose of collagen-rich tendons to fill-up those sunken cheeks.
But not everything’s contemporary.
Hake ($36), its exterior done to a crisp brown and its flesh still moist, arrives in a pool of ume brown butter sauce topped with wisps of crunchy leeks, a winner in my book.
Also the only non-seafood dish of a gigantic hunk of pork short ribs ($38) thickly slathered in a dark and piquant BBQ sauce served alongside slaw. Rustic and downright delicious.
For desserts you can’t do better than order the pecan pie sundae with red miso caramel. Here, they make a pecan pie from scratch, crush it into chunks and serve it with a scoop of sundae and red miso caramel. What’s not to like?
39-40 Duxton Road, Singapore 089 503; +65-9012 3747; marcys.sg
BIBIK GOURMAND 