26 Beach Road, South Beach Avenue | January 2026
First Impressions: Theatre Before the Meal
There is something deliberately confrontational about Medusa’s interior. Stepping into the basement-level space beneath JW Marriott’s South Beach Avenue complex, one is not eased into the experience — one is ambushed by it. Crimson walls, saturated to the point of almost aggressive warmth, press inward from every angle. LED lighting, cool and glittering against that deep red, creates a chiaroscuro that feels less like a Roman supper club and more like a fever dream of one — Roman antiquity processed through a contemporary maximalist lens. The portraits lining the walls are cheeky, slightly irreverent, and wholly intentional. This is not a restaurant that wants to be overlooked.
Seating 76 across indoor and al fresco configurations, the room manages to feel intimate despite its ambition. The crimson palette does much of this work — red contracts perceived space, raises psychological warmth, and historically stimulates appetite. Whether by design or intuition, Medusa’s colour theory is sound.
The Kitchen’s Philosophical Position
Before addressing individual dishes, it is worth establishing what Fortuna Group is attempting here. The osteria romana — as a form — is resolutely unpretentious in its Roman context: a neighbourhood haunt, heavy on tradition, light on ceremony. What General Manager Federico Burci and dough master Giorgio Sorce are executing is a studied translation of that ethos into Singapore’s premium dining landscape. The tension between those two impulses — rustic Roman tradition and contemporary urban dining — is where the menu’s most interesting decisions live.
The Pasta Station: Technique Under Scrutiny
Fettuccine ($36++)
The Fettuccine is the menu’s purist offering, and for that reason, the most merciless in exposing technique. Egg fettuccine — wide, ribbon-cut, with a surface area designed to carry sauce — is tossed in Italian butter and Pecorino Romano. Nothing else. No garlic, no cream, no aromatic scaffolding to obscure fundamental weaknesses.
At this price point, the pasta itself must be immaculate. Egg fettuccine done correctly yields a strand with a faint yellow ochre hue — the yolk-to-white ratio determining depth of colour and richness of flavour. The surface should carry a slight roughness, the result of either bronze-die extrusion or hand-rolling, allowing the emulsified butter-and-cheese sauce to cling without slipping. Pecorino Romano — sharper, saltier, and more mineral than Parmigiano-Reggiano — should cut through the fat of the butter, providing saline counterbalance. The final texture should read as silken but with resistance: al dente in the truest sense, where the tooth meets a centre with just enough structure before yielding. A dish of this spare construction either sings or exposes.
Caserecce ($35++) — “Il Sporco”
This is the menu’s most intellectually provocative offering. Nicknamed “the dirty one” in Roman dialect, the Caserecce is constructed as a confluence of three canonical Roman sauces — carbonara, amatriciana, and cacio e pepe — unified into a single preparation. On paper, this reads as excess. In practice, it demands considerable technical discipline to avoid collapse into incoherence.
The caserecce cut itself is significant here. A short, tubular, twisted pasta — reminiscent of a tightly rolled scroll — it traps sauce within its spiral interior while presenting a firm exterior bite. The hue of a well-made caserecce tends toward pale ivory with faint golden tones. Sauce adherence is maximised by the geometry.
The conceptual challenge is one of balance. Carbonara contributes guanciale fat, egg emulsification, and black pepper. Amatriciana introduces tomato — acidic, bright, with a slight sweetness that cuts through richness — and further guanciale depth. Cacio e pepe adds sharpness and a starchy, almost grainy mouthfeel from the Pecorino. The risk of combining all three is tonal muddiness: a dish that tastes of everything and therefore of nothing. If Burci’s kitchen resolves that tension successfully, the result would be a bold layered sauce with discrete, identifiable flavour beats arriving in sequence — fat first, then acid, then sharp saline heat. If not, the components flatten into an undifferentiated richness. Given the dish’s apparent popularity and its nickname’s knowing confidence, one suspects the kitchen has found its calibration.
The Pizza Station: Roman Orthodoxy vs. Its Own Variant
Pizza Romana (from $29++) and Pinsa Romana (from $20++ for two slices)
Giorgio Sorce’s decision to offer two distinct Roman interpretations is itself a statement of technical seriousness. The pizza romana in its traditional form is characterised by its thinness — almost cracker-like in its final crust — achieved through low-hydration dough rolled (not stretched) to evenness, then baked at high temperature. The visual result is flat, pale gold at the edges, with charred spotting across the base. The bite is dry and brittle rather than chewy, with no significant cornicione. Toppings must therefore be restrained, as there is no structural bread to absorb excess moisture.
The pinsa romana presents a markedly different textural proposition. A blend of wheat, soy, and rice flours — the latter two contributing a lighter, crisper crumb structure — pinsa dough undergoes a long cold fermentation, sometimes exceeding 72 hours, resulting in a crust that is simultaneously airy in its interior and deeply crunchy at its surface. The hue is paler than a standard pizza, tending toward cream-white with golden browning. Its oval form distinguishes it visually, and per portion size is more economical at $20++ for two slices.
The Gircia topping variant — inspired by the foundational Roman pasta of the same name, combining guanciale, Pecorino, and black pepper — is the topping of greatest culinary interest. In pasta form, gricia relies on pasta water to emulsify fat and cheese into sauce. Applied to pizza, those elements must perform differently: guanciale renders and crisps under oven heat, Pecorino melts unevenly and browns at the edges, and black pepper blooms into something more aggressive in dry heat. The result should offer textural contrast between rendered fat, crystalline cheese, and firm crust — a more complex surface than a simple Margherita.
Dessert: Restraint and Comfort
Truffle Tiramisu ($18++) and Torta della Nonna ($18++)
The inclusion of truffle in a tiramisu is either a considered decision or a gimmick, and the distinction lies entirely in execution. Truffle’s earthiness — fungal, faintly pungent, with an umami depth — is in genuine tension with tiramisu’s sweetness. If the truffle component is shaved fresh and applied sparingly, it adds an unexpected savoury bass note that elongates the dessert’s finish. If it is truffle oil — synthetic, penetrating, and uniform — it overwhelms entirely. The price point of $18++ suggests restraint rather than extravagance.
The Torta della Nonna — literally “grandmother’s cake” — is in its classical form a shortcrust pastry shell filled with pastry cream and finished with pine nuts and icing sugar. The hue is warm gold at the crust, ivory within. Texturally, the contrast between the crumbling, buttery pastry and the smooth, yielding cream interior is the dish’s primary pleasure. Its presence on the menu signals something important: Medusa is not interested only in novelty. The grandmother’s cake is the menu’s most legible act of sincerity.
Verdict
Medusa Italian Osteria Romana positions itself as a conceptually coherent project: Roman technique, deliberately communicated, within a space that refuses to be invisible. The menu’s most interesting quality is its willingness to engage with the full register of Roman culinary tradition — from its most austere expressions (Fettuccine, Gricia) to its most maximalist (the Caserecce’s triple-sauce construction) — without appearing to lose intellectual thread.
Whether the kitchen consistently executes at the level the menu implies remains, of course, a question only repeated visits can settle. But the vocabulary being spoken here is the right one.
Reservations via website. Not halal-certified. Esplanade MRT, 5-minute walk.