32 Keong Saik Road, Singapore 089139
Catalan Spanish • A La Carte • Dinner & Weekday Lunch
Reviewed March 2026
Overall Verdict
FOC Restaurant has weathered relocation with its identity entirely intact. Six months into its new home along the storied length of Keong Saik Road, this long-standing standard-bearer of Catalan cuisine in Singapore feels not merely settled but reinvigorated — an establishment that has shed the familiarity of its former address and rediscovered the confidence that defines a restaurant operating at the peak of its powers.
The evening proceeded as a masterclass in Spanish hospitality: unhurried, convivial, marked by a kitchen that understands the architecture of a meal. There were moments of genuine brilliance — a foie gras phyllo bite that ranks among the finest single mouthfuls this reviewer has encountered in Singapore this year — and there were moments that fell fractionally short of the ambition the dishes seemed to promise. But taken together, this is a restaurant that earns its reputation decisively, and then some.
Ambience & Setting
The new Keong Saik space communicates considered restraint. Where the restaurant’s former iteration occupied a building with a particular historic weight, this incarnation feels polished and deliberate: intimate without being cramped, warm without veering into the cloying. Wooden surfaces, low ambient lighting, and the clean geometry of the counter seating create the conditions for a certain kind of evening — one in which the conversation matters as much as the food, and the food matters enormously.
Counter seating is the architectural highlight of the room. To dine at the pass is to be admitted into the restaurant’s confidence — watching plated dishes move from mise en place to finished composition is a reminder that cooking at this level is a performative act, as much choreography as craft. For food-minded diners, it is the only seat in the house worth requesting.
Service across the evening was attentive without any suggestion of surveillance. The front-of-house team wore their knowledge of the menu with ease rather than ostentation, offering guidance where invited and withdrawing where not. The pacing of courses was exemplary: no dead time between plates, no sense of being rushed toward the close. This is the quiet infrastructure on which a dining room’s reputation is built.
Snacks
Foie Gras Terrine & Ahrenka Caviar in Crispy Phyllo — $20 / 2 pcs [5/5]
There is a school of thought that holds a great snack to be the most difficult thing a kitchen can produce: it must resolve itself in two or three bites, must contain within that brief window a complete and memorable experience, and must announce the register at which the evening will operate. By this exacting standard, FOC’s foie gras phyllo is faultless.
The construction is deceptively architectural. The base is a phyllo shell baked to the precise threshold of feuilletage — not merely crisp but structurally taut, yielding to pressure with a clean shatter rather than a collapse. Within it sits the foie gras terrine, pressed and chilled to a satiny, almost trembling density, its fat content released not on contact with the tongue but fractionally after, in a warm wave that floods the palate. The Ahrenka caviar crowning each piece introduces briny salinity precisely where the foie gras fat would otherwise become cloying — a counter-argument built into the dish’s architecture.
The chromatic palette is worth noting: jet-black caviar against the pale ochre of the terrine and the amber-gold of the phyllo shell, the whole thing no larger than a thumb. It is a dish that looks exactly like what it is, and tastes better than it looks.
Sea Urchin, King Crab & Tarragon Butter on Toast — $32 / 2 pcs [3.5/5]
The second snack was an altogether quieter proposition. Where the foie gras bite dealt in dramatic contrasts, the sea urchin toast operated in a register of sustained, accumulating umami: the briny iodine of the uni lobes, the clean sweetness of hand-picked king crab, and the anise-inflected warmth of tarragon compound butter layered across a crisp toast base. The flavour profile was deep and coherent, but it lacked the structural drama that elevates a dish from enjoyable to remarkable.
The tarragon butter served as an emulsifying bridge between the marine elements and the toast, but its herbal character — which might have introduced the brightness the dish needed — was somewhat muted in practice. A touch of yuzu gel, a few drops of good rice wine vinegar, or even a scattering of thinly sliced shiso would have done the work of acid here and sharpened a profile that currently fades slightly before its resolution. On its own terms, it is a generous and pleasurable bite. In the context of the extraordinary snack that preceded it, it could not help but feel slightly diminished.
Tapas
“Huevos Rotos” Japanese Egg — $22 [4/5]
The huevos rotos is one of FOC’s foundational dishes — the kind of preparation that anchors a menu with its simplicity and reveals the kitchen’s technique through the quality of its execution. The essential proposition of the dish is irresistible: twice-fried potatoes, rendered golden and hollow-crisp through the double-fry method, arranged in the bowl alongside ribbons of Iberico ham, piquillo peppers, and a slow-cooked Japanese egg. The ritual of breaking the egg tableside, releasing its deep-gold, custard-like yolk over the potatoes, is the theatrical centrepiece of a dish that understands how to make the diner complicit in its own construction.
The use of a Japanese onsen-style egg rather than a traditionally cracked Spanish egg is a meaningful substitution. The yolk is set to a tighter consistency than it would be at higher temperature, creating a saucing texture that is closer to crème anglaise than to a free-running yolk — richer, more viscous, more evenly distributed when broken. The potatoes absorbed it beautifully.
Where the dish fell fractionally short was in the piquillo pepper’s performance. These are exceptional ingredients — slow-roasted, sweet, slightly smoky, with a residual warmth that should cut through the fat of the yolk and ham — but their character did not project with the prominence the dish deserved. Whether the peppers were under-seasoned, under-charred, or simply overwhelmed by the richness of the surrounding elements, the net effect was a dish slightly more monochromatic in its flavour than it should be. The fix is small: higher heat on the pepper prep, or a light finish on the plancha.
Argentinian Prawns ‘al Ajillo’ — $32 [4.5/5]
This was the standout tapas of the evening, and it deserves to be discussed with the seriousness that great simple cooking invites.
Al ajillo is among the most transparent of all Spanish preparations — a technique that strips away every form of concealment and presents the ingredient and its aromatics with nowhere to hide. The olive oil must be good. The garlic must be sliced, not crushed, and must be coaxed through its bitterness into a state of soft, yielding sweetness without approaching the acrid edge that comes with even a moment’s excess heat. The dried guindilla chilli must infuse steadily rather than fry aggressively. And the protein — in this case, Argentinian red prawns, which possess a natural sweetness and structural firmness that most farmed varieties cannot match — must be introduced into the oil at the precise moment when the aromatics are ready to receive them.
FOC’s kitchen executed all of this with confidence. The garlic had mellowed to a golden, almost caramel note. The chilli had given the oil a clean, penetrating heat — present throughout the finish without dominating the foreground. The prawns were cooked with restraint, their flesh snapping cleanly, their heads yielding a rush of bisque-like intensity when pressed.
The white bean emulsion accompanying the dish was the inspired addition. This is Catalan coastal cooking in miniature: alubias blancas — white beans slow-cooked to complete tenderness and then emulsified with olive oil and a small amount of the prawn’s cooking liquid — produce a sauce of extraordinary creaminess and depth. It added a legume richness that complemented rather than competed with the garlic oil, and it bound the whole composition together in a way that made mopping every last trace from the plate feel not merely permissible but obligatory.
Main Courses
Seafood ‘Senyoret’ Paella — $54 [4/5]
No serious assessment of a Spanish restaurant can sidestep the paella, and at FOC the seafood senyoret is the version around which the menu’s more ambitious ambitions quietly cohere. Senyoret — literally “young gentleman” in Valencian — designates a paella in which all seafood arrives pre-shelled, a gesture of hospitality that prioritises the diner’s ease over the kitchen’s convenience, since shelling at service is a considerably more labour-intensive commitment than presenting shellfish whole.
The ingredients were impeccable. The Carabinero red prawn — a deep-water Spanish species whose vivid scarlet pigmentation bleeds into the sofrito and colours the rice — delivered the crustacean sweetness that defines a great seafood paella. The Hokkaido scallops were fresh and sweet, with a clean, oceanic character. The squid was tender rather than rubbery, suggesting correct timing and, very likely, Galician sourcing.
The sofrito and saffron base were well constructed: sufficiently complex to carry the dish without dominating the seafood, and the liquid balance was well judged throughout most of the cook. Where the paella fell marginally short was in the texture of the rice — slightly softer than the al dente resistance that Spanish bomba rice is capable of when cooked at consistent radiant-bottom heat — and in the socarrat, the prized Maillard-caramelised crust that forms at the base of the pan when stock absorption is timed precisely and high heat is applied in the final minutes. The socarrat was present but understated; a longer, more aggressive final blast would have produced the amber, toasted-rice depth that makes a great paella genuinely unforgettable.
These are fine-margin observations. The paella was, in all meaningful respects, a very good one: generous, fresh, and satisfying. At $54, it represents genuine value for the quality and quantity of seafood involved.
Suckling Pig with Cabbage ‘Trinxat’ — $12 / 100g [4.5/5]
The suckling pig is the meal’s purest statement of classical Spanish technique, and it delivered with considerable assurance. The pork had been cooked low and slow to a state of complete connective-tissue dissolution — the flesh pulling apart at the slightest pressure, its fat rendered through rather than pooling on the surface. The crackling was the technical showpiece: paper-thin, blistered to a glassy, shattering crispness, providing a structural and textural counterpoint to the yielding flesh beneath that is among the most satisfying contrasts in all of rustic European cooking.
A slight gaminess — characteristic of very young pork raised on a diet that has not been fully neutralised by age or processing — was detectable in the meat, though not unpleasantly so. The accompanying sauce provided a measure of acidic and herbal counter-balance, and the trinxat was the earthing element the dish required: a pressed cake of roughly mashed potato and slow-braised Savoy cabbage, pan-fried until crusted on its exterior, its brassica character adding a welcome astringency against the rich pork fat. Trinxat is a Catalan Pyrenean peasant preparation — about as far from the polish of the foie gras bite as a kitchen can travel — and its inclusion here spoke to FOC’s commitment to the full register of Iberian regional cooking, not merely its photogenic highlights.
Dessert
Flaming Grand Marnier Baba — $16 [4/5]
The baba au rhum is one of the great desserts of the French-European tradition, and FOC’s Spanish-inflected interpretation was a fitting close to the meal. The baba itself was textbook: a brioche-adjacent, yeast-leavened enriched dough with an open, honeycomb crumb structure specifically engineered to absorb significant volumes of liqueur without structural collapse — the result simultaneously airy, saturated, and cohesive, the liqueur dispersed uniformly rather than pooling at the base.
The tableside flambé with whisky introduced a performative element that the room responded to with evident pleasure. The choice of whisky over the conventional rum is significant: where rum brings molasses sweetness and tropical warmth, whisky — particularly a lightly peated expression — adds a dry, grain-forward complexity and a faint smokiness that plays interestingly against Grand Marnier’s bitter-orange base notes. The alcohol kick, of which the service team gave advance warning, was indeed robust — the baba retained a substantial liqueur presence even after flambéing, which is a matter of preference but signals kitchen confidence in not over-reducing the spirit.
The vanilla ice cream alongside provided textural relief — cold-creamy against the warm, saturated sponge — and the confit orange offered a jewel-like citrus concentration that underscored Grand Marnier’s orange character without redundancy. It was a dessert that understood how to close a meal with generosity and a degree of theatre, which, as gestures go, is exactly right.
Dish Scorecard
| Dish | Price | Score |
| Foie Gras Terrine & Ahrenka Caviar in Crispy Phyllo | $20 / 2 pcs | 5 / 5 |
| Argentinian Prawns ‘al Ajillo’ | $32 | 4.5 / 5 |
| Suckling Pig with Cabbage ‘Trinxat’ | $12 / 100g | 4.5 / 5 |
| Seafood ‘Senyoret’ Paella | $54 | 4 / 5 |
| “Huevos Rotos” Japanese Egg | $22 | 4 / 5 |
| Flaming Grand Marnier Baba | $16 | 4 / 5 |
| Sea Urchin, King Crab & Tarragon Butter on Toast | $32 / 2 pcs | 3.5 / 5 |
Final Assessment
FOC has now spent a decade earning, and re-earning, its place as one of Singapore’s most important Spanish restaurants. The relocation to Keong Saik, which might have provided the disruption that tests a kitchen’s true character, has instead proved clarifying. The menu reads as an act of deliberate curation: each dish sits in the correct position in the meal’s arc, each technique is calibrated to the ingredient it serves, and the overall ambition is controlled enough to ensure consistent execution without sacrificing the moments of genuine brilliance that distinguish great restaurants from merely good ones.
There are refinements still available to the kitchen — the socarrat wants more heat, the piquillo needs more char, the sea urchin toast could use a sharper acidic counterpoint — but these are observations made from the vantage point of a reviewer looking for the gap between a very good restaurant and an exceptional one. In every material respect, FOC is operating at the upper end of what Spanish cooking in this city can offer, and it is doing so in a room that has found exactly the right register for the food it serves.
The weekday lunch promotion — three courses at $56++, with one diner complimentary per four guests — represents the most intelligently priced entry point into the restaurant’s kitchen currently on offer in Singapore. For groups of four or more, it is not merely attractive; it is something close to unmissable.
Reserve: +65 6206 5810 • Mon–Thu 12pm–11.30pm | Fri–Sat 12pm–midnight | Sun 6pm–11.30pm