Where to find the best chilli crab in Singapore

“We used to crack them with hammers,” says Justin Lim, surveying my red-sauce-splattered table. “When the restaurant was full, the noise was deafening,” he adds with a grin. Plastic gloves, a bib and a retinue of tools are helping me tackle the kilo of chilli crab bubbling on a wok burner in front of me. But there are no hammers or, in fact, cutlery, at his family’s Roland Restaurant. Defiantly clad in a white T-shirt, Justin looks unfazed. He’s the third generation of the Lim family to have served what’s now widely regarded as Singapore’s national dish. And in the 75 years since they created it, chilli crab has seen ever-shifting approaches in how it’s prepared and consumed.

“Chinese New Year is busiest,” notes Justin. During that period, he says, the restaurant will shift more than 500 crabs a night. I can see why. The gentle chilli hum and tomato tang is balanced by buttery chunks of tender crab meat, which I prise from part-cracked claws and legs, messily mopping up the sea of sauce with spongy bao-like mantou buns.

This rise of this indulgent, celebratory dish is all the more remarkable given it started as a home creation first sold from a food cart. My table is overlooked by portraits of its innovators — Justin’s grandparents, Cher Yam Tiam and her husband Lim Choon Ngee — beamed from a digital photo gallery on a huge TV hanging above the restaurant’s banquet-style dining hall. “Some cooks have been here since grandma’s day,” says Justin. “But only the family know the exact sauce recipe.”

Its origin story is one of legend. Back in the 1940s, so the lore goes, Madam Cher added tomato ketchup to crabs her husband had caught off Singapore’s eastern shores. It was a departure from the family’s Teochew Chinese tradition of serving simple, steamed crab — and a winning one, once her husband had negotiated the addition of chilli, later emulsified with egg and enriched with a sambal paste of ginger, garlic and other aromatics. Word spread, and in 1950, Madam Cher’s food cart was born. Within a decade this was traded up for a restaurant, followed by its current incarnation — named after Mr Lim’s son, Justin’s dad — somewhat improbably crowning a six-storey car park in Singapore’s suburban Marine Parade district.

The quest goes west

My chilli crab hunt takes me west along a humid-hazy coast into Downtown’s immaculate forest of skyscrapers where the city’s futuristic Supertree structures overlook the gridlock of cargo ships ever-present in the bay. Located at Southeast Asia’s maritime crossroads, Singapore has long been a nexus of trade and cultural intermingling, writ large in its cuisine, as I discover at the Grand Copthorne branch of Red House Seafood, where the Singapore River snakes west of the Downtown core. The family-run micro franchise of 50 years standing serves Nanyang-style cuisine. “This means its originators were from China,” says tattooed young sales executive Wendy Tan, who joins me in the contemporary-chic dining room. “As they travelled to Singapore over generations, they gathered Southeast Asian influences — aromatics, like lemongrass, kaffir and galangal.”

Chilli crab is now commonly found in Singapore’s home-style Nanyang zi char (‘cook fry’) restaurants like Red House Seafood and Roland Restaurant, where it’s typically the shining star in a multi-course constellation of dishes favoured for a celebration feast. This evening, that includes acar, a crisp, bright Peranakan (Chinese-Malay-Indonesian) dish of pickled vegetables in a peanut rempah spice mix. There’s also the ‘spicy seafood combo’ — a Chinese take on a Thai curry with a kaffir lime kick. The chilli crab — more ketchup-sweet and less spicy than Roland’s, as well as being more marbled with egg — can be cracked to order and is accompanied by mantou buns baked into cute crab shapes.

In the kitchen, I’m given a sneak peek at the formidable, meaty Sri Lankan mud crabs — the preferred species for chilli crab — housed in high-tech filtered tanks, some weighing upwards of two kilos. At S$80-100 (£46-58) per kilo — enough for three people — they’re a status serve. But it’s a treat that’s evolved into more affordable forms. Wendy tells me that on Singapore Day — the annual 9 August celebration marking the island state’s founding — chilli crab appears everywhere: its sauce on pasta dishes, atop McDonald’s burgers and KFC chicken, and even flavouring pretzels and popcorn. “Singapore turned 60 in 2025. You can imagine what ‘chilli crab day’ was like then,” quips Wendy.

Snack attack

On the fragrant fringes of the sprawling Singapore Botanic Gardens one morning, I find a minimalist little cafe called Bao Makers, serving meaty chilli crab sauce slathered into fried bao buns: the ideal breakfast bites for locals who trot up in designer sportswear, refuelling from morning runs. The fruity spice of the meat is complemented by an iced, salted cream coffee. It keeps me going until later that day, when I find biscuit sticks — crisp-like wafers flavoured with chilli crab — at the nearby Dempsey Hill branch of the Jumbo Seafood chain. Styled to resemble a beach shack, the restaurant has various snacks to go. I also stock up on chilli-crab paste packets, in the hope that I can replicate the zesty flavours of Jumbo’s chilli crab back home.

In the following days, I consume chilli crab in increasingly surprising forms: as crumbly, salty-sweet biscuits at The Cookie Museum, topped with a small, whole, baked soft-shell crab; in a neat, one-bite buttery pastry shell, as part of a Peranakan-style afternoon tea at National Kitchen by Violet Oon, the grande dame chef’s restaurant, set within National Gallery Singapore. But it’s at Resort World Sentosa that my mind is most blown. It only takes five minutes to get to this offshore island from Downtown, hopping aboard a cable-car that glides above mangrove-backed beaches and malls. Once a Malay fishing village and British military base, it’s evolved over the decades to become a tropical pleasure island, complete with theme parks, hotels and luxury retail enclaves. It’s in one of the latter that I discover the Coach ‘experience store’, where I’m served a cone of velvety soft-serve chilli crab ice cream — paired with a savoury wafer made out of mantou — in a shade of coral that wouldn’t look out of place on one of the US brand’s luxury handbags. The cold comes as a shock, but as the chilli hum warms into the sweet tomato tang, I decide this umami-not-exactly-fishy snack is perfect in Singapore, where humidity regularly hits 90%. “It’s a real divider,” says retail director Trevor Wagstaff in a distinctive Californian drawl. “You know within a couple of bites if it’s for you — and we swap it out if it’s not. But most locals love that we’ve made a tribute to the dish.”

My last stop is Keng Eng Kee Seafood, a third-generation zi char restaurant in Alexandra Village, west of Downtown, where pretty residential streets are lined with colonial-era bungalows. I’m joined on its terrace by a brood of chickens pecking about the tree-lined pavements. “People started keeping them in lockdown. They’re everywhere now,” says operations manager Jia Min Liew, waving them away with a manicured hand. Her sexagenarian parents are in tow — father manning the till, mother scouting the floor — while her brother Wayne, clad in chef’s whites, helms a kitchen that produces house-made novelties.

I’m presented with ‘coffee ribs’ — toasty, caramel-rich pork tenderloins — and ‘cereal shrimp’, a sort of deconstructed tempura with breadcrumbs of butter-fried breakfast cereal seasoned with curry leaves. But the chef’s lovely, lemongrass-zesty version of classic chill crab is the ceremonial centrepiece. Locals here aren’t purists; I watch as diners around me sprinkle handfuls of leftover cereal crumbs to spruce up puddles of crab sauce. “This is Singapore,” says jovial eldest brother Paul, who manages the restaurant. “We get creative. We’re young and we’re not a singular culture.” Thus, embracing the local spirit of ever-evolving innovation and fusion, I might have to award this dish the crabby crown.