Dracula Romanian Food

Hungrygowhere reports the demise of the improbably-named 'Dracula Romanian Food', a hawker-centre stall at Singapore's Alexandra Village neighbourhood. The title on the page is now prefaced with a curt 'closed', and any time you try to access a review you're festooned with annoying popups screaming at you, in case you missed the point, that 'This establishment is no longer in operation'. One review, dated just a month after my last visit there, indicates some reasons why: a tedious story involving cost-cutting; substituting experienced staff with cheaper (and correspondingly less competent) replacements; and (horrors!) so steep a drop in food quality the reviewer actually contracted food poisoning. A sad way to go for an eatery I used to be rather fond of.

I came across the place towards the end of my stay in Singapore. At that time I was staying at a condo called Gillman Heights, one block of which NUS used as a graduate students' residence. (Gillman Heights is also history now. Thanks to an en-bloc sale, we had to vacate the place within weeks of my last visit to Dracula. The old flats have been pulled down now, with something called 'The Interlace', which looks like a tribute to disjointedness, coming up in its place.) Dracula was walking distance from Gillman, just across the Ayer Rajah Expressway. But because it was tucked away behind an HDB block, it took me till June 2009 to discover the place, almost a year since I had shifted to Gillman.

My first impressions were not particularly favourable. Invoking the Dracula name smacked of blatant attention-grabbing (but then this was before I found out several other joints exist all over the world both named and themed after that (blood)sucker). The faux-ness was underscored by a tacky plywood cutout of a castle stuck in front of the counter. Or to be strictly accurate, one half of the counter; the other half was given over to an Italian joint called 'Funny Lasagna by Peter Bontoi'. A menucard was stuck onto the quasi-drawbridge, you gave your order through this large slot masquerading as the castle entrance, and then collected your food through the same aperture.

A copy of a newspaper report framed and displayed prominent gave me some background info. Bontoi was born in Romania and worked as a chef in Turin for many years. He then shifted to Singapore and got into the restaurant business, but after facing partner troubles he decided he was better off running hawker centre stalls instead. So he set up Funny Lasagna, specialising in Lasagne, Pasta and Pizza. The article does not mention when the Draculanian side of things was started. But I presume at some time he must have realised there was a market for Romanian food too, so he partitioned off his stall into two halves, and so forth.

The first time I went there I ordered Cirnati de Pork, or handmade Romanian pork sausage. Somewhat expensive at S$8 for one large sausage on a flatbread, a small portion of salad, two slices of tomato, a few scraps of leafy veg, and also a complimentary bread basket containing about four slices of good multigrain. The flatbread was the most intriguing. Its name was not mentioned, but in all likelihood it was an unstuffed Placinta (nowhere near as gross as it sounds like). It looked very much like a Paratha, if a bit more severely circular in shape, but its taste was different, denser and fattier, presumably because they used refined flour and also greater amounts of shortening. The salad was excellent. The sausage left me marginally let-down; maybe the exotic surroundings and the Romanian antecedents had goaded my expections to unduly high levels. It was certainly good, no doubt. Just that it didn't taste very different from any other well-made sausage. The portions also generally tended to be on the smaller side, especially given the price. Apart from these nits, I enjoyed myself enough to go back three days later.

On this occasion I opted for a Friptura de Pork, or Romanian pork chop. They took some time to prepare it, time I spent most enjoyably chatting with the manageress and the lady who ran the drinks stall next door. I got a little more bang for my buck (ok ten bucks) this time round: two generous pieces of pork smothered in mushroom sauce, a roll, a helping of salad, and again those bits of tomato and leafy veg. Three bucks extra fetched me a potato salad, which was nothing short of excellent, but then I've always had a weakness for potato and sour cream. The pork chops were excellent too, very soft, excellent meat, well cooked. As was the gravy rich and flavourful. But once again, not much different from any other decent chop anywhere else.

That was my last visit to Dracula. In less than two weeks Gillman Heights shut down for good, and we all had to relocate. I left Singapore in end-August. These last few weeks were extremely hectic, so I couldn't go back for another visit. It remains one of my most vivid memories of Singapore, and I wonder why. The food was certainly good, but not wildly exciting. I guess it was the fun of the whole thing, the quirky name, the gimmicky castle, and the very nice people running the show. Yes, an easy conviviality, an informality, that you don't often come across in Singapore. I shall miss it.