Review: Sentosa, Bermondsey

Way back in 2010, in the middle of our year-long trip around the world, we found ourselves in Singapore for three days. This was a wonderful city, both quite alien in many of it’s habits and customs, but also completely modern and comfortable to be in (okay, except sometimes for the heat on the street!). And one day we sat down to one of the most memorable means of our year-long trip: Singapore black pepper crab! Oh, it was amazing, such a relentlessly, nose-drippingly fiery pepper sauce and such a lot of crab to pick through. Big enough crab that the bits of meat were worthwhile even from the smaller claws.

So we were happy to find Sentosa, newly opened in Bermondsey and providing chilli and black pepper crab as their star menu items, alongside lots of other Singaporean/Malay favourites like laksa and char kuey teow. We’ll have to come back to try them, because today was black pepper crab day!

We did grab starters of crispy veg spring rolls and roti canai (oh, and I can recommend their iced Malay coffee). The spring rolls were moreish and crisp on the outside, very trad, just as I remember them. The roti was as perfectly crisp, flaky and chewy as any other specimen in London and the little bowl of potato curry was gently warm and fragrant, perfect for dipping in though I’d have preferred it a bit thicker. However, since the crab arrives 30 seconds after the starters arrived (why does this keep happening lately?!) the roti was also perfect for spare black pepper sauce!

And their midnight black pepper sauce was also tip-top and just as I remember: the first ferocious hit of pepper makes your nose run and leaves you wondering if you can keep going, then magically it all gets better after that, massively full-flavoured and punchy but very edible and terribly moreish. The sauce was puddled over a magnificent specimen of a crab, properly big enough for two to share, and they’d cracked each claw and leg in advance, the brown meat still clinging to the underside of the carapace. Nevertheless, it took us a solid hour to work our way through everything. Seriously. Whole crab isn’t something you can rush. And whole black-pepper crab is like no other whole crab dish.

Sentosa is a simple restaurant in the back of Bermondsey, it’s not fine dining nor designer-chic, but comfy and friendly. If you share a crab, you’ll end up around £35-40 each for food without drinks, maybe a bit more as even a big crab isn’t a massive meal. I can only have it occasionally – such a faff, but such tasty fun – so I’m actually more keen to hurry back and try some of the other Singaporean classics, which also look very keenly priced!