Laura Zastrow
Shrimp shumai are springy and tender.
There may not be a nicer restaurant in Madison than Red Lion Singapore Grill and Japanese Cuisine. This does not mean the food is the fanciest, or that it’s the most polished. It’s the kind of nice where the owner apologizes for the entirely reasonable wait for a table on a busy Saturday with a chuckled (but just maybe a little sincere) “too many customers!” The people are nice, the food is nice. And yes, it seems to be doing well.
Red Lion’s initial success comes from a straightforward menu that rewards both people looking for Japanese dishes they recognize and others eager to try Singaporean dishes not often seen in Madison restaurants. If there’s a problem with trying to focus on the Singaporean menu, it’s that there’s much more real estate devoted to the Japanese.
Although I was more interested in the Singaporean offerings, the unagi don was too tempting to resist. I had an image of roasty fillets of eel laying over a bowl of rice, and indeed that image is printed on the Red Lion menu, but what I got was a room-temperature deconstruction: a dome of rice with a sprinkling of green furikake seasoning, and soft lengths of well-sauced eel, in separate dishes like they’d been arguing. Delicious, yes, but it was hard to not feel a little let down.
A Singapore roll from the sushi menu also demanded my attention. The salmon and spicy crab-stuffed roll was a real chonker, with a generous zig-zag of mayo on top. But putting Singapore in the name does not make a dish Singaporean.
Hainanese chicken rice is claimed by Singaporeans as a national dish, and at Red Lion it is typically prepared only on Wednesday and Thursday nights. As is traditional, it is served at room temperature. My only other chance to enjoy this dish came at the lauded Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco, so my expectations were high.
They were also exceeded. This was one of the best dishes I’ve eaten in Madison in years. I swiped every bite of the supremely tender chicken through the small divided dish of ginger and scallion sauces. The traditional “oily rice” (made here with vegetable oil rather than chicken fat) replaced some of the savory richness that might otherwise have come from a bird more crisply cooked. The colors may all be close to the same, but this dish is a riot.
Singapore curry chicken, popular and limited enough to sell out on some evenings, is a big bowl of saucy curry, mild enough to please any fan of the Japanese style but not without a little peppery zip. The blanket of fried egg atop the Singapore fried rice was a pleasant surprise, adding richness to a fried rice more blond than I might otherwise have preferred.
Dense gyoza and chewy, hearty yaki udon will merit return visits as the weather cools, and I’ll probably go with shrimp over the bacony pork from my first udon, based mostly on the success of the fried shrimp shumai, springy and tender. Lightly grilled beef satay and its sweet, peanutty sauce took me back to the Indonesian food my father would cook, and if my childhood didn’t include a confident, balanced, not-overly-sweet New York strip loin teriyaki, my adulthood at least is better for having had it.
Red Lion gets the details right, down to soup and salad. Classic miso soup is a given, but the Hainanese chicken soup — waste not the broth produced by boiling whole chickens for the main dish — is something special. The Red Lion salad has zippy dressing and a snarl of crunchy tempura-fried strands of crab meat on top, not something you see every day. Fun stuff.
This place just puts you in a good mood. It certainly did for me, anyway, from the cheery owners to the comically large menus (think swim class paddleboards), and certainly to the clear success Red Lion is having in drawing the neighborhood in. As the Royster Commons building slowly rises from the field across the street, Red Lion seems poised to claim its territory where previous restaurant tenants have flamed out.
Red Lion Singapore Grill and Japanese Cuisine
515 Cottage Grove Road; 608-467-3018; redlionmadison.com
10:30 am-9 pm Mon. and Wed.-Thurs.
10:30 am-10 pm Fri., 11 am-10 pm Sat., 11 am-9 pm Sun.
$2-$28
