Part I: The Neighbourhood & Arrival
Upper Thomson Road is, as food writers in Singapore have long noted, a kind of culinary corridor without pretension — <a stretch packed with late-night supper spots, trendy bakery-cafés, and comforting local joints> where the density of dining options makes it one of the island’s most naturally evolved food enclaves rather than a manufactured one. <On one side, the Central Water Catchment offers dense forests and nature reserves, giving the road a uniquely verdant backdrop>. On the other, the residential neighbourhoods of Bishan and Ang Mo Kio provide the kind of steady, unglamorous foot traffic that keeps neighbourhood restaurants honest.
📌 Thomson Plaza itself, perched at 301 Upper Thomson Road, is a mall with long institutional memory — older Singaporeans may recall its previous incarnation as Yaohan, a Japanese department store that anchored much of the estate’s commercial identity before the brand’s collapse. The mall has since undergone successive renovations, and with the opening of Upper Thomson MRT Station on the Thomson-East Coast Line, it has become considerably more accessible.
It is into this context — unhurried, residential, faintly nostalgic, genuinely foodie — that Harvest Union Market arrives.
One imagines pulling up on a Friday evening just as the equatorial sky deepens to a bruised violet. The air outside the mall still carries that specific Upper Thomson quality: faintly cool from the MacRitchie treeline to the north, tinged with the char of a satay stall somewhere around the corner. 📌 The venue occupies #01-37A on the ground floor, which means stepping in from the street rather than descending through mall corridors — a subtle but meaningful distinction. You arrive at it; you don’t stumble upon it.
Part II: Ambience — A Speculative Reading
📌 The concept is a verified triple-hybrid: café and bar, Afresh & Co boutique provisions store, and a seasonal durian corner. The founder, Terence Chan, is a former MOE teacher turned wholesale food distributor. This biography matters architecturally. A man who spent years in the logistics of food sourcing before opening a restaurant tends to design spaces around abundance rather than minimalism — the grocer’s instinct to show, to stack, to display.
One imagines, therefore, warm pendant lighting over timber-topped tables. Not the cool industrial lighting of the Instagrammable café, but something closer to a weekend market in the late afternoon — amber, slightly forgiving, generous. The Afresh & Co provisions section, one suspects, is positioned such that guests pass through it (or at least alongside it) en route to their tables, so that the produce — seasonal fruits, premium picks, the Black Thorn or Black Gold durians in their thorned glory — functions as both retail offering and décor. The durian, in particular, is a bold aesthetic choice. Its presence in a café-bar hybridises the tropical and the Western in a way that feels less like fusion and more like honest self-representation.
📌 The space features both indoor, air-conditioned seating and an alfresco outdoor section, the latter described as pet-friendly. The indoor section is presumably where the laptop crowd congregates — Harvest Union Market has already been flagged by the LaptopFriendly community in Singapore as a work-friendly venue — and the alfresco section where the after-dark crowd gathers for those two pints of Asahi during happy hour.
The sonic environment one would expect: a moderate hum of conversation, the occasional espresso machine pull, the soft clink of pint glasses after 9pm. Not quiet enough for focused solo work, but not loud enough to require raising your voice across the table. A neighbourhood register.
Part III: The Dishes — In Depth
3.1 Signature Fish & Chips (~$20 📌)
The crown jewel, and the dish most worth examining speculatively, because Fish & Chips in Singapore is a category with deeply contested benchmarks. It is simultaneously a pub staple (served battered and generous), a café affectation (served deconstructed and precious), and in this particular case, a founder’s statement of intent.
📌 Early feedback from at least one reviewer notes that the dish received “positive feedback for taste despite not being the absolute best in Singapore” — a characteristically Singaporean qualifier that nonetheless means: it is genuinely good.
The batter: A well-executed fish & chips batter in the Singapore context typically uses a cold-beer or soda-water tempura base, producing a crust that shatters rather than bends. One imagines Harvest Union Market’s version erring towards the thicker, pub-style British tradition — audible on first bite, yielding a cloud of steam from the white flesh beneath. The hue would be that deep golden-amber that only achieves itself between 175°C and 185°C, not the pale gold of an underdone batter nor the mahogany of the overcooked.
The fish: In the Singapore context, dory, barramundi, or cod are the most common choices. Given the founder’s background in wholesale produce sourcing — and the premium ethos of the Afresh & Co adjacent provisions store — barramundi or a firmer white fish seems likely. The flesh, when the batter is broken, should present as snow-white, flaking in large moist segments rather than the dry, compressed texture of frozen fish product.
The chips: The critical supporting actor. One imagines thick-cut, skin-on, roasted to a dry crispness on the exterior with a floury, yielding interior. Served in a portion generous enough to suggest no one counted them individually. A ramekin of tartare alongside, perhaps with capers and dill.
On the plate: The composition would be monochromatic at its centre — ivory fish, golden crust — punctuated by the green of a garnish, the pale yellow of the tartare, possibly a wedge of lemon that collapses under the lightest pressure into a small acid burst that cuts the fat cleanly.
3.2 Pesto Primo Pasta (~$15.90 📌)
📌 Made with homemade pesto genovese and topped with shaved cheese. The emphasis on homemade is significant. Commercial pesto is a flat, uniform green product. True pesto genovese — made from Genoese DOP basil, Ligurian olive oil, Parmesan, Pecorino, pine nuts, and garlic, emulsified by hand or with minimal mechanical intervention — is a livelier, more volatile thing. It oxidises at the edges to a darker forest green, carries a raw grassiness that no jarred product replicates, and separates slightly on warm pasta in a way that is not a flaw but evidence of authenticity.
The hues: The dish, if made correctly, arrives in multiple greens — the bright emerald of freshly turned basil, the duller olive of the emulsified oil, the near-yellow of the shaved Parmesan catching light. The pasta beneath (likely a long cut — linguine, spaghetti, or tagliatelle) is the pale yellow of an egg-rich dough, though a dried pasta of quality bronze-die extrusion would also provide enough surface texture to hold the sauce.
The texture: Pesto is a cold sauce applied to hot pasta — a marriage of temperatures that produces a moment of steam and collapse as the basil perfume intensifies on contact. The pine nuts provide the only real textural interruption: small, tender, occasionally slightly toasted. The shaved cheese on top provides both salt and a waxy resistance before it begins to melt.
The delivery challenge: Pesto pasta is one of the dishes most susceptible to degradation on delivery. The sauce seizes, the pasta over-hydrates, the cheese melts into an indistinct mass. If Harvest Union Market offers delivery (see Part V), this dish should be among the last ordered for that purpose.
3.3 Fish Nuggets
📌 Described as “crisp on the outside and tender on the inside” — a description so universal as to be nearly uninformative, but instructive in its emphasis. The word tender suggests a fish paste or minced fish interior rather than a solid fillet piece — more Southeast Asian in its textural logic than British. The crumb would be either panko (for that shaggy, light-catching exterior that achieves maximum surface area per bite) or a seasoned flour dredge.
The hue: warm amber, uniform. The cross-section, when bitten, would reveal a pale grey-white core with visible moisture. These are comfort items — casual, shareable, unintimidating.
3.4 The Durian Latte — Iced Mao Shan Wang / Musang King (~market price)
📌 Made with fresh Mao Shan Wang pulp — not flavouring, not powder, not paste, but the actual flesh of the Durio zibethinus cultivar most prized for its bitter-sweet complexity, custardy body, and arresting aroma. This is the ingredient that separates the Harvest Union Market beverage from most café durian drinks on the market.
The flavour architecture: Mao Shan Wang (猫山王) carries a flavour profile that is difficult to analogise accurately — a custard-like sweetness undercut by a bitterness reminiscent of very dark chocolate, with sulphurous topnotes that the uninitiated find confronting and the converted find irreplaceable. When blended with espresso or combined with milk, the interaction is one of mutual transformation: the dairy softens the durian’s edge, the durian turns the milk voluptuous and slightly fermented in character. The coffee, if present, grounds the whole construction with a roasted baseline note.
The hue: A pale canary yellow, tending toward cream, with the slight unevenness that comes from real fruit rather than colouring agents. Served iced, the glass would sweat immediately in Singapore’s humidity, droplets forming on the exterior within sixty seconds.
Structural risk: The latte is an ephemeral object. The ice dilutes it. The fruit solids begin to separate from the liquid at around the ten-minute mark if not consumed promptly. This is a drink that insists on immediacy — order it, attend to it.
3.5 Durian Cake & Seasonal Fruit Desserts
📌 Durian cake and various durian-inspired sweets are confirmed on the menu, alongside seasonal fruit selections from the Afresh & Co counter. One imagines a layered cake construction: génoise or chiffon sponge, Mao Shan Wang mousse or cream, possibly a thin layer of mango or pandan to introduce contrast. The top would be decorated with a generous smear of pulp rather than piped frosting — the fruit as its own ornament.
The broader seasonal fruit selection — managed through the provisions arm — would vary by what is peaking in the region: rambutans in mid-year, mangosteens in the first half, perhaps longan or lychee from neighbouring countries during off-peak local seasons. The intent seems to be the full expression of tropical abundance: a provisions store that doubles as a living menu.
Part IV: Happy Hour & The Late-Night Proposition
📌 Two happy hour windows daily:
- 2pm – 6pm
- 9pm – midnight
📌 During these windows: 2 pints of Asahi Draft Beer for $16.
📌 The venue operates until midnight, placing it firmly in the Upper Thomson late-night tradition.
The logic here is sensible and community-oriented. The afternoon window catches the post-lunch stragglers and work-from-café crowd during their mid-afternoon low. The evening window — 9pm to midnight — is the more interesting proposition: it transforms Harvest Union Market into a genuine late-night option in a mall context, which is unusual. Most mall F&B closes by 10pm. A venue with alfresco seating, draft beer, and a durian corner at 11pm on a Thursday night is a different kind of urban proposition entirely — closer to the neighbourhood hawker supper culture of old Thomson than to the mall-café ecosystem it physically inhabits.
Asahi Draft is a clean, low-bitterness Japanese lager — the ideal foil for rich, fatty food. Two pints at $16 is $8 per pint, which sits at the lower end of draught pricing in Singapore’s café-bar category.
Part V: Delivery — Speculative Assessment
📌 No official delivery platform listing was confirmed in the sources reviewed for this piece. However, given the venue’s positioning as a community-oriented hybrid concept and the general market expectation that Singapore café-bars participate in at least one of the major platforms (GrabFood, Foodpanda, Deliveroo), one might reasonably anticipate delivery availability.
What travels well from this menu:
| Dish | Delivery Suitability | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Fish & Chips | Moderate | Crispness degrades within 15–20 mins; order only if <5km away |
| Fish Nuggets | Good | Holds crunch better than battered fish |
| Pesto Primo Pasta | Poor | Sauce seizes; pasta over-softens; best eaten in-house |
| Durian Latte | Poor | Ice-dependent, structurally degrades; not delivery-suitable |
| Durian Cake | Good | Stable structure; travels reasonably well chilled |
| Seasonal Fruits | Excellent | From Afresh & Co; produce is the most delivery-stable item |
General delivery note: The hybrid concept’s greatest strength — the interaction between the provisions store, the seasonal produce, and the café kitchen — is fundamentally an in-person experience. Delivery captures only a fraction of the proposition.
Part VI: A Speculative Recipe — Fish & Chips in the Harvest Union Spirit
This recipe is the author’s own construction, inspired by the described dish. It is not Harvest Union Market’s recipe.
Ingredients (serves 2)
For the fish:
- 2 fillets of barramundi or firm white fish (~200g each)
- 180g plain flour
- 30g cornstarch
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp fine salt
- ½ tsp white pepper
- 250ml ice-cold soda water or pale lager
- Neutral oil for deep frying (1.5L, canola or sunflower)
For the chips:
- 4 medium Russet or Maris Piper potatoes
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp sea salt
- ½ tsp smoked paprika (optional)
For the tartare:
- 4 tbsp good mayonnaise
- 1 tbsp capers, roughly chopped
- 1 tbsp cornichons, finely diced
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard
- 1 tbsp fresh dill
- ½ lemon, juiced
- White pepper to taste
Method
The chips (begin first):
- Peel and cut potatoes into 1cm-thick batons. Soak in cold water for 30 minutes to remove excess starch, then dry thoroughly.
- Preheat oven to 220°C fan. Toss dried chips in olive oil, salt, and paprika. Spread on a baking tray without crowding.
- Roast 30–35 minutes, turning halfway, until deeply golden and dry at the edges. The interior should be floury and soft when pinched.
The tartare: 4. Combine all tartare ingredients. Taste and adjust acidity with lemon. Chill until needed.
The batter (make at the last moment): 5. Whisk flour, cornstarch, baking powder, salt, and pepper together dry. Just before frying, whisk in ice-cold soda water until a loose batter forms — it should drip, not pour. A few lumps are acceptable. Do not overmix.
The fry: 6. Heat oil to 180°C in a deep, heavy pot. Test with a small drop of batter: it should immediately rise and sizzle. 7. Pat fish fillets dry, season lightly, then coat in batter. Allow excess to drip off. 8. Fry two minutes each side until the batter is a deep amber-gold and audibly crisp when tapped. Internal fish temperature should reach 63°C. 9. Drain on a wire rack (not paper towel — steam from below destroys the crust).
Assembly: 10. Plate the fish directly, chips alongside, tartare in a small ramekin. A lemon wedge. Nothing more.
The target: The batter cracks on first bite. The fish beneath has that specific white, large-flake texture of a well-cooked barramundi — moist, not wet. The chips resist briefly, then yield. The tartare cuts the fat with cold acidity. The lager in the batter becomes, at the table, the argument for ordering another pint.
Closing Notes
Harvest Union Market represents a type of F&B concept that Singapore’s neighbourhood dining scene has historically lacked: the deliberately slow, deliberately hybrid, deliberately late-night community space that is neither hawker centre nor high-concept restaurant. Terence Chan’s trajectory — from education to food logistics to founder — is the kind of CV that produces venues with genuine institutional knowledge behind them rather than aesthetic positioning alone.
📌 Whether the Fish & Chips is “the best in Singapore” is a question for someone who has actually eaten it. Whether the Durian Latte is sublime or merely unusual is something only the palate can resolve. Whether the alfresco section at 10:30pm, with the Thomson treeline somewhere beyond the carpark and two cold Asahi pints on the table, is one of Singapore’s quieter pleasures — that seems, speculatively, very likely.