Mentaiko Meets Taramasalata: Two Roe Traditions, One Dip

Two menus, two addresses, one idea. At Hamilton Road it is printed as Cassava & Taramasalata — twice-cooked cassava chippies, housemade labne, mentaiko XO, tobiko. At our Haji Lane sibling it is Mentaiko Taramasalata — mentaiko XO, housemade labne, tobiko, crispy shallots, chives.

Read either line closely and you will notice something. There is no tarama in our taramasalata. That is not sloppiness; it is the entire dish. Here is how a Greek meze and a Fukuoka delicacy turned out to be the same idea, and what happens when you let them meet.

What taramasalata actually is

Taramasalata is a dip of cured fish roe, and the name says so twice over. Tarama is a Turkish word meaning fish roe, borrowed into Greek; salata arrives in Greek from the Italian insalata. Fish roe salad. The dish itself is generally traced to Byzantine cooking and it is claimed with equal conviction by Greece and by Turkey, which is roughly the standard situation for anything delicious in the eastern Mediterranean.

The classical build is salted, cured roe — cod, carp or grey mullet, depending on where you are standing — whipped with olive oil and lemon juice over a starchy base of soaked bread or boiled potato. The starch is not filler. It is the thing that turns an intensely salty cured product into something you can eat by the spoonful without flinching.

The bright pink version sold in supermarket tubs is a much later, much dyed invention. Proper taramasalata is a pale beige-cream and tastes considerably more of the sea.

What mentaiko actually is

Mentaiko is marinated Alaska pollock roe. Its full name is karashi mentaiko — the karashi marks the chilli — and it is the single most Fukuoka thing you can put in your mouth.

The lineage runs through Korea, not Japan. The ancestor is myeongnan-jeot, salted pollock roe fermented with chilli and garlic, and it crossed over after the war. Toshio Kawahara, who founded the Hakata company Fukuya, began producing his own version in 1949 and spent about a decade working out a marinating method tuned to Japanese palates. He then declined to patent it and shared the method with the rest of the trade, which is why Fukuoka has hundreds of mentaiko makers and why mentaiko is the thing you are handed at the airport when you leave.

You will often see it translated as cod roe. That is not wrong so much as loose: Alaska pollock sits in the cod family, so the English name has drifted to the more familiar fish.

The same idea, arrived at twice

Line them up and the overlap is almost comic. Both traditions take the roe of a cold-water whitefish. Both cure it hard in salt. Both then face the same problem — the cured product is too intense to eat straight — and both solve it by loosening the roe into something spreadable and pairing it with a bland starch. The Aegean reaches for bread and olive oil. Fukuoka reaches for rice, or for a bowl of pasta, or for a piece of grilled bread.

Nobody coordinated this. Two kitchens six thousand miles apart looked at a sac of fish eggs and came to the same conclusion. Our menu just puts them in the same bowl.

What our version does differently

Three deliberate departures from the classical dip.

The roe is Japanese. Mentaiko carries chilli and a fermented depth that cured mullet roe does not, so the dip lands savoury and slightly hot rather than purely salty. It arrives as a mentaiko XO — XO being the Hong Kong condiment of dried seafood, chilli, garlic and shallot, which is itself a third cuisine getting involved. Then tobiko, flying fish roe, goes on top: tiny, orange, and there for the pop rather than the flavour.

The base is labne, not bread. This is the biggest change. Instead of soaked bread or potato we use our own strained yoghurt, which does the same softening job with acidity and dairy weight instead of starch. The dip comes out lighter and tangier than a Greek one, and it stays cold on the palate, which matters when half the table is eating things that just came off a fire.

The vehicle is cassava. At Hamilton Road it arrives with twice-cooked cassava chippies rather than pita — thick, craggy, fried twice so the outside shatters and the inside stays soft. A chip that can carry a heavy dip without snapping is an underrated piece of engineering, and cassava does it better than bread.

Three roes on one menu

Once you start noticing, we use fish eggs the way other kitchens use salt.

Mentaiko in the taramasalata, savoury and hot. Tobiko on the same dish, for crunch. Ikura — big, glossy salmon roe — sitting on the chickpea hummus with macadamia tahini and again on the Atlantic seabass. Three different roes, three different jobs: depth, texture, and a burst of clean sea salt.

That is a very Japanese instinct dropped onto a Levantine mezze table, and it is the same move as putting a Japanese sesame sauce on a smoked eggplant dip. Different ingredient, identical logic.

How to order it

Order it against something hot. It is cold, salty and rich, and it does its best work next to the charred Brussel sprouts or straight after something off the grill. Ordering three cold dips together and nothing hot is the most common ordering mistake we see, and it flattens all three.

It is also a dish that shows up in write-ups as something people were surprised by rather than something they came for, which is the fate of everything on a menu that is not the sprouts — there is more on that pattern in what reviewers keep ordering. The full mezze section is on the menu, and there are photographs of the room in the gallery.

The Haji Lane version

At Li’l Habibi, 55 Haji Lane, the same dip is served under its own name and finished differently — crispy shallots and chives instead of the cassava-and-tobiko treatment, sitting on a menu built around skewers. It is a bar snack there and a mezze course here. Same roe, different night out.

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, Tuesday to Sunday from 5pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. If a fish-roe dip with three cuisines in it sounds like your kind of thing, book a table — and the wider story of how this kitchen ended up cooking like this is in five years of Habibi-san.