Curated — honest reviews of Singapore’s restaurants, cafés and bars

On a Katong gelato shop that started life in 2016 under a former defence engineer, has spent a decade making white chrysanthemum legible, and now runs seven outlets without softening the flavour list.

On a 1962 dim sum house that grew into a six-shophouse, 420-seat supper landmark. The expansion meant to kill the queue never did, the cooking quietly thinned on everything that can be batched, and the only things worth the 1am pilgrimage are the dishes the kitchen has to make the moment you ask.

On a small Tanjong Pagar mall counter where the Hvala matcha group treats decaf as a serious specialty category, and a single-origin decaf flat white whose crema did not read as a compromise.

On a Fullerton Cantonese room run by a chef who is also a ceramicist and calligrapher, where the osmanthus char siew bao arrives on a dish he threw himself, in a room he composed, so the meal is a single authored object rather than good food on generic hotel porcelain.

On a meat-free Mediterranean restaurant that has survived in Chip Bee Gardens since 1997, not by selling virtue, but by being a genuinely good restaurant that happens to leave out the meat and never once mentions it.

On a hidden Orchard hotel bar that should be tired by now, and the cask programme that has survived the bartender who built it.

On a chef who closed an established sushi-ya in 2024, went quiet for a year, and came back to an eight-seat counter at the Conrad. The comeback carries a plus sign and is, in fact, a deliberate shrinkage where the smallness is the upgrade.

On a Lebanese grill house on the most photographed street in Singapore, where the charcoal lamb chops are genuinely good, the bread is better value than anything else on the table, and the golden dome framing the view is doing more of the selling than the kitchen is.

On a tiny Joo Chiat counter that builds coffee like cocktails, clarified, multi-ingredient, engineered, treating the espresso as a base spirit rather than a soloist, in deliberate opposition to specialty coffee's purity ethos.