Whose Restaurant Esquina Is Now

Esquina is not the tapas counter the marketing language says it is.

That is the most useful thing to say about a restaurant that turns fourteen in December 2025, has had two different chefs in fourteen years, and whose actual cuisine bears very little resemblance to what most diners walking past 16 Jiak Chuan Road for the first time would assume. The restaurant opened in December 2011 as a collaboration between Loh Lik Peng's Unlisted Collection and the London-based Jason Atherton. The opening head chef was Andrew Walsh, an Irish cook who had been sous chef at Atherton's Pollen Street Social in London. At the start it was a fifteen-cover tapas counter in a restored Keong Saik-area shophouse, and the cuisine was Spanish. That was 2011.

Walsh left in 2015 to open Cure, then Catfish, on his own. The kitchen passed to Carlos Montobbio, Barcelona-born, trained at El Celler de Can Roca and Zuberoa, and four years as sous chef at Cinc Sentits in Barcelona, all three among the most decorated Catalan and Basque restaurants of the last twenty years. Atherton has since wound down his day-to-day involvement; Montobbio is now described, across current coverage, as the restaurant's chef-owner or chef-patron, though Unlisted Collection remains the operator.

Most coverage still understates that handover. The restaurant has changed under it.

The counter, and what is above it

The room itself has expanded since the original 2011 footprint. The ground floor is still a counter at an open kitchen, roughly ten seats facing the working line, with the chef visible across the bar. Above it, an upstairs dining room called Esquina 2.0 adds another twenty seats, taking total capacity to around thirty. The counter is still the room's centre of gravity. Larger parties go upstairs. The two floors run the same menu.

The format reads more like a serious Catalan-and-Japanese small-plates restaurant with a counter than a pure tapas bar. The à la carte runs alongside a set lunch (thirty-five dollars for two courses, forty-five for three) and a tasting menu at one hundred and forty-eight dollars, available both lunch and dinner. Tuesday through Thursday from noon to half-past two and six to half-past ten; Friday and Saturday to eleven. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Carlos works the pass on weekends.

Read Esquina now as a small-plates restaurant whose format has held steady while the cuisine has matured. It has not refused to evolve; the room has just kept its shape.

The Tsukune

The Tsukune is the dish where the kitchen's actual cuisine position is most legible. It arrived as two small skewers: Iberico pluma minced into a Japanese-style chicken-meatball format, glazed with a burnt-onion sauce, with a dab of sobrassada (the soft, spreadable Mallorcan cured sausage) folded into the meat. Nine dollars on the current menu.

The first bite was the test. The pork carried the iron-and-fat depth that good Iberico produces. The binding and the glaze were doing yakitori work underneath, in the texture of the meat, the way the surface had caramelised, the soy-and-sugar register of the burnt-onion sauce. The sobrassada gave the bite a faint chilli warmth that pulled the dish back to Mallorca. The burnt-onion glaze sat between the two cuisines without picking sides. Montobbio's whole working method, two cuisines folded into one bite, for nine dollars.

Carlos has put the position plainly. He has described his own kitchen as Catalan and Spanish at the base, with traditional and modern techniques folded together and a Japanese touch he traces to his own affinity for the cuisine. That sentence explains the menu better than anything else. The Catalan and Spanish foundation is real, and the Japanese inflections are not a marketing gesture but the way he actually cooks.

The Sea Urchin Toast at twenty-two dollars makes the same argument differently: uni and burrata on toast with a small spoon of caviar, the salinity of the urchin running into the dairy of the burrata, the bread holding both in a Catalan format the Japanese might never have built. The dish is structurally a tapa and a sushi-bar gesture at the same time. The kitchen does this consistently across the menu.

The classical heritage, and what it costs

The restaurant still runs the heritage Spanish dishes, and they remain the entry signatures: the Chorizo Iberico Croquetas with piquillo pepper salsa at ten dollars, the Marinated Gordal Olives at ten, the Thyme & Onion Bread at twelve, the Iberico Ham de Bellota at thirty-two, the Padrón Peppers at fifteen, the Foie Gras Terrine at twenty-six.

The Iberico Ham is the classical test. The plate arrived as a small composition: a few thin slices of jamón Iberico de bellota draped over the plate, with a small drizzle of olive oil and a few crystals of finishing salt. The ham had the right colour, deep red with the marbled white fat that proper Iberico shows. The slices were thin enough to be translucent at the edges, with the cut hand-done rather than machine-uniform. The first bite carried the slow-cured savoury depth that proper Iberico produces, and the fat had the slow-rendering character that only long-aged cured meats develop. The dish is properly built.

It is also, in 2025, no longer the dish the kitchen's argument is being made through. The classical Spanish heritage is what most diners will recognise on the menu. The Catalan-Japanese register is where the cuisine has been pulled forward over the last decade. A diner ordering only the heritage tapas will eat well and underread the restaurant. The kitchen's stronger moves are the Tsukune, the Sea Urchin Toast, the Galician Octopus, and the way the larger plates (the Carabinero Prawn Paella at fifty-eight, the Hokkaido Uni Paella at sixty-eight, the Segovian Spanish Suckling Pig at sixty-five for the half and ninety-eight for the whole, the Black Angus Tenderloin at thirty-four) sit alongside the small plates without abandoning the format.

That is how Esquina has aged. It did not become a different restaurant; it widened what counts as tapas.

Modern tapas is going further into mostly bite-sized presentations. A dinner becomes a combination of 10 to 14 bites with very diverse textures and flavours, and not necessarily using purely Spanish ingredients.

That line, from Carlos, describes the menu the kitchen actually runs. The "not necessarily using purely Spanish ingredients" half is where the whole thing turns. Esquina serves Spanish products (the kitchen is ICEX-accredited by the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade, which means the ham, the chorizo, the oil, and the cheese on the plate are sourced through proper Spanish channels) but the kitchen is no longer Spanish-only in its working grammar. The cuisine has crossed into Japanese without leaving Catalan behind.

The wine programme

The list at Esquina is Spanish-leaning, with sherries available by the glass: Rioja, Ribera del Duero, the broader Spanish white selection on the long-form side. No named in-house sommelier surfaces in current coverage. The list is not sherry-deep in the way a sherry-led restaurant would build it; it is a working Spanish list with sherry as one of its registers. The by-the-glass programme is real.

The sherry is worth dwelling on. Tapas pairs better with sherry than with most other drinks; the fortified, oxidative character of sherry holds up against the cured meats, the briny olives, the rich anchovies, the spicy chorizo. A Spanish restaurant without a serious sherry presence is missing the format's natural pairing.

Esquina has built the sherry presence without making it the centrepiece. The diner can have a single glass of sherry across several plates, or commit to a bottle of wine for the whole meal, or alternate between the two. That flexibility is the right calibration for what the kitchen now serves.

A useful complement runs alongside the regular service: the Viva Vermut programme on the first Saturday of each month, eleven to five, with vermouth cocktails, tinned seafood, and casual daytime small bites. It is the closest Esquina now comes to a pure tapas-bar register, and it is one of the more lovable city-Saturday traditions Singapore restaurants run.

The friction

The trouble with Esquina sits in the gap between the marketing language and the kitchen.

Some diners arrive expecting a pure Spanish tapas bar at casual neighbourhood-tapas prices and find a small-plates restaurant with a tasting menu at one hundred and forty-eight. Some arrive expecting an Atherton room and find Montobbio's. Some are uncomfortable that the Catalan-Japanese register has displaced the more straightforward Spanish-only one. None of these are the restaurant's fault. They are the cost of an evolving kitchen whose framing has lagged the work.

The other friction is the counter's size. Ten seats fill quickly. The upstairs room handles overflow but does not carry the open-kitchen view that makes the counter version of the meal work, so book the counter if you can. The reservation runs through Chope with a two-hour table window, a fifteen-minute hold, and a no-show fee, standard Unlisted Collection terms.

Montobbio has also expanded sideways. In November 2024 he opened Carlitos in Joo Chiat, a casual neighbourhood Spanish tapas bar co-founded with Antonio Miscellaneo of La Bottega and Picelli. That second venue is the lower-key version of Carlos's work, and it confirms his trajectory from head chef to chef-owner across two operations. The Esquina counter remains the more serious of the two rooms.

What the restaurant is for now

A fourteen-year-old Spanish-Catalan-Japanese small-plates restaurant on Jiak Chuan Road is no longer a hot new room, and that works in its favour. The format has held while the cuisine matured, the same chef has kept the kitchen for ten of those fourteen years, and the menu has expanded without abandoning the counter. The framing has lagged the work, but the work itself has been steady.

The Tsukune and the Sea Urchin Toast carry the same evidence, the Iberico Ham holds the classical baseline, and the tasting menu, when ordered, runs the same Catalan-Japanese logic across ten to fourteen courses. That kind of continuity, under Montobbio's chef-ownership, is hard to find and easy to miss. A Spanish small-plates restaurant that started under one London chef and matured under a Barcelona-trained successor, holding a counter format while quietly broadening the cuisine, is doing something most fourteen-year-old restaurants in this city cannot do. The room is no longer the Atherton room. It is Montobbio's, a kitchen that has earned its way out of the lore that opened it.

The Tsukune on the counter, between a glass of sherry and a plate of Iberico ham, was the evidence: a single nine-dollar skewer of Mallorcan-glazed Iberico pluma that could not have been served the same way in 2011, and could not be served the same way in any other Catalan or Japanese kitchen now.