The Tartare and the Quenelle of Caviar

At this point Les Amis is measured less against the other rooms in town than against its own long record.

The room has been operating, in roughly its current form, since 1994, as Singapore's first independent (non-hotel) French fine-dining restaurant, founded by a partnership of Desmond Lim, Dr Chong Yap Seng, chef Justin Quek, and sommelier Ignatius Chan (the same Chan who would later found Iggy's). That makes Les Amis older than most of the city's currently-discussed fine-dining establishments by a meaningful margin. Many of Singapore's most recognised chefs trained in this kitchen, or in kitchens shaped by people who trained here. The restaurant has been, in a quiet way, one of the seeding institutions of the city's modern fine-dining scene.

That kind of accumulated weight is its own punishment. The newer dining rooms are usually compared to each other, modern French against modern Japanese-French against contemporary Singaporean, within a recent timeframe. Les Amis does not get that comparison. The benchmark is its own back catalogue. Has the kitchen kept the standard the institution requires? Has the dining room held the level of service that thirty years of operation have set, and has the wine programme stayed the kind of programme that justifies its reputation? Those are the questions a restaurant of this age has to answer at every service, and they are not flattering questions.

I ordered the multi-course tasting menu, which is what most diners take here. The à la carte option is the smaller option in name and in use, and the tasting menu is the kitchen's full statement.

The room as institution

Les Amis is at 1 Scotts Road, #02-16 Shaw Centre. The entrance does not immediately announce itself to the casual mall foot traffic. The interior is restrained: cream walls, dark wood, white linen, polished silver, fresh flowers on each table. Nothing here is performing the modernity that newer restaurants tend to perform. The room is, deliberately, classical. The current Executive Chef is Sébastien Lépinoy, who joined in 2013 after seventeen years working under Joël Robuchon, including running Robuchon's Hong Kong operation. The kitchen's classical foundation is therefore not theoretical. It is the literal Robuchon school applied to a Singapore dining room that has had time to refine the application.

That classical register is the institution's first editorial decision. A restaurant of this age could have, over the years, modernised its interior to chase a newer audience. It could have softened its formality, loosened its dress code, swapped its linen for unbleached cotton, replaced its silver with brushed steel. It has not. The dining room still looks like a French fine-dining room from a different era of restaurant culture, with the small adjustments that thirty years of operation have made invisible to the casual eye.

The seating is generously spaced, a luxury most newer restaurants cannot afford in the city's real-estate market. The tables hold their distance. The service staff move at the right pace. The room is quiet without being silent. The conversation around me, on the night I ate, was the kind of measured conversation the room invites: slower, more deliberate, less performative than the noisier rooms across the city. That atmospheric calibration is doing more work than the interior decoration alone. A room that has been operating at this register for this long has trained its staff and its regulars in a way newer rooms cannot fake. The pace of the dinner is the institution's accumulated rhythm.

The beef tartare with caviar

I will write specifically about the beef tartare because the course was the test for the restaurant's whole argument.

The tartare arrived as a small plated dish: finely chopped beef, dressed at the table with a small drizzle of seasoned oil and a quenelle of caviar on the side. The presentation was minimal. The plating was white-on-white-on-white with the dark beef as the central visual element.

I tasted the beef first, without the caviar. The meat had been hand-cut, not machine-ground. The texture under the fork was the right kind of resistance, small dice with the cuts uneven enough to read as hand work rather than uniform processing. The seasoning was salt, pepper, a faint vinegar acidity, and a small amount of mustard for body. The temperature was correctly cool, not cold and not warm, but the temperature that lets the beef's flavour come through without being numbed by the cold.

The meat tasted of meat. That is the small detail lesser tartares fail at. A bad tartare is a vehicle for the dressing: the meat is incidental, overshadowed by the seasoning, indistinguishable from the same dressing applied to almost any chopped protein. The Les Amis tartare let the beef stay at the centre while the seasoning stayed in a supporting role, so it was the meat that carried the dish.

The caviar was the supporting move, a small quenelle of properly briny caviar placed on the side of the plate so the diner could choose how much to combine with each bite of tartare. It was the high-quality kind: the eggs distinct, the brininess controlled, the small saltiness lifting the meat without dominating it. I ate the tartare with and without the caviar. Both worked. The tartare with caviar was the more dramatic bite, and the one without was the more honest. Both showed me what the kitchen could do.

What surprised me, eating the dish, was a smaller detail: the seasoned oil drizzled at the table was poured by the captain in a single continuous arc that crossed the plate twice, the kind of small front-of-house choreography a captain only develops after years of running the same service. The dish arrived with that gesture as part of it. By the end of the course I had been reminded of what a properly classical French dining room can deliver when the kitchen has had time to refine the work over years.

The wine pairing, a Champagne by the glass to start and then a structured white Burgundy with the tartare, was the kind of programme the restaurant has spent decades building. The cellar is one of the deepest in Singapore by depth and historical reach, with strong Burgundy and Loire sections, a respectable Champagne selection, and a more recent broadening into other European producers. The sommelier team is competent in the way only an institution of this age can produce. That programme is, in some ways, the restaurant's longest-running argument. The kitchen has changed personnel over the years, the dining room's interior has been modestly refreshed, and the menu has evolved. The wine programme has, by contrast, only accumulated, the cellar growing and the list deepening as the sommeliers' knowledge of it expands.

The institution as the offer

The friction with Les Amis is the same friction faced by any restaurant of this age. The classical posture will not appeal to every diner. A guest who prefers the looser, more chef-driven, more visibly modern rooms that have proliferated in the last decade will find Les Amis formal, traditional, and slightly removed from the contemporary discourse. That formality is, again, the restaurant's deliberate position. It has chosen not to chase the modern. It has kept the classical standard intact while the rest of the category has moved.

The other friction is the price. The tasting menu and the wine programme together produce a bill that is, even by Singapore fine-dining standards, on the higher side. The bill reflects the institution, the wine, the kitchen, and the service. Whether it is a fair price is, again, a personal judgement. The room has settled into the audience that values what it offers. The other audiences are served by other restaurants.

Les Amis is one of the few restaurants in Singapore where the institutional weight is part of the offer rather than separate from it. The room has been operating since 1994. The kitchen has been refining its classical French training, the wine programme has been accumulating, and the service team has been training in the institution's tradition over the same three decades. That accumulated weight is what the diner is, in part, paying for.

The beef tartare, the captain's continuous arc of seasoned oil across the plate, the wine programme, and the dining room itself with its classical posture intact across three decades all carry the same evidence. A room that has held a single posture for that long, in a market that prefers reinvention, is doing something most restaurants cannot do. The discipline has been the institution's identity, not a marketing position. The tartare and the caviar, the wine, the linen and the silver, the slow service and the careful pace of the dinner were all the institution still doing its working version of itself. The diner who wants what the institution offers will get exactly what they came for.