The Sea Urchin Pudding at Lolla

Lolla has run a small-plates programme on Ann Siang Road for thirteen years.

The restaurant opened in September 2012 at 22 Ann Siang Road, with three co-founders: Pang Hian Tee on wine and concept, Thaddeus Yeo on hospitality, Lee Chin Sin on culinary direction. Pang had been running a guerrilla supper club called Lolla's Secret Supper from his home since 2009; the restaurant was the bricks-and-mortar version of that operation. The room seats fourteen at the ground-floor counter facing an open kitchen, with twenty-two more seats around a communal table in the basement for private bookings.

That structure has held across three chef eras.

From 2012 to 2020, Lolla operated for eight years without a single named headline chef. The kitchen ran on the founders' standards rather than on a chef's signature. From August 2020 to early July 2025, Johanne Siy ran the kitchen as head chef, building the restaurant's best-reviewed period of regional press attention. Siy left a few weeks before this visit. The successor has not yet been publicly named.

The Sea Urchin Pudding has been on the menu the whole time.

If you want to understand Lolla, start there.

What the format requires

A serious small-plates restaurant is difficult to run by design. Each dish has to be properly built, the sauce properly made, the protein properly cooked, the seasoning calibrated, the plating considered, but in a portion much smaller than a conventional main course. The kitchen has to do all the work of a fine-dining course in a portion sized for a casual share. The economics of doing this honestly are tight.

Most small-plates restaurants compromise on one of these axes. The portions get smaller without the prices reflecting the reduction. The cooking gets simpler to fit the format. The sauces get replaced with simpler dressings. The format becomes a cost-saving measure rather than a kitchen philosophy.

Lolla has, for years, avoided most of these compromises. The portions are small, but the cooking is at the level a tasting-menu kitchen would produce. The sauces are properly built. The proteins are properly sourced. The plating is restrained but considered. The format is the founders' deliberate philosophy rather than a shortcut.

Pang has been blunt about the position: sourcing rather than saucing, with the founders personally meeting producers to land the meat, produce, and seafood the restaurant runs on. That framing is the most accurate description of how the restaurant actually works. What goes onto the plate matters more than what the kitchen does to it. Mayura wagyu. Bouchot mussels. Oscietra caviar. Le Cordon Bleu pastry discipline. Curated low-intervention wines, with the list built by Pang himself.

The kitchen's own published framing matches the practice: inspired but simple small plates built on seasonal produce with a Mediterranean lean.

Not Catalan. Not tapas. Modern Mediterranean small-plates.

The room

The restaurant sits in a heritage shophouse that has been calibrated for the format. The interior is restrained: pale walls, timber furnishings, a long counter facing the open kitchen, with the basement room downstairs for private groups. The room is sized for the kitchen's actual capacity rather than for an aspirational scale. The patina on the bar is real. Thirteen years of service shows in the wear of the timber.

The counter is where the meal is supposed to happen. The diner faces the kitchen. The cooking is visible. The plates arrive directly from the kitchen to the counter; in the closest seats, the chefs themselves serve. The format is intimate without being claustrophobic.

That setup is the right one for the small-plates format. Small plates work best when the diner can see the kitchen, because the visibility gives the small portion sizes the context of the cooking. A back-room small-plates service would have asked the diner to evaluate the plates without that context. The counter format makes the kitchen part of each plate.

The wine programme, Pang's hand, runs alongside as a curated, low-intervention-friendly list, with a real by-the-glass selection that supports the casual pairing register the small plates invite. The list is not doctrinaire natural-wine; it is built around what the kitchen needs.

The Sea Urchin Pudding

The Sea Urchin Pudding is the restaurant's editorial constant and the test for any small-plates kitchen: first bite, second bite, third bite, all three sustaining the kitchen's argument.

The dish, twenty-two dollars for the half portion and forty-two for the full, arrives in a small ceramic dish: a squid-ink custard base with cream and egg yolk, set to a soft pudding consistency, with fresh sea urchin on top. The Sea Urchin Pudding has been on the menu since 2012, through the no-headline-chef era, through Siy's tenure, and most likely through whatever comes next.

The first spoonful was the test. The custard had been set to the right consistency, soft enough to flow under the spoon, firm enough to hold its shape in the dish. The sea urchin was present at a meaningful concentration, the slight sweetness, the slight brininess, the slightly oceanic character that good uni produces sitting at the centre of the bite. The squid ink ran underneath as the sea-floor register. The squid-ink-and-uni combination is the dish's central move: the bitter, slightly metallic squid ink and the sweet, briny urchin pull each other toward the centre, with the cream-and-egg-yolk base softening the collision into a single creature.

The dish is a single idea executed with care. The custard. The sea urchin. The squid ink. The cream. Four components, all properly considered, in a small portion that the founders decided thirteen years ago was the right size for the dish.

The second spoonful was the harder test. A small-plates dish is judged not by the first bite but by whether the second and third bites continue to deliver. A dish that is dramatic on the first taste and disappointing on the second has failed.

The Pudding holds.

By the third spoonful, which was, given the size of the portion, the last, the dish had stopped reading as a sum of parts.

This is what a properly built small-plates dish should do. It should be small enough to feel like a course rather than a meal, built deeply enough to justify its existence as a separate course rather than a side dish, and good enough to leave the diner thinking about it after the plate has been cleared.

The Pudding does all of these. It has done so since 2012.

The Sea Urchin Pudding survived every chef the restaurant hired.

What else holds

The other dishes around it run the same logic at the same standard. The Toasted Sourdough with house-made Kombu Butter at fourteen dollars is the menu's quietest essential; the kombu butter, set in a small dish with sea salt flakes, is the structural argument for the kitchen's sourcing-led cooking. The Spot Prawn Crudo with Sea Urchin and Oscietra Caviar at sixty-eight is the menu's most direct luxury statement. The Mayura Wagyu Tartare with Oyster Aioli and Jerusalem Artichoke Chips at thirty-eight is the bolder mid-menu build. The Burnt Cheesecake at seventeen for a slice (or thirty-six with black truffles) is the dessert that has, alongside the Pudding, become a restaurant signature in its own right.

The tasting menu, available Friday and Saturday dinners only at two hundred and thirty-eight per head, runs the kitchen's full discipline across a longer evening. Siy's specific bolder builds, the avocado with smoked eel consommé, ponzu, and jalapeño granita; the charred carabinero with shrimp-head butter, spring onion oil, and potato bread, were the menu's most ambitious additions during her tenure and will likely be the dishes most affected by her departure.

The Bouchot Mussels with celeriac in mussel broth, at thirty-eight, were the night's most modest dish and the place where Siy's recent exit was most visible: correctly cooked, cleanly built, but sitting in the menu's middle register without the more conceptual gestures her signature constructions provided. Not a fail. A small softening that the next chef will need to address.

Format as kitchen argument

The small-plates format at Lolla is meant to be ordered as a sequence: multiple dishes across the meal, shared across the table or held to oneself, with the diner choosing which dishes to commit to. The menu is sized for several small dishes per diner rather than for one main course.

That ordering logic is the format's structural argument. The diner is being asked to engage with multiple small ideas rather than committing to one large idea. The kitchen is being asked to execute multiple small ideas at the same level rather than one large idea.

That distributed execution is harder than the concentrated kind. A single main course gets the kitchen's full attention. Multiple small courses have to be executed in parallel, with the kitchen's attention spread thin. The discipline is what distinguishes a serious small-plates restaurant from a casual one.

Lolla has, year after year, maintained the discipline. The plates across a long meal hold their standard. The kitchen does not collapse under the weight of multiple parallel orders. The founders have, for thirteen years, kept the format's economics honest.

What the restaurant is for

The sister restaurant Lollapalooza, opened in 2015 at 1A Keong Saik Road, runs a slightly more upscale, daily-changing-menu version of the same logic, with individual seating rather than counter format. Together the two rooms are the founders' working argument for the small-plates and seasonal-format register in Singapore.

The friction with Lolla is the friction of the small-plates format itself. Some diners will find the portions too small. Some will find the bills higher than expected for what feels like a casual meal. The format is expensive by design, since the kitchen labour does not scale down with the portion sizes, and the pricing reflects that.

The other friction is the room's size. Reservations can be hard to come by. The capacity is the format's structural limit. Walk-ins are limited to whatever the counter has available at any given moment.

The deeper friction, on the night I ate, is the kitchen transition. Siy's departure was quiet, the announcement made in Filipina press more than in Singapore, and the successor has not yet been publicly named. The Sea Urchin Pudding, the Kombu Butter, the Cheesecake, the Wagyu Tri-tip are the dishes most likely to survive any subsequent menu refresh. They are the restaurant's signatures, not Siy's specific compositions.

Pang's own framing of the restaurant, that the menu serves only what the founders would themselves want to eat at home, is the line that explains why the format has held across chef eras. The kitchen has had three different generations of cooking authority. The founders have been the same the whole time. The Pudding has been on the menu the whole time. The sourcing-not-saucing philosophy has been the structural argument the whole time.

That continuity, across the chef successions, is the restaurant's quieter editorial achievement.

A small-plates restaurant that has held the format's discipline for thirteen years by treating the format as founder-led rather than chef-led is rare. Lolla has done it. The cooking is good because the sourcing is good, and the sourcing is good because the founders do it themselves.

The Sea Urchin Pudding, in a small ceramic dish with squid-ink custard and fresh uni, served at a counter in an Ann Siang Road shophouse to diners who had committed to the format's logic, was the evidence: a single composition, properly built, the restaurant's editorial constant across three chef eras.