The Restaurant That Lowered Its Price

Mustard Seed is the kind of restaurant the discourse is now slightly behind on.

The room at 75 Brighton Crescent in Serangoon Gardens opened in June 2019 as a thirteen-seat counter. For six years, most coverage treated that counter as the restaurant's visual signature. Earlier in 2025, the kitchen ripped it out. The counter is gone, the room converted to table seating with capacity around twenty-two to twenty-three. The tasting menu, on the same date, was cut from two hundred and thirty-eight dollars to one hundred and eighty-eight, a reduction of roughly twenty per cent. From March 2026, second seatings at 8pm have been introduced on select tables.

The demand has not softened. The room still fills every seat.

Counter removed, price lowered, capacity slightly expanded, demand undimmed: that sequence is the opposite of the trajectory most chef-driven restaurants in this city follow. Operating costs rise, sourcing improves, standing climbs, and the price climbs along with it. Gan Ming Kiat has reversed the formula. Most older coverage describes the cuisine and leaves the sequence at the edges.

Why the counter went

The chef has been blunt about the reasoning.

In recent interviews Gan has said the old version of Mustard Seed had felt sterile, that the counter format had defeated what dining out meant to him: spending time with the people you love, with the food as facilitator rather than centrepiece. The price cut, he has framed elsewhere, came from a simpler position. He, Shin Yin, and Desmond are not people who are comfortable spending a lot of money dining out.

That second sentence is the remarkable one. Most chef-owners do not say it aloud. They frame their pricing as a function of sourcing, technique, labour, the running cost of a small operation, the market rate for the genre. Gan has framed his as a function of his own and his team's comfort. The implication is that the restaurant is now priced to be a meal he himself would buy, not a meal he is selling. That is a useful position to hold publicly.

It also matters because Mustard Seed is no longer a solo project. The kitchen is now run by Gan alongside his wife Shin Yin, who is co-founder and co-chef, and Chef Desmond Shen, ex-Alter Native, who joined in 2024 and brings the technique vocabulary of a stint cooking at Central in Peru. The menu is collaboratively written by all three. The three-person structure is part of the room's editorial logic now, and the price reduction is partly the working consequence of three chefs choosing to run a restaurant at a price they themselves would pay.

The room is small, pale-walled, neutral-toned. The kitchen is still open. The chefs are still visible across the meal. The new table seating reads warmer than the counter format did, with diners facing each other rather than the back of the kitchen. The cuisine has become the meal's medium rather than its centrepiece. That is the chef's own description of the change, and it reads correctly on the plate.

The turmeric frog legs

I ordered the turmeric frog legs course on the night.

The plate arrived as three small frog legs deep-fried to a faint char on the surface, dusted with a herb-salt the kitchen builds from dehydrated curry leaves and laksa leaves. No garnish, no sauce. Three legs, the salt, the turmeric base, nothing else.

The first bite settled it. The frog was tender, with the slight gaminess of properly handled amphibian meat, the deep-fry crisp without becoming brittle. The herb-salt did the spine work: the curry-leaf register sat under the laksa-leaf register, both pulled together by the turmeric base, the salt grain providing a small textural finish that kept the dish from collapsing into a single perfumed note. The flavour vocabulary was Mod-Sin, the plating restraint Japanese.

By the second bite the dish had cohered. A personal cuisine works when the diner stops categorising the components and starts eating the dish, when the kitchen's integration goes invisible at the level of the eating even though the components are identifiable at the level of analysis. The frog legs achieve that invisibility.

They are also the cleanest evidence that the cuisine has survived the structural change. The 2025 revamp could easily have softened the cooking. When a restaurant lowers its price by twenty per cent, the obvious risk is that the kitchen compensates by simplifying. Mustard Seed has not done that. The frog legs are not a simpler dish than the menu's older entries. They are the kitchen's working signature, served at the new price.

The cuisine, framed correctly

The cuisine is not Japanese-Singaporean. That label, which the press has used for years, is too symmetrical for what the kitchen is doing.

The restaurant's own framing on its site is modern Singapore cuisine enriched with global influences: in practice, Singaporean flavours through Japanese technique. Gan trained at At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy, then spent three years at the now-closed kaiseki restaurant Goto learning Japanese cooking, then worked under Chef Malcolm Lee at Candlenut. The Candlenut inheritance shows in the kitchen's approach to spice paste, rempah-fried and spice-led, layered rather than flat, and the white curry on the current menu has its own white rempah, the crab porridge a parallel spice paste.

That is Mod-Sin, not fusion. The Japanese technique is the cooking method. The plating discipline is kaiseki-inspired. The flavour palette is Singaporean. The integration is the kitchen's working position, not a stylistic gesture.

The menu rotates every two months, with roughly ten courses on a single tasting menu that runs lunch and dinner the same way, taking about two and a half hours. Recent cycles have included: fruit ceviche with sugarcane granita; spring bean tostada with sambal hijau; steamed green peas with hokkigai (Japanese surf clams); Suan cai yu, shima aji with pickled radish and a sake-kombu sauce; scallop and otah folded inside a shiso leaf; a beef and daikon broth with leek and chilli oil; the sweetbread with tamarillo kuluyok and a potato pancake (the dish where Shen's Peruvian register is most visible); nasi liwet with threadfin panggang and urap; the soybean dou jiang you tiao dessert, soy milk ice cream with soy caramel and okara fritters. The buah keluak squid ink paella and the DIY beef tartare kueh pie tee are signature constructions that have anchored multiple cycles.

The menu's flavour vocabulary is consistent across courses. The technique is consistent. The integration is the cuisine.

What the new format does

The format change is the more interesting fact underneath it.

Counter restaurants in Singapore have, over the last decade, become the dominant form for chef-driven cooking. The counter creates intimacy between chef and diner. It lets the kitchen plate at the bar without intermediaries, makes the cooking visible, signals seriousness. It also creates a particular kind of social condition: diners face the kitchen, not each other.

Gan's editorial argument is that this is the wrong shape for the meal Mustard Seed wants to feed. The food, he has said, should be a facilitator rather than a centrepiece. The counter format made the food the centrepiece. The table format makes the conversation the centrepiece, with the food as the medium. That is a real distinction.

The new layout works because the cuisine survives the change. The frog legs are still the frog legs. The buah keluak paella is still the buah keluak paella. The plating discipline is still the same. The diner no longer watches the kitchen build the dish; the diner now eats it across a table from someone they came with. A different kind of meal happens.

The price drop is what made the rest possible. At two hundred and thirty-eight dollars, the meal was an occasion. At one hundred and eighty-eight, it is closer to a meaningful evening than a special one. Gan's framing, that the room still fills every seat and that the project is about building something that lasts rather than chasing profit, is the clearest editorial position any chef-owner in Singapore has taken publicly on pricing in 2025.

The friction

The friction with Mustard Seed is no longer about cuisine. It is about access.

The reservation system is brutal. Bookings open on the first of each month at ten in the morning for the following month. One to six guests per booking. A seventy-two-hour cancellation policy with a one-hundred-and-eighty-eight-dollar-per-head charge if missed. The room books out in minutes. The second seatings at 8pm from March 2026 are the kitchen's first cautious step toward absorbing more demand without expanding the room further.

The other friction is the cuisine framing. A diner expecting a clean Japanese tasting menu will find too much Singaporean influence. A diner expecting a modern Singaporean restaurant in the more traditional Mod-Sin sense, Candlenut-adjacent and more directly local, will find too much Japanese technique. The cuisine sits in a position that does not match any easy expectation, and the older "Japanese-Singaporean" framing in the press is partly responsible for the mis-expectation.

The wine and sake programme is modest: a small list, no named sommelier in public coverage, no formal pairing flight. That sizing is correct for the room. The food is the meal; the drink is the accompaniment.

What the restaurant is for now

Gan has made the broader argument about his generation of chefs explicit elsewhere. Chefs of his cohort cut their teeth at marquee restaurants and then, when they open their own rooms, find their Singaporean upbringing surfacing in the food, the way Japanese cooks who trained in France and Italy decades ago eventually produced a Japanese-Italian and Japanese-French cuisine of their own. That sentence is the right frame for understanding Mustard Seed.

The cuisine is not a category transferred to Singapore. It is the cuisine that emerges when a Singaporean cook trained in Japanese technique runs his own restaurant. The integration is structural, not stylistic. It is what the chef cooks. It is also, after the 2025 revamp, what the chef cooks at a price he himself would pay, in a room where diners face each other rather than the kitchen. That continuity, alongside the structural change, is the restaurant's quiet editorial achievement.

A chef-driven counter restaurant that converted itself into a chef-driven table restaurant, lowered the price, kept the cuisine, and held the demand is rare. Most independent restaurants in this city run the opposite direction. Mustard Seed has done the unusual move and made it work.

The turmeric frog legs, with the herb-salt of dehydrated curry and laksa leaves and nothing else on the plate, served across a table in a Serangoon Gardens room that no longer has a counter, were the evidence. A single dish, properly built, the kitchen's argument compressed into three legs and a salt.

In a city where most chef-driven restaurants get more expensive over time, this one decided to be less expensive instead. Mustard Seed has been holding that position, and that is enough.