The Chicken Decomposed and Reassembled

Odette is one of the more difficult restaurants in Singapore to write about because the room arrives so heavily pre-explained.

The pre-explanation is institutional. The restaurant sits inside the National Gallery in the former Supreme Court registration room, in a building that has its own architectural significance and its own carefully maintained sense of itself. Chef Julien Royer's name has accumulated more discussion than almost any other chef's in the city. The dining room's pink-and-gold interior has been photographed enough times that, by the time a first-time guest sits down, the room is already familiar. The expectation is that the dinner will be a kind of small ceremonial event rather than a meal. A restaurant in this position has to do an unusual amount of work to be the actual room I am eating in rather than the room I have already read about.

I ordered the full tasting menu, because that format is how the kitchen makes its case and the restaurant cannot really be assessed any other way.

The room as inheritance

Odette opened in December 2015 inside the National Gallery, at 1 St Andrew's Road, as a partnership between Royer and the Lo & Behold Group. The restaurant is named after Royer's maternal grandmother in Cantal, France, who taught him the ingredient-first cooking the kitchen now organises every course around. The colour palette, soft pink and dusty rose, gold accents, pale neutrals, has been carefully chosen to keep the room warm against the institutional gravity. The seating is structured around the open kitchen, with most tables positioned to give the diner a view of the cooking without putting the kitchen in front of them. The chairs are properly upholstered. The tables are properly spaced. The flatware is properly weighted. The lighting is the kind of dim warmth that flatters food and faces without dropping into the cave-like darkness some restaurants mistake for atmosphere.

This is the kind of meticulous front-of-house design that a restaurant in a building like this is obliged to deliver. The Gallery is a state institution. The restaurant inside it cannot afford to be casual about the room. The pink-and-gold interior is less a chef's aesthetic preference than an institutional answer to the question of how a dining room should look inside this particular building. That answer has held for years. The room still works as a piece of design. The fact that I have seen many photographs of it before sitting in it does not diminish the actual sitting in it. The room, in person, looks better than the photographs.

The kitchen runs a tasting menu rather than an à la carte service. The menu evolves through the year, with each course tied to a single ingredient or set of ingredients written down the centre of the printed page: garden vegetable, heritage chicken, yuzu pomelo. The single-ingredient naming is the chef's small editorial move. The diner is not given a description of the dish, only a hint of what the central object will be. The rest is for the kitchen to deliver. That format gives the kitchen the right kind of pressure: the named ingredient cannot be hidden in the dish. If the menu says garden vegetable, the garden vegetable has to be the centre of what arrives on the plate. The supporting components, sauces and garnishes and plating, exist to bring out the central object rather than to compete with it.

The heritage chicken

I will write specifically about the heritage chicken course because that is the dish that, on the night I ate, made the kitchen's argument most clearly.

The course arrived as a sequence of small components rather than as a single plated chicken. The bird had been broken down into multiple preparations: a small piece of breast under a layer of crisp skin, a smaller piece of leg meat shredded into a working garnish, a small intense reduction made from the bones and trimmings, and a single piece of root vegetable that had been cooked in the chicken fat to give the plate a vegetable component that read as part of the same ingredient.

The breast was the centre of the dish. The skin had been pulled and crisped separately, giving the meat a layer of crunch without subjecting the breast to the higher heat that would have dried it. The meat itself was barely under the threshold of well-done, moist, firm enough to retain texture, with the juices visible at the edge of the cut.

The reduction was the small move. A serious chicken jus, made from the bones and aromatics of the heritage bird, served in a small quantity at the side of the plate. The reduction tasted of the bird. In a single spoonful of the jus, the diner could taste what the kitchen had been able to extract from the bones over hours.

What surprised me, and made the course finally cohere, was the root vegetable. A small piece of carrot, slow-cooked in the chicken fat, finished with a drizzle of the jus, plated on the side of the breast. On most tasting menus the vegetable garnish to a meat course is the throwaway component, there to balance the plate visually and to add a colour. Here it had been folded back into the dish's central ingredient. The carrot had taken on the chicken. The chicken had taken on the carrot. The decomposition I had been watching across the plate reassembled itself in one bite.

By the end of the course I had a clearer sense of what the kitchen meant by heritage chicken than the menu's single-word naming had suggested.

The wine alongside, a measured red Burgundy from the sommelier's pairing, was the right kind of pour. Light enough not to overwhelm the bird, structured enough to hold up to the jus. The sommelier team's work across the tasting menu is the kind of supporting infrastructure a restaurant of this format needs. Every course is paired with thought. The wines move the dinner along without dominating it.

What the discourse keeps obscuring

The friction with Odette is the friction of being a restaurant that arrives so heavily pre-explained that the actual eating has to recover the meal from the discourse. Some guests will arrive expecting a transcendent revelation. The kitchen, even at its best, delivers a serious, considered, modern French tasting menu, extraordinary in the technical sense, perhaps less transcendent than the press coverage has implied. That gap between expectation and experience can sour a visit. The kitchen has, in my experience, mostly held to the standard the room demands. Whether the standard is the highest in the city or merely one of the very high standards in the city is a discourse question, and a separate one from what the kitchen actually puts on the plate.

The other friction is the price. The tasting menu is, by any measure, expensive. The wine pairings add to that significantly. A guest who is paying the full bill is paying for the institution, the room, the kitchen, the wine programme, and the chef's accumulated reputation. The components, on the night I ate, justified the components' individual prices. The aggregate is a matter of what the diner values.

Odette is one of the few rooms in Singapore where the institutional weight of the building, the design of the room, and the kitchen's working discipline are all calibrated to support a single kind of dining experience: a slow, multi-course modern French tasting menu, served in a setting that takes itself seriously without becoming oppressive. The heritage chicken course, the reduction tasting of the bird and the carrot folded back into the dish, was the small evidence that, on the night, made the whole evening cohere.

A restaurant that can deliver one such course inside a tasting menu, with the surrounding components calibrated to support rather than compete with the central dish, is doing the kind of work the room is supposed to be doing. The discourse around the restaurant will go on regardless. The kitchen will go on cooking, and for the next dinner that is the part that actually matters.