The Roaster Has Built Itself a Room

PPP Coffee has spent fifteen years being the bean inside someone else's room.

That is, on paper, an unglamorous position. The roastery sells to bakeries, hotel breakfast counters, third-party cafes, and small specialty rooms run by people who would rather be associated with their own brand than with a supplier's. The bean does its work and the host cafe takes the credit. For most of the company's life this trade has been the deal: Papa Palheta when it started in 2009, PPP Coffee since the 2019 rebrand, the long-running Chye Seng Huat Hardware on Tyrwhitt Road as the only consumer-facing room until very recently. The drinker at the host cafe was unlikely to know whose bean they were drinking. That was fine for the roaster. The wholesale ledger held.

The New Bahru outlet, opened August 2024, is the room where that arrangement finally changes.

The Kim Yam Road address is the first time the company has built a destination cafe that is not Chye Seng Huat. The fit-out is larger and more deliberate than either of the other current outlets, Funan (opened 2019 with the rebrand) and The Annex at CSHH. The company itself positions the room as the flagship multi-sensory experience. There is a record bar with a wall of LPs. There is a chef on the kitchen side, Sandra Lee, doing almond croissants and cakes and a working all-day menu. There is pet-friendly outdoor seating. And, as of 2025, there is a dedicated tasting counter that runs a fifty-five-dollar Friday coffee omakase, by reservation, walking small groups through the rarer varietals on the roastery's books.

That last move is what I came to write about. The omakase is the strangest hour in Singapore coffee at the moment, and it is the right thing to write about.

What the company has stopped being

The history matters. PPP started in 2009 as Papa Palheta, Leon Foo's small-batch roastery on Hooper Road, the name borrowed from the Brazilian colonel credited with smuggling coffee seedlings into Brazil in 1727. The early years were wholesale: green-bean supply, espresso programmes for cafes that wanted a serious bean without running their own roasting operation, the unglamorous infrastructure work that quietly determines what a specialty scene tastes like.

Chye Seng Huat Hardware, opened in 2012, was the company's first concession to the idea that a roaster might also want a room. The Tyrwhitt Road shophouse, a former hardware store with its blue sign kept and reused, was the first time most Singapore drinkers encountered the bean by its own name. For seven years CSHH was the only retail face. The wholesale side, much larger, ran in the background.

The rebrand in July 2019 was the inflection. Papa Palheta became the heritage label that still ships green-bean and certain product lines, and PPP Coffee became the consumer-facing brand, debuting with the Funan outlet. The company kept the wholesale spine and started building a retail business on top of it.

New Bahru, five years later, is the room where the retail business stops apologising. The roastery is no longer at the address; that remains at the Tyrwhitt compound. The bean is no longer the primary set-dressing. The room has been built around an experience the bean sits at the centre of without being the only point. The pastries are real. The record collection is curated. The space is designed for a long sit, not a takeaway.

A wholesale roaster's first retail flagship is normally a thinly-disguised showroom. New Bahru is not that. It is a working cafe whose roastery happens to be elsewhere, closer in operating model to a single-vintage wine bar than to a coffee-roastery cafe. That is a meaningful shift for a company that built its reputation on being invisible inside other people's rooms.

The omakase

I booked the Friday five-o'clock omakase a week in advance because it is the cafe's defining new move, and because the format (small group, dedicated tasting counter, rare-varietal flight, lead barista as both host and explainer) is the only thing the company is doing that the rest of Singapore's specialty scene is not.

The session runs about an hour. Three to four lots, brewed in sequence on the counter in front of the table, with the bean's origin and processing and varietal called out before the cup arrives and the cafe's notes printed on a card the guest can keep. The bean lineup rotates. On the visit I sat through, the flight opened with a washed Colombian Pink Bourbon, a soft, lifted cup, peach and cane sugar on the front, a long honeyed finish, and worked through a natural-process Ethiopian heirloom whose strawberry top-note was almost embarrassing in its clarity, before closing on a competition lot from Costa Rica that had been roasted slightly more developed than the others, the cooling cup pulling toward cocoa nib and dried apricot.

That sequencing is the right call. The lighter, more transparent cups go first, before the palate is fatigued. The more developed lot closes. The water glass between cups is brought without asking. The pace is calm without being slow. The room around the tasting counter, the records spinning, the kitchen visible behind glass, the other tables doing their own afternoon, does not intrude.

The honest moment of the session arrived between the second and third cups, when the barista (lead at New Bahru, formerly behind the bar at the CSHH Annex) asked the group what we had been tasting in the cup before defining what he had been tasting. Letting the guest's palate move first, then offering the trained palate as a second reading, is the small hospitality choice that separates a tasting flight from a lecture. Most of the city's specialty rooms have not figured out the difference.

The cups were uniformly excellent. The bean is, of course, the company's competitive advantage, and the rarer lots in the omakase are the kind of small allocations that almost never reach a host cafe's espresso machine, because the volumes do not justify it. New Bahru is the first room in Singapore where these beans get a public airing inside the same operation that roasted them.

The Throwback house espresso is on the standard menu: Brazil and India, dark chocolate and caramel and hazelnut, comfort-forward and milk-friendly. I had a White afterwards, almost as a control. It was the version of the drink I have been having at host cafes for years, made on the home counter, with a cleaner voice than I usually hear it. Same blend, more confidently itself.

That was the part of the visit I expected.

What gets lost when the supplier becomes the destination

The friction with New Bahru is the friction with every wholesale roaster's first proper retail flagship. The room is, by design, more aspirational than the host cafes that have carried the company's bean for fifteen years. The price points are higher. The omakase is a paying ticket. The pastries and the kitchen and the record bar are operating costs the cafe has to recover. Some of the unselfconscious working-roastery feeling that has always made CSHH coherent does not transfer to a lifestyle-enclave room with curated vinyl on the wall.

The drinker who knew PPP through the dark-chocolate Throwback on a bakery counter may walk into New Bahru and find a room that is no longer entirely about the bean. The record collection is the giveaway. CSHH never had a record collection. Funan did not need one. New Bahru does, and the having of one is a small ideological choice that the older outlets did not have to make.

There is also a question about what New Bahru does to the older framing of CSHH. The Tyrwhitt Road room has been the company's consumer face for over a decade. The line that CSHH "taught Singapore the rest of Papa Palheta existed" is still true historically, but the teaching role is now shared with, and partially eclipsed by, the omakase counter five kilometres away. CSHH is no longer the only room, and no longer the most ambitious one. It will probably stay the most working one, which is its own kind of position.

A company that runs three outlets at three different temperatures (the working-roastery room at CSHH, the mall-traffic room at Funan, the destination-experience room at New Bahru) has stopped being just a wholesale roaster with a side hustle. PPP is now, openly, three things at once: a green-bean supplier, a cafe operator, and a coffee-experience brand. The three are not contradictory, and they are not the same thing either.

The omakase is the thing the company could not have done five years ago. The bean has earned it. The operating discipline has earned it. The fact that the cafe scene around them has matured enough to support a fifty-five-dollar coffee tasting flight has earned it. The Friday session I sat through justified the format on the cups alone.

What it cannot quite justify yet is the company's quiet transition from being invisible inside everyone else's room to being a destination of its own. That transition is the New Bahru outlet's actual project, and the omakase is its loudest argument.

For a roaster that built its reputation on the bean speaking for itself through other people's voices, the move to also speak in its own voice matters. The room makes the case. The next few years will show whether the company can hold the wholesale ledger and the destination experience without one of the two starting to bend.

For now, both are working. The cups held up on the visit I sat through, and the omakase is the case the company is making with them.