Restaurants

On a chef who closed an established sushi-ya in 2024, went quiet for a year, and came back to an eight-seat counter at the Conrad. The comeback carries a plus sign and is, in fact, a deliberate shrinkage where the smallness is the upgrade.

On a Lebanese grill house on the most photographed street in Singapore, where the charcoal lamb chops are genuinely good, the bread is better value than anything else on the table, and the golden dome framing the view is doing more of the selling than the kitchen is.

On a Tras Street room filed under 'modern Indian' that is really a fire restaurant with an Indian accent, and a hybrid flatbread topped with comté and pork that proves a 2024 chef change kept the grill instead of importing the white tablecloth.

On a 1978 Hokkien restaurant whose handmade ngoh hiang and broth-dark mee are irreplaceable, whose flowered red carpet moved address-to-address unchanged for decades, and which, as of this winter, is a heritage cuisine with no dining room left to serve it in.

On a late-2025 French-Japanese debut in a restored Penang Road mansion, where chef Shu Kubota finds a third route through Southeast-Asian fusion: keeping the French mother sauce deliberately visible and infusing the local spice paste into it rather than dissolving the technique away.

On a Eurasian restaurant that lives inside its own community's house on Ceylon Road, the vinegar-and-mustard sting of a Devil's Curry that no recipe site can teach you, and the year the body meant to preserve the cuisine nearly evicted the only kitchen still cooking it.

On an Edomae counter that relocated from a grand hotel to a Millenia Walk unit in late 2025. The move reads as a downgrade and was the opposite, because the chef's real signature, a four-vinegar shari, came through the move completely intact.

On a COMO Dempsey Italian room where the headline dish carries the marketing weight, the quietest dish carries the cooking, and a chef de cuisine has spent eighteen months drifting the menu toward Modena rather than away from it.

On a Jalan Pisang nasi padang counter so famous the family name has replaced the words 'nasi padang' in people's mouths, and the one dish, braised from 2am, that tells you there is still a kitchen behind the brand.

On the city's most divisive expensive meal, fine-dining money for crab bee hoon from a plastic-stool Geylang eating house, where the 'is it worth it' question has a precise answer that inverts the menu's own framing.

On a 1934 Hainanese eating house everyone searches for the chicken rice, where the dish that actually matters is the one nobody searches for: a pork chop that records the Hainanese cooks who learned Western cooking in colonial European households.

On an Orchard Hotel Cantonese room that has held its dining floor since 1992, in a category the city's food attention has filed away as settled, and a small baked tartlet that should be a gimmick and is the reason the room is an institution rather than just an old one.