Tag
Stories rooted here.
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 Purvis Street bar that has spent over a decade testing whether Singaporean-ness can be the structure of a drink, not just the garnish.
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 much-hyped Hong Kong café that finally opened in Singapore, in a polished office tower, in the most saturated brunch market in the region, and without the ice-cream cookie sandwich that made it famous in the first place.
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 fifteen-year-old room above Haji Lane that asks the most uncomfortable question in a bar: what do you actually want?
On a 1960s-themed Ritz-Carlton bar that could have worn the decade as costume and instead bought the actual era in a bottle: a Negroni built from sixty-year-old Campari and vermouth that tastes of time itself, buried under a regular menu that mostly trades in decor.
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.