News Beat
A foodie tour around Singapore
From his balcony in River Valley, Master of Wine Richard Hemming watches Singapore explain itself through a single tree. ‘One canopy, twelve species,’ he writes in his Meanwhile In Singapore Substack. Hemming left Surbiton nearly seven years ago for this island; the view below has become daily proof the exchange was worth it. The tree reads as a compressed Singapore, many origins growing upward together.
You understand this quickest by eating. Sometimes seated, sometimes standing, sometimes returning days later for the same thing. A plastic stool at noon, a tasting menu at night. A mosque and a temple sit steps from hawker tables. Heat and timing matter, whether they come from a roaring wok or a kitchen where plates arrive one by one, shaped as art.
You meet it before you arrive. At Ellen Chew’s Shan Shui, airside in Heathrow Terminal 2, airport food is not an afterthought but the beginning of the adventure. Laksa leads — shrimp and coconut curry with Peranakan roots, rice noodles carrying heat and ballast, prawns and fishcake doing their work. A Singapore Sling follows. You board already tuned.
Raffles: Singapore’s original address
Stepping off Beach Road into Raffles (from £572, raffles.com) feels like crossing from circuitry into prose. The deep gravel of the driveway gives underfoot, a reminder that this was once the edge of the island, the original shoreline before land reclamation pushed the city outward into the bay. Outside, towers blink for attention. Inside, fans turn above white linen. The house began as a ten-room bungalow. Its folklore blends fact and embroidery: the tiger shot beneath the Bar & Billiard Room in 1902; Kipling’s inspection; Maugham’s stays — a writer well suited to a hotel which understands the value of watching quietly and leaving before the bill becomes a plot point. The Sling devised by Ngiam Tong Boon in 1915 so women could drink alcohol publicly without censure, its colour offering discretion in a more guarded age.
Today, the building is best understood through use. Tiffin Room remains Singapore’s oldest Indian dining room, its name taken from stackable carriers once used to ferry home-cooked meals across the subcontinent, each tier distinct, arriving together. Past an entrance of butterflies, Yi by Jereme Leung shapes regional Chinese cooking with measured elegance. Butcher’s Block works with fire and wood, including deeply smoked signature duck and whole bigeye tuna. The Writer’s Bar remains a counter for pause. Suites open onto palms and whitewashed tiled walkways. As Singapore has extended itself seaward, again and again, this house has stayed put, an icon because it never needed to move.
At Zén (three Michelin stars), dinner unfolds floor by floor in a townhouse close to Sri Kandaswamy Temple and a durian seller whose fruit hangs in the air. You ring the bell and step over a threshold where grower champagne arrives, music buffers conversation, and the larder is shown. Truffles in crystal. A vast crayfish on ice, nicknamed Jon. Upstairs, Swedish craft meets Japanese exactitude, bound by French method. This was Björn Frantzén’s first restaurant abroad, paired with fermentations developed by operations and beverage director Aaron Jacobson. Seafood leads: savoury beignet with hazelnut cream and caviar; chawanmushi of marine depth; the crayfish, glazed with dashi and lardo. At the top, a terrace opens onto the city, backed by a wall of spirits drawn from long-closed distilleries.
Zén is set in a townhouse close to Sri Kandaswamy Temple
Zen Singapore
Cloudstreet (two stars) sits on Amoy Street, where offices thin into older shopfronts and evening trade slips from briefcases to bar stools. Inside, the room folds around a long, curved counter set over a checkerboard floor, the kitchen fully exposed. There is no printed menu until the end. Chef Rishi Naleendra, alongside his wife Manuela, brings Sri Lankan heritage into line with Australian training. Jeju abalone arrives beneath courgette foam; celeriac and crab follow with kaffir consommé and steamed egg, chilli building steadily. A Sri Lankan curry of Normandy blue lobster is set in coconut broth, tom yum gha keeping the edge taut. In the corridor, Naleendra’s own nude studies line the walls. Sommelier Jay Ho builds pairings through acidity and texture. Our daughter Lyra, awake since 2am with jetlag, stayed absorbed until 11pm, before being invited to plate her own pudding.
Nearby at Nouri (one star), Ivan Brehm cooks against the smoothing instinct of modern fine dining. Hands are ceremoniously washed on arrival. Dishes run straight off the surrounding pass beneath a comically large cherry signed by visiting chefs including Blumenthal. Brehm calls it Crossroads Cooking. Tomato appears as sauce, cured, hollowed and refilled with beef jus. The argument sharpens through narezushi pairing Cambodian prahok with Japanese preservation, pamonha tracing corn’s migration, and a Trilogy of Spice mapping how heat travelled before borders. Pairings keep pace. Desserts resist sweetness, ending with a chocolate fish ball jolted by cool tawny. Above, ‘Appetite’, a gallery and listening bar, extends the ideas.
One of Ivan Brehm’s creations at Nouri
Nouri Singapore
This account remains incomplete without hawker centres. Fluorescent glare. Steel trays. Plastic stools. A city feeding itself. Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice at Maxwell Food Centre stands as exemplar: poached chicken over rice cooked in its own rendered fat, served with ginger, chilli and vinegar. Nothing flashy. Everything exact. Standards hold because people expect them to.
Drink, meanwhile, has its own language. Despite sharing the same Wi-Fi password, 67 Pall Mall Singapore is not a sequel to its London sibling but a parallel universe, where terrace heat meets a list reading like a library catalogue. Drawn from vast glass walls, wine and whisky carry equal weight. It helps to know you are not simply ‘upstairs’ on Orchard Road, but in the Shaw Centre penthouse, once the private home of Tan Sri Dr Runme Shaw. The Club sits inside Singapore’s cinema history, the Shaw family’s presence still felt in Foundation keepsakes and the old film posters lining the staircase.
METT Singapore (from £195, metthotelsandresorts.com)sits on Fort Canning Hill, where Singapore’s history has repeatedly turned on itself. Long before hotels, this was Bukit Larangan — the forbidden hill — seat of Malay royalty, later hollowed out by the British into barracks and command rooms. Beneath the grass, in chambers carved from the hill, decisions were taken which ended the island’s defence in 1942. Around it, fragments keep surfacing: ceramics, jewellery, traces of trade older than the port itself.
METT Singapore occupies a former military headquarters
METT Singapore
Created by Sunset Hospitality Group, METT occupies a former military headquarters whose maps and orders have been replaced by daylight and leisure. The pools meet the skyline at eye level. Guestrooms favour openness. The tone is Mediterranean, but the ground beneath carries older weight. Traffic dulls as you climb the hill. The city loosens its grip. Sidecar tours sweep through districts taxis miss. L’Amo adds an Italo-Singapore thread: seafood handled with finesse, pasta shaped with assurance, charcoal managed by someone who understands both coasts.
Head north, within Mandai Wildlife Reserve, and Mandai Rainforest Resort by Banyan Tree (from £184, banyantree.com) signals a different ambition. Designed by Singapore studio WOHA, the building steps lightly through forest, lifted so animals pass beneath, roofs and façades planted until architecture and canopy begin to merge. Bark patterns are pressed into concrete. Trees felled on site return as hangers, benches and joinery. Dragonfly ponds, with a steady chorus of frogs, keep mosquitoes in check. Rooms sidestep the hotel reflex for greys, instead carrying murals by a local artist which start at the windows, while seed-pod-inspired treehouse suites sit among nest-like pools.
Mandai Rainforest Resort by Banyan Tree
Bayan Tree
Dinner centres the stay at Forage, supplied by edible gardens stretching across the rooftop, where early risers also catch eagles slicing the air above the reservoir. Inside, a double glass-fronted fridge operates as a living mushroom habitat, feeding straight into the kitchen. Chef Marcus Tan cooks with nerve and colour: soybean custard lifted by Kaluga hybrid caviar; chawanmushi capped with bafun uni, tiger prawn and abalone; Boston lobster, barely heated, edged with tamarind, torch ginger and laksa leaf; Tajima beef traced back to conservation through Kopi Owa.
After dark, the Night Safari reshapes the reserve. The forest breathes differently, movement sensed before it is seen, pangolin scales catching light. Morning brings Breakfast in the Wild inside the Zoo, taken as animals are fed: orangutans overhead, penguins in conference, a plump, unhurried lizard accepting gentle attention. Bird Paradise fills the air with motion, from macaws and hornbills to crowned pigeons and spoonbills, while at River Wonders, prehistoric-looking sturgeon glide past, and Rainforest Wild Asia narrows the focus again with its tiger holding ground and voice.
To understand Singapore, notice how easily the city carries you. Clear paths, early parks, trees set exactly where shade is needed. When afternoon storms break, void decks offer shelter as intended. Green runs through neighbourhoods, climbing façades, until planning reads not as control but as release. This is a green and pleasant land, reached by choice rather than accident.
Singapore does not mistake disorder for soul, nor friction for authenticity. It asks little beyond attention and respect. In return comes the freedom to move, to eat, to live without bracing yourself. It poses a simple question: are you willing to belong to a city which has decided that care, once taken, should be felt everywhere.
