The Ah-Ma-Kase Runs Ten Courses and Turns Over Every Two Months
Malcolm Lee cooks his grandmother's Peranakan out of a colonial barracks at Dempsey — and has held a Michelin star in every Singapore edition since 2016.
The Blue Swimmer Crab Curry lands mid-table and the room quiets for a beat. It is a wide bowl of rempah the colour of terracotta, crab legs half-submerged, the smell doing the work before the spoon does. This is not a curry that reads clever on paper. It reads like something a Peranakan grandmother would make on a Sunday if she had access to better crab and a professional stove. Which is more or less the point of the kitchen.
Candlenut is Malcolm Lee's project — a fourth-generation Peranakan cook who learned from his mother and his grandmother, and whose restaurant has held a Michelin star in every Singapore edition since 2016. That is a specific claim rather than a general one: nobody else has done this with Straits-Chinese cooking, anywhere. The restaurant sits inside a former colonial barracks block up at Dempsey Hill, in a room built for volume, and it runs an Ah-Ma-Kase tasting menu that rotates every two months alongside a short à la carte.
A Peranakan kitchen starred in every Singapore guide since 2016 runs on a grandmother's recipe book, and Lee has the discipline to let it.
Editorial Deep
The rempah is pounded in-house and it shows in the depth of the Chef's Mum's Chicken Curry ($34), which carries a long, layered heat rather than a front-of-the-tongue chilli hit. This is the sourcing story that matters at Candlenut — not provenance in the European sense, but the willingness to grind the spice paste from scratch on a scale most Peranakan kitchens abandoned decades ago. It changes the finish. Every dish that runs through a rempah — the crab curry, the chicken, the sambals braided into the tasting menu — tastes fuller and more integrated than the version you get from a version made from a bought paste.
At lunch (12–3pm daily) the room reads bright and airy — the bamboo and rattan detailing catches the light coming off Dempsey, the ceilings are high, and the canteen-scale footprint feels generous rather than empty. At dinner (6–10pm), the same volume works against it. The acoustics echo, and by the time three or four tables are full, diners start dropping their voices to keep conversation inside the table. It is not loud. It is the opposite problem: a room that pushes you to talk quietly.
The service captain explaining the tasting menu at a table nearby stopped mid-sentence to note that a dish had been reworked in the current rotation, then walked back through what had changed and why. That is the shape of the room: staff who know the menu turns every two months and who can talk about it without a script. Pacing across the Ah-Ma-Kase is handled well; a group of six sitting communally will find the kitchen adjusts course intervals to the table's pace rather than the ticket printer's.
The Ah-Ma-Kase at $138++ for dinner sits against a Singapore fine-dining field where the same slot at Odette or Les Amis runs several times north of it before pairings enter the conversation. Against that peer set, Candlenut is the value option among rooms carrying comparable Michelin recognition — a distinctly different cuisine, at a materially lower entry point, cooked at a level that earned the same star.
A diner looking for a big, generous à la carte spread — three curries, a rice, a vegetable, plates arriving at volume — should not come back. The kitchen does not cook at that scale, and forcing it into that shape produces a bill that reads high for the quantity. This is a room built for the tasting menu and for tables that want to eat a curated ten courses rather than choose their own six.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Ah-Ma-Kase dinner tasting menu ($138++); Blue Swimmer Crab Curry; Chef's Mum's Chicken Curry ($34); Bakwan Kepiting Soup
“A Peranakan kitchen, Michelin-starred since 2016, that earns the star on rempah, not novelty.”
Order the Ah-Ma-Kase and bring a group; skip if you came looking for a big à la carte spread. Against Odette and Les Amis this is Singapore's value fine-dining play — a different cuisine at a materially lower entry, cooked at a level that carries the same recognition.
The Verdict
