32 Years on Scotts Road and Still the Room to Beat
Singapore's first independent fine dining restaurant remains its most disciplined French room. The cooking is exact, the service runs like clockwork, and the wine list is priced with unusual honesty for the tier.
A gueridon rolls up to the table and a wedge of aged Comté comes off it under a domed cloche, cut to order by a captain who has clearly done this several thousand times. This is the kind of gesture that either lands as theatre or lands as competence. At Les Amis it lands as neither — it just happens, the way a well-run French room has been doing it for a century. The cheese is excellent. The knife is sharp. The trolley moves on.
Les Amis opened in 1994 as Singapore's first independent fine dining restaurant, which in this city means it predates the concept of Singapore having a fine dining scene at all. Sébastien Lepinoy took the kitchen in 2013 and pulled a third Michelin star out of it in 2019. Thirty-two years in, the room on the ground floor of Shaw Centre is doing something the newer three-star kitchens in Asia mostly cannot: French haute cuisine without the reinvention tic, without the tasting-menu narration, without the pretence that a chef needs to explain himself between courses.
Singapore's most disciplined French kitchen, with a wine list priced more honestly than any three-star has a right to offer.
Editorial Deep
The foie gras mousse arrives first, mounted with mushrooms, served cold in a shallow bowl with a piece of toasted brioche on the side. It is set to the exact texture a French kitchen has been setting it to since Escoffier — dense enough to hold the spoon, loose enough to slacken on the tongue. Nothing about it is new. Everything about it is right.
Two people at a four-top can hold a conversation at library volume without leaning in, and the couple at the next banquette will not hear a word of it. The acoustics do the heavy lifting — carpet underfoot, upholstered walls, the ceiling treatment that catches the room noise before it bounces. The soundtrack is barely there, some low classical thing that never resolves into a recognisable piece.
The booking is advertised as straightforward: SevenRooms or a call to +65 6733 2225, done. In practice a weekend dinner at a table for two needs three to four weeks of notice, and the chef's table needs longer and needs to be asked for by name. Book via SevenRooms for the standard tables and phone the restaurant directly if the party is larger or if the chef's table is what you want. Lunch is materially easier to land than dinner. Last lunch seating is 1:15pm; last dinner seating is 8:15pm — the kitchen does not stretch these.
The cheapest way to eat well here is the three-course prix fixe at SGD 205, Monday to Thursday, with a glass rather than a bottle. It is still not cheap, and service and GST still land on top. What that buys is a two-hour meal at a kitchen holding three Michelin stars since 2019, where the technique is exact and the room is the most disciplined French room in the city — and yes, it is the visit to send someone to when they want to see what Les Amis does before committing to the full tasting.
The condition that is currently unmet is a reason to eat this specific food in this specific city. The kitchen is doing classical French with the discipline the classical French kitchens in France have mostly stopped bothering with, and that is its own argument — but a reader who has already eaten at Le Cinq or Guy Savoy in the last year is not going to find a new idea on the plate here. A return makes sense when the wine list becomes the reason: a specific vintage, a specific producer, a bottle that has moved off the London and New York lists but is still sitting on this one at a defensible number.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Hand-dived scallops; foie gras mousse with mushrooms; cheese selection from the trolley; chocolate tart
“The most disciplined French room in Singapore, and the wine list is the quiet argument for coming back.”
Book the mezzanine, order the scallops, take the cheese trolley, and read the Burgundy list properly. If a chef with a point of view matters more than a kitchen with a playbook, Odette at the National Gallery is the other Singapore three-star to consider — different proposition, similar money.
The Verdict
