The Smoked Egg, the Supreme Court Wing, and Lunch First
Julien Royer's French room inside the National Gallery, and the lunch that is the right way in. The midday menus start at S$298++.
The champagne cart arrives before the menu does, wheeled across a dining room the colour of the inside of a shell — pale pink ceiling installation, white tablecloths, glass sliding doors onto an open kitchen. A hot spring egg comes out under a cloud of dry ice at some point in the first hour. Both things could read as theatre in a lesser room. Here they land as calibration: the kitchen wants you to know, early, that composure and spectacle are not in tension.
Julien Royer opened Odette inside the National Gallery Singapore in 2015 and named it after his grandmother. The restaurant just crossed its tenth year and used the anniversary to refresh, which is worth flagging because a decade in is when most fine-dining rooms in this city start to drift. Odette has not. What has changed is the difficulty of getting in — the seat count is small, the reputation is regional, and a table takes planning.
Ten years in, Odette is still Singapore's most disciplined French room — the trouble is getting through the door.
Editorial Deep
Not every combination on the menu lands as a surprise. The pairings are exquisite without being consistently unexpected — the Scottish Blue Lobster in its sake-based sauce is precise, correctly seasoned, exactly what the description promises, and exactly that. It is a very good dish that does not particularly want to argue with you.
The first navigational problem is that Odette is not where you think it is. The main National Gallery entrance is not the one you want. The restaurant sits inside the Supreme Court wing, and its foyer entrance is discreet enough that first-timers routinely walk past it. Give yourself ten minutes on either side of the reservation to find the right door.
This booking model rewards two kinds of diner: the local who can keep checking for a cancellation, and the traveller who knows their Singapore dates well ahead and books the moment they are fixed. It excludes almost everyone else — the last-minute weekend planner, the visitor who lands on Tuesday hoping for Thursday, the group of six deciding over dinner in Sentosa that they'd like to try Odette tomorrow.
Start with the S$298++ lunch tasting. For that money, a diner sits inside a Michelin-listed room for the better part of three hours, eats through a kitchen sourcing 90% of its produce from abroad specifically to hit its own quality floor, and receives service from a team that a top Paris dining room would recognise. Nothing on the lunch bill is hard to defend — the price tracks the product.
First visit, the Rosemary Smoked Organic Egg is non-negotiable and the lunch tasting is the correct entry point. Second visit, the order changes: come back for white truffle season if the calendar allows, and take the base wine pairing rather than skipping it, because the pacing of the meal is designed around it. The Heirloom Beetroot, easy to under-rate on a first pass because it arrives early, is the dish to pay closer attention to the second time — it is doing more work than it announces.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Rosemary Smoked Organic Egg; Heirloom Beetroot; Tuscany white truffle course when in season
“Singapore's most disciplined French room, ten years in, and still worth the chase for a table.”
Book the S$298++ lunch, enter through the Supreme Court wing foyer, and start with the smoked egg. If SevenRooms keeps showing nothing for your dates, Les Amis on Scotts Road is the more forgiving door into serious French cooking in this city.
The Verdict
