Best Restaurants in Singapore

Best Restaurants in Singapore

Guide: Fire, Heritage & Destination Dining

Singapore's serious restaurant tier moves between Peranakan inheritance, hawker memory translated into tasting menus, live-fire cooking, Cantonese precision, and polished seafood. These ten reservations justify planning a meal around them.

• CandlenutMalcolm Lee's Dempsey dining room treats Peranakan food as a living cuisine, balancing buah keluak depth, bright rempah, and polished family-style service without sanding away its character.
• Restaurant LabyrinthLabyrinth turns familiar Singaporean flavours and local farm relationships into a tightly narrated tasting menu; the Esplanade setting is formal, but the reference points remain recognisably local.
• Burnt EndsDave Pynt's open kitchen works as a theatre of fire, smoke, grills, and custom ovens, with deceptively simple plates that reward counter seats and a deliberately paced order.
• OdetteJulien Royer's restaurant pairs precise contemporary French cooking with Southeast Asian produce inside the former Supreme Court, making it the city's clearest special-occasion reservation.
• The Coconut ClubThe Beach Road flagship makes coconut milk, sambal, and nasi lemak its serious business, with polished service and enough menu range to work for breakfast, lunch, or supper.
• The Blue GingerThis Tanjong Pagar shophouse is strongest as a shared Peranakan meal: order across spicy, sour, braised, and coconut-rich dishes rather than treating it as a one-plate stop.
• National Kitchen by Violet OonViolet Oon's National Gallery dining room gives visitors a broad, polished route through Peranakan and Singaporean dishes, with a terrace that turns dinner into a Civic District occasion.
• JUMBO Seafood Riverside PointJUMBO is the efficient riverfront answer for chilli crab, black pepper crab, and a full seafood table; book a group and arrive ready for a messy, expensive feast.
• Song Fa Bak Kut TehThe New Bridge Road original is a direct lesson in peppery Teochew bak kut teh, with quick refills, pork ribs, preserved vegetables, and queues that move faster off peak.
• Summer PavilionSummer Pavilion gives Cantonese cooking the calm, exacting hotel treatment, especially for dim sum lunches, refined seafood, and family meals that need flawless service near Marina Bay.

Reviewed by RGuide Editorial · Venue details checked August 2026