Chef-owner Julien Royer pays tribute to his childhood using premium ingredients sourced from small producers worldwide.
Odette sits in the Supreme Court wing of the National Gallery Singapore, which is a suitably theatrical address for a restaurant that trades in detail. You arrive from marble corridors and museum hush into a room that feels deliberately removed from the pace outside. It is modern French dining in form, but not in the stiff, ceremonial way that the phrase can sometimes suggest. Odette has a knack for making grandeur feel calm.
The restaurant’s tenth-anniversary refresh has nudged the look from its early, powdery prettiness into something warmer and more mature. There is timber marquetry with a gentle Art Deco wink, plush mohair velvet chairs and a palette that sits somewhere between beurre and umber, grounded by cherry wood, while still keeping the room light and airy. Above the entrance hangs Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall, a drifting paper sculpture by Dawn Ng, its tones drawn from Royer’s seasonal thinking: petal, leaf, fruit, root. It is a quiet cue to seasonality and a reminder that what lands on the table is meant to move with the year.
Service matches the understated and graceful setting with an informed and confident front-of-house team. The choreography is precise without ever feeling robotic, and the dining room runs with the smoothness of a well-drilled kitchen pass. Menus are tasting-only, with Terre & Mer (S$368) and Épicure (S$468). It is a serious spend, but you are paying for the full apparatus of sourcing, technique, and a fantastic front-of-house team.
Chef-owner Julien Royer has always framed Odette as personal. He named the restaurant after his grandmother, whose cooking shaped his understanding of produce and care, and that emotional backbone still anchors the experience. “I believe there’s something truly special about how food can move a person, the way it awakens a sense of childlike wonder, a rush of pure bliss,” he writes on cards placed beside the cutlery laid out upon pressed white table linens.
On the Épicure menu, the opening sequence immediately signals Odette’s classic French foundations, nudged by Asian accents. Hokkaido Botan Ebi arrives with bafun uni and caviar, the sweetness of the prawn sharpened by a brown butter “ponzu” that fuses the flavours of Brittany and Tokyo. It is a luxurious bite, but also an intelligent one, because it avoids the dead weight that can come with stacked prestige ingredients. The Crab “Contrast” plays a similar game, offering a familiar French remoulade and béarnaise, with a jolt of chilli crab, bringing Singapore into the frame without turning the dish into a cliché.
From there, the menu keeps deepening. Jeju Abalone and foie gras, rich and marine, swim alongside shiitake in a robust pork broth with yuzu. The Scottish Blue Lobster continues the theme of refinement, cooked with exacting tenderness, then paired with Kyoto miso, endive and a saké beurre blanc that lands somewhere between silk and sea spray. The miso adds depth, not sweetness, and the endive’s bite stops the whole thing from drifting into luxury-for-luxury’s-sake.
If there is a showpiece moment, it is the Périgord Black Truffle Langoustine “Comme un Dumpling”, an optional course (S$68) that is painstakingly formed, presented with care, and finished with a generous snowfall of shaved white truffle at the table. There is leek fondue underneath, vin jaune for lift and katsuobushi for savoury flicker. The temptation, with a dish this ornate, is for flavour to become secondary to effort. Here, it does not.
The meat course is a reminder that Odette is not only about seafood and shine. Kampot Pepper-crusted Pigeon is brought to the table in a little garden of foliage prior to serving. The bird is then prepared, plated and poised like a centrepiece, clutching a tiny scroll between its toes. It is whimsical, but the cooking prioritises the blush, gamey meat with a yielding texture, framed by topinambour, black garlic and fig leaf oil that adds a seasonal sweetness.
A cheese trolley is offered as an optional detour, a very French flourish that suits the room’s new warmth, before pastry chef Louisa Lim – Asia’s Best Pastry Chef 2023 – delivers a delicate, balanced dessert based on her kitchen nickname. The LOULOU Lemon presents a meringue “rind” that hides Amalfi lemon curd and basil sorbet, plus a Japanese citrus salad, finished with citrus sauce and basil oil. It is bright, balanced, and crucially, not a sugar bomb after so much precision. Then comes the familiar fine-dining coda of petite fours, followed by a parting gift of apricot jam, a small but pointed reminder that Odette wants you to leave with something tangible, not just a receipt.
Odette is worth the accolades because the kitchen’s technique is impeccable, and the restaurant has spent a decade refining its craft and maturing into a clearer version of itself. It is still French at its core, but Singapore and the wider region are present in the confidence with which Royer lets local references sit alongside European craft.
Odette has held three Michelin stars and topped Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants List, but the real achievement is how little it leans on those headlines. Odette excels in its creative combinations, impeccable techniques and the use of the very best ingredients sourced from small purveyors in Australia, Japan and Europe. The restaurant reflects heartfelt hospitality and emotional storytelling through food.
Where: Odette, National Gallery, 1 St Andrew’s Road, Singapore, 178957
When: Open Monday to Saturday from 12pm
Contact: https://odetterestaurant.com