YEAR OF THE HORSE
An In-Depth Critic’s Guide to Nine Exceptional Tables
This guide is written for the discerning diner — one who understands that a reunion dinner is not merely a meal but a ritual of belonging, and who therefore approaches the question of where to celebrate with the seriousness it deserves. What follows is a dish-by-dish analysis of each restaurant’s festive offering: the colours, textures, aromatics, and techniques that distinguish the exceptional from the merely good.
Shang Palace
Shangri-La Singapore, 22 Orange Grove Road
Price Range From S$138++ per person
Reservations +65 6213 4473
Available Until 3 March 2026
Ambience & Setting
Stately and jade-hued, Shang Palace is a room that has always felt like it exists slightly outside of time. Ornate lattice screens cast geometric shadows across tables dressed in ivory linen, and the gentle susurrus of a water feature provides an almost meditative counterpoint to the warm murmur of reunion conversation. On festive evenings the space doubles in warmth: crimson lanterns are strung high, and gold calligraphy banners catch the low-hanging pendant light in a way that makes even the walls appear to glow. There is an unhurried dignity to service here — plates arrive with the gravity of ceremony, never rushed, never delayed.
Dish by Dish
Fortune Yu Sheng — Norwegian Smoked Salmon & Poached Lobster
The arrival of this platter is theatrical in the most elegant possible sense. A lacquered tray is arranged with concentric rings of julienned daikon (starkly white, almost lunar in its pallor), shredded carrot in sunset amber, and translucent cucumber ribbons. Draped across the summit: silken slices of cold-smoked Norwegian salmon, their surface a deep rose-copper, faintly iridescent where the curing salt has drawn out the fat. Alongside sit thinly sliced medallions of poached lobster — pearl-white through the centre, blushing coral at their outermost ring. The plum-and-sesame dressing is a considered counterpoint: viscous and tangy, smelling of five-spice and citrus peel. When tossed to the cry of “Lo Hei!”, the resulting riot of colour and texture is an assault on the senses in the most auspicious way possible. In the mouth: bright acidity from the plum cuts through the salmon’s richness, and the crunch of fried yam shreds provides a textural percussion that lingers.
Auspicious Golden Horse Yu Sheng (limited-edition centrepiece)
Sculpted for tables of six to eight, this showstopper arrives already assembled — a rearing horse formed from dyed daikon and moulded taro paste, flecked with edible gold leaf. Chefs at Shang Palace have long understood that festive theatre need not sacrifice flavour, and this holds: the horse’s mane is fashioned from thinly sliced poached abalone, its texture yielding yet faintly mineral, a counterpoint to the sweet tuber beneath. Guests must request it in advance, and the ceremonial disassembling at table — spoon by spoon until the horse dissolves into a communal salad — is genuinely moving.
Buddha Jumps Over the Wall
Served in individual clay pots sealed with a pastry lid that blooms with steam on opening, this is the centrepiece of Shang Palace’s premium menus. The broth inside is the colour of dark amber, lacquered and deeply aromatic. One inhales: pork tendon, dried scallop (conpoy), sea cucumber, and an undercurrent of aged Chinese rice wine. The sea cucumber has been braised until it yields completely under spoon pressure, its surface carrying the slight gelatinous give characteristic of properly prepared trepang. Fish maw — dried swim bladder, here rehydrated to thick, silky sheets — hovers in the broth in translucent folds. The entire composition is a lesson in umami stratification: each ingredient adds its own signature note, from the briny depth of the conpoy to the sweet, mellow undertone of the pork. A dish to eat slowly and in near-silence.
Vegetarian Set: Bamboo Pith Fungus Rolls & Five-Grain Fried Rice
The fungus rolls — gossamer cylinders of dried bamboo pith, stuffed with water chestnut, carrot, and wood ear mushroom — arrive steamed and glazed with a light superior stock reduction. They are breathtakingly delicate: ivory-white and almost translucent, with a faintly spongy interior that captures the braising liquid within each bite. The five-grain fried rice arrives in a lotus leaf parcel, fragrant with wok hei; the grains (millet, barley, red rice, glutinous rice, and jasmine) each retain individual texture, forming a mosaic of gold, crimson, and ivory on the plate.
Critic’s Verdict
A masterclass in Cantonese festive dining for those who value ceremony as much as cuisine. Shang Palace’s CNY menus offer extraordinary breadth — from accessible eight-course celebrations to grand showstoppers — and the kitchen’s command of classical technique remains exemplary.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★★
Ambience ★★★★★
Value ★★★★☆
Hai Tien Lo
Pan Pacific Singapore, Level 3, 7 Raffles Boulevard
Price Range From S$168++ per person
Reservations +65 6826 8240
Available Lunar New Year period
Ambience & Setting
To dine at Hai Tien Lo on an auspicious evening is to occupy a room that seems to hover between the earth and sky. The floor-to-ceiling windows command a sweep of Marina Bay that deepens from steel-blue at dusk to inky velvet by night, the city’s lights doubling on the water below. Tables are dressed with precision: double-layered table skirts, ivory over champagne, and floral centrepieces in the red-and-gold palette of the season. Service is broad-shouldered and assured — Executive Chef Edden Yap leads a brigade that moves with the clockwork confidence of a team that has run this room for decades.
Dish by Dish
Lavish Yu Sheng — Whole Abalone, Lobster, Scallop, Coral Clam & Crystalline Ice Plant
Hai Tien Lo’s yu sheng is among the most extravagant iterations in the city this season, and its opulence is not merely performative. The whole abalone crowning the platter is a statement of intent: cooked until the surface carries a faint caramelised gloss and the interior is just firm enough to resist the tooth before yielding. Scallops are sliced raw and wafer-thin, their surfaces pale as new ivory. The coral clam adds an unexpected marine brininess. Most arresting, however, is the crystalline ice plant — a succulent whose translucent, pearl-like vesicles burst on the palate with a faintly saline, fresh moisture that cleanses the palate between richer bites. Texturally, this is the most complex yu sheng on the list: simultaneously yielding, crunchy, slippery, and crisp.
Braised Australian Fresh Abalone
Where some kitchens serve abalone as a vehicle for sauce, Hai Tien Lo presents it as the protagonist. The abalone is large — braised slowly until its natural sugars caramelise at the surface into a deep mahogany glaze — and the interior, when cut, reveals a pale ochre flesh whose grain runs in visible parallel lines, like the rings of a tree. The oyster sauce in which it is finished is reduced to the consistency of fine varnish and carries notes of fermented soybean, aged Shaoxing wine, and something approaching caramel. A bed of gai lan provides a bitter counterpoint, its jade colour a vivid contrast to the bronze abalone above.
Sautéed Japanese A5 Wagyu with Seasonal Vegetables
The wagyu arrives cut into broad, barely-seared slices, their marbling visible as a fine white lacework through the muscle. In the wok, the fat has softened into a liquid state that coats the tongue with an extraordinary richness before dissolving almost instantly — a quality particular to the highest grade of Wagyu, whose intramuscular fat melts at body temperature. Seasonal vegetables (asparagus and baby bai chye) provide structural contrast: the asparagus is wok-tossed to retain its snap, offering a vegetal freshness that cuts the bovine richness like a knife. A glossy reduction of oyster sauce and sesame pulls the dish together without obscuring the meat’s inherent quality.
Wok-Fried East Australian Lobster with Thai Basil
The lobster is split lengthways and wok-tossed at ferocious heat, its shell acquiring a coral-red blush that deepens at the claws to near-vermillion. The flesh inside remains succulent and sweet — a texture somewhere between firm tofu and the most delicate fish — and the aromatic Thai basil sauce, spiked with bird’s eye chilli and fish sauce, imparts a herbal punch that the lobster’s sweetness handles with grace. Droplets of wok sauce pool in the shell’s natural contours: scooping these out with a spoon and eating them over white rice is, frankly, the table’s best-kept secret.
Critic’s Verdict
Among the most reliable addresses for Cantonese festive dining at the higher end of Singapore’s market. The view amplifies every dish; eating here on CNY Eve with the fireworks reflected in the bay below is an experience difficult to replicate.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★☆
Ambience ★★★★★
Value ★★★★☆
Peach Blossoms
PARKROYAL Collection Marina Bay, 6 Raffles Boulevard
Price Range From S$688++ per person (Spring Blossoms Rising Fortune Set)
Reservations +65 6845 1118
Available CNY period; 2 days advance order required for headline set
Ambience & Setting
Peach Blossoms occupies a room that its hotel’s architects clearly intended as a jewel box: curved walls, warm amber lighting, and a custom installation of handblown glass petals that scatters light across the ceiling in the shifting patterns of a koi pond. During the Lunar New Year period the space is further dressed with peach blossom branches in ornamental urns, their pale pink blooms real and perfumed, lending the air a faint floral sweetness that mingles with the kitchen’s aromatic exhaust. An unhurried and deeply attentive service team ensures that large tables feel individually cared for.
Dish by Dish
Harvest Yu Sheng — Hakka-Style Salt-Baked Chicken with Taro, Leeks & Peanuts
The most iconoclastic yu sheng on any Singapore reunion dinner table this season. In place of the conventional raw seafood, Chef has constructed an entirely Hakka-inspired composition built around salt-baked chicken — hand-shredded into loose, aromatic fibres seasoned with the mineral, slightly resinous character that Hakka salt-baking imparts. The taro is cut into delicate batons and fried until lacquer-golden, shattering into dusty sweetness at the bite. Crispy leek ribbons add an allium sharpness, while coarsely crushed peanuts bring the requisite textural punctuation. The dressing — a Hakka-style sesame-peanut combination — is earthier and less acidic than the convention, anchoring rather than lifting. An extraordinary reinterpretation of a deeply familiar form.
Deep-Fried Spring Roll — Snow Crab, Bird’s Nest & Caviar
Four centimetres of architectural precision arrives in an upright row, each spring roll’s pastry a uniformly crackling amber-gold. Inside, the snow crab filling is sweet and moist, bound with the imperceptible viscosity of bird’s nest strands that have been folded into the mixture rather than layered atop. The surface is then crowned with a quenelle of black caviar — each pearl firm, salt-sharp, and reflective as polished jet. The contrast between the warm crunch of the shell, the cool saline pop of caviar, and the mild marine sweetness of the crab interior is strikingly accomplished. One of the most technically refined spring rolls in the city.
18-Head Dried Abalone Poached in Pig’s Trotter Vinegar with Ginger Pearl Rice
The headline of the Spring Blossoms Rising Fortune Set and its most complex dish. The abalone is of the premier 18-head grade — meaning approximately 18 pieces per catty — and has been braised then finished in a pig’s trotter vinegar reduction whose dark caramel-brown colour and intensely layered aromatics (vinegar, five-spice, blackened garlic) coat each piece with a gloss that refracts light at the table. The flavour is stunning in its contradictions: the natural mineral sweetness of the abalone against the acidic reduction’s tartness, cut again by the clean ginger rice whose pearls are perfectly separate, each carrying a faint sheen of abalone braising liquor. Eating this dish is to witness the full range of the Cantonese palate in a single composition.
Critic’s Verdict
Peach Blossoms is the city’s most ambitious reunion dinner address this season. The Hakka-inflected yusheng and the abalone-in-vinegar centrepiece represent genuinely original culinary thinking. For tables who are prepared to invest — in both money and advance planning — this is the most rewarding experience on the list.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★★
Ambience ★★★★★
Value ★★★☆☆
Li Bai Cantonese Restaurant
Sheraton Towers Singapore, Lower Lobby, 39 Scotts Road
Price Range Set menus from 2 persons upward; call for pricing
Reservations +65 6839 5845
Available CNY festive period
Ambience & Setting
Li Bai is a room that rewards attention. Named for the Tang Dynasty’s most celebrated poet, it is dressed with jade and silver accents, fine celadon crockery, and silk-panelled partitions that can be drawn to create the private dining chambers for which this address is particularly known. Lighting is warm and directional, casting each dish in a pool of amber upon arrival. There is a settled confidence to the space — Li Bai has been quietly excellent since 1985, and the room feels earned rather than performed.
Dish by Dish
Toro & Hamachi Yusheng
A departure from the Cantonese tradition, this yusheng draws from Japan for its protein: buttery toro (bluefin belly) and hamachi (yellowtail) replace the conventional salmon, both fish marbled with fat that renders them satin-smooth against the tongue. The toro in particular is remarkable — sliced just thick enough to carry its own weight in the toss but thin enough to acquire a faint translucency at the edges. When combined with the daikon and plum dressing, the fat of the fish acts as an emulsifier, giving the finished salad a creamier body than most yu sheng achieves. An annual revelation.
Bird’s Nest Soup with Crab Meat
Served in a deep, straight-sided bowl of bone-white porcelain, this double-boiled soup is the paradigm of clarity. The broth is pale gold — superior stock reduced and clarified to near-transparency, tasting of sweet pork and dried scallop at once — and within it float strands of bird’s nest that have swelled into almost translucent, soft noodle-like ribbons. Crab meat is folded in loose pieces throughout, sweet and barely seasoned. The overall impression is of profound lightness and nourishment simultaneously: a dish that asks very little of the diner and gives back enormously.
Black Truffle Boston Lobster
Halved and baked in the shell, the lobster arrives surfaced with a black truffle cream whose dark, pitted surface contrasts dramatically with the vivid coral-red of the shell. The truffle fragrance — that dense, earthy, faintly sulphurous aroma that commands any room — rises in a column of steam. Beneath the cream, the lobster flesh is set just past translucency: the texture is at once resilient and yielding, and the natural sweetness of the Atlantic cold-water crustacean stands up admirably to the truffle’s insistence. A dish of real personality.
Barbecued Suckling Pig — Whole, Carved Tableside
Li Bai’s theatrical centrepiece. The pig arrives intact on a lacquered board, its skin the colour of polished mahogany, taut and impossibly crackling — the surface shattering at the server’s first score into irregular shards that gleam under the restaurant’s warm light. Beneath the skin: a thin layer of snow-white fat, then the pale, moist meat, and at the cavity, glutinous rice that has absorbed every drop of roasting dripping over hours in the oven. The rice is spectacular — each grain saturated with pork fat, five-spice, and the caramelised fond from the pig’s interior, forming a glossy, aromatic mass that is the evening’s most quietly addictive element. To be requested for the full table.
Critic’s Verdict
Li Bai represents the old guard at its finest — understated, consistent, technically immaculate. The toro-hamachi yusheng and the suckling pig are two of the most original and executed dishes across all nine venues. Private room bookings make this ideal for multigenerational family gatherings.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★★
Ambience ★★★★☆
Value ★★★★☆
Summer Pavilion
The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore, Level 3, 7 Raffles Avenue
Price Range Six- to eight-course menus; call for pricing
Reservations +65 6434 5286
Available Until 3 March 2026
Ambience & Setting
The Ritz-Carlton’s one-Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant occupies a corner of the third floor that commands the full breadth of the Marina Bay waterfront through floor-to-ceiling glass. The room is classical without being museum-like: pale celadon green panelling, carved rosewood furniture, and table settings of extraordinary precision. On reunion evenings a string quartet has been known to play at the entrance. The service standard is Ritz-Carlton through and through: guests are addressed by name from arrival, and every dietary preference noted at booking materialises as a considered adjustment mid-meal without discussion.
Dish by Dish
Yusheng — Abalone, Lobster, King Scallop or Salmon
Chef Cheung Siu Kong’s yusheng is an exercise in balance. The ingredients are premium but not ostentatiously stacked; the dressing — a proprietary house blend of plum sauce, sesame, and a faint note of aged vinegar — is calibrated to complement rather than dominate. The abalone version is the one to order: thin slices of braised abalone interspersed with raw lobster claw meat, both at their own temperature (the lobster faintly chilled, the abalone barely warm), so that the toss serves the additional function of harmonising them. The crispy elements — golden fried shallots and shredded wonton skin — dissolve gradually into the dressing as the table eats, transitioning the texture from crunchy to silky in real time.
Double-Boiled Superior Bird’s Nest with Crab Roe, Crab Meat & Black Caviar
The emblem dish of Summer Pavilion’s festive menu and one of the most layered soup courses in Singapore’s Cantonese landscape. The double-boiling process — slow steaming over a water bath for four hours — preserves the delicacy of each ingredient while driving the broth to an intensity of flavour that a conventional simmer could not achieve. The bird’s nest filaments have swollen into long, undulating strands, their texture somewhere between silken tofu and al dente glass noodle. Crab roe — the compressed, intensely flavoured ovaries — disintegrates in the broth, contributing a sunset-orange hue and a deep, sweet-marine richness. Black caviar pearls crown the surface, delivering a final burst of saline contrast. The colour of the finished soup, viewed from above, moves from gold at the edges through orange at mid-depth to the specked black surface: a painting in three registers.
Pen Cai — 10-Layer Premium Hotpot
This is Summer Pavilion’s defining festive statement and one of the most technically demanding dishes on any reunion dinner menu in the city. The pot arrives sealed, its contents stratified in ten deliberate layers from bottom to top: sea perch, fish maw, mushrooms, pork trotter, sea cucumber, tofu, Hokkaido scallops, abalone, and, at the apex, an entire lobster tail lacquered in reduced oyster sauce. The order of assembly matters — the bottom layers have been cooking slowly in the broth for hours, their flavours saturating upward, while the seafood near the surface remains pristine. When the lid is removed at table, the steam carries a complex aromatic signature: oceanic, meaty, deeply vegetal. Ladled carefully, each diner receives a cross-section of all ten layers, and eating through them from top to bottom charts a journey from brininess and sweetness to profound earthiness.
Steamed Dong Xing Grouper with Minced Pork, Preserved Vegetables & Black Bean
The grouper — a deep-bodied reef fish whose white, firm flesh breaks into large, clean flakes — is steamed whole and presented across a long oval platter. The surface gleams under a sauce built from fermented black bean, preserved mustard greens, and rendered pork fat: a dark, intensely savoury, slightly funky combination that the mild, sweet grouper flesh mediates with effortless grace. The preserved vegetables have been rinsed of excess salt and scattered as a garnish, their amber colour and faint crunch providing both visual contrast and textural relief.
Critic’s Verdict
Summer Pavilion remains the gold standard for Michelin-quality Cantonese festive dining in Singapore. The pen cai is perhaps the most accomplished version in the city, and the bird’s nest soup achieves a complexity and visual beauty that few competitors approach. Essential.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★★
Ambience ★★★★★
Value ★★★★☆
Cherry Garden by Chef Fei
Mandarin Oriental Singapore, Floor 5, 5 Raffles Avenue
Price Range Four set menus available; call for pricing
Reservations +65 6885 3500
Available CNY festive period
Ambience & Setting
Reopened under the direction of Chef Fei, formerly of Man Fu Yuan, Cherry Garden arrives at its first Lunar New Year as a newly minted address with old credentials. The room is architecturally striking — an internal garden courtyard at the Mandarin Oriental’s heart, with cherry blossom motifs in carved teak and a canopy of silk cherry blossoms suspended from the ceiling. During CNY, the silk blossoms are replaced with real flowering branches imported from Japan, and the combined perfume of cherry blossom and the kitchen’s clay-pot aromatics creates an olfactory signature unique to this address. Staff are exceptionally well-briefed and clearly proud of the kitchen’s identity.
Dish by Dish
Chaoshan-Style Yusheng — Julienned Vegetables, Crispy Taro, Wujiang Salted Vegetables & Sour Plum Sauce
Chef Fei’s yusheng is the most coherent reinterpretation of the form in Singapore this season, because its departures from convention are rooted in a specific culinary geography — the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong — rather than novelty for its own sake. The base is a landscape of julienned radish (white and pickled purple), cucumber ribbons, and crispy taro batons whose golden, honeycomb interior shatters in strata under the tooth. The Wujiang salted vegetables add a pungent, fermented depth that the sweet sour plum base dressing navigates with precision. The plum sauce itself — housemade, blended with lemon juice and a whisper of fresh chilli — is a revelation: fruity, acidic, gently hot, with none of the cloying sweetness of commercial versions. Optional toppings of lobster, geoduck clam, or Atlantic salmon complete the picture, though the vegetable base is strong enough to stand without them.
Pan-Fried Lotus Root Patties Stuffed with Crab Meat
Lotus root is one of the most texturally demanding vegetables in Cantonese cooking: its starch content means that, improperly handled, it becomes gluey; correctly prepared, it achieves a uniquely satisfying crunch-and-give. Here, sliced rounds of lotus root are sandwiched around a filling of sweet crab meat and scallop mousse, then pan-fried until the root surfaces are amber-gold and aromatic, their natural earthiness intensified by the Maillard reaction. Cut open, each patty reveals a cross-section of the lotus root’s characteristic hole pattern framing the pearlescent crab filling: visually extraordinary. The flavour is a study in contrast — the sweet marine crab against the mineral, slightly tannin-tinged root.
Seared Xisha Lobster with Creamy Garlic Sauce
Xisha lobsters — sourced from the South China Sea’s Paracel Islands — are prized for their particularly sweet, dense flesh, which lacks the slightly iodine edge of some Atlantic varieties. Here they are split and seared until the cut surfaces carry a faint caramelised crust, then finished in a sauce built from slow-roasted garlic cream, Shaoxing wine, and reduced superior stock. The sauce is a pale ivory, barely coloured, its aroma dominated by sweet roasted garlic rather than raw pungency. Against the lobster’s coral-white flesh, it creates a visual composition of extraordinary delicacy: ivory on ivory, differentiated only by the lobster’s faint natural iridescence.
Bird’s Nest with Zesty Yuzu Honey Dessert
The dessert that most clearly announces Chef Fei’s vision for the restaurant. Bird’s nest in a yuzu-honey broth is served in a small, handleless porcelain cup whose interior has been lightly coated with osmanthus-infused syrup. The yuzu — a Japanese citrus with a floral, aromatic tartness reminiscent of grapefruit and mandarin simultaneously — gives the broth a brightness that is entirely absent from conventional bird’s nest desserts. The nest strands drift in the pale-gold liquid like slow, floating calligraphy. Cold, and barely sweet, it is a palate cleanser as much as a dessert.
Critic’s Verdict
Cherry Garden by Chef Fei emerges as the season’s most intellectually compelling new address. The Chaoshan framework gives Chef Fei’s menu a coherence and identity that elevates it beyond the merely excellent to the genuinely distinctive. The lotus root patties and the Xisha lobster are dishes worth visiting repeatedly.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★☆
Ambience ★★★★★
Value ★★★★☆
Cassia
Capella Singapore, 1 The Knolls, Sentosa Island
Price Range From S$248++ per person
Reservations +65 6591 5045
Available Until 3 March 2026
Ambience & Setting
To reach Cassia requires a short pilgrimage from the mainland — across the bridge to Sentosa, through the grounds of Capella’s colonial-era estate, past the black-tiled infinity pool and the bougainvillea-draped heritage wings. The restaurant itself is intimate by the standards of its peers: perhaps twelve tables in the main room, each set with the quiet opulence that defines Capella’s sensibility. Views of the estate’s tropical gardens replace the city’s skyline, lending the experience a contemplative quality absent from the waterfront venues. One arrives and immediately slows down. This is by design.
Dish by Dish
Prosperity Lo Hei with Housemade Golden Pineapple Sauce
Cassia’s yusheng is deceptively simple in its presentation — a restrained, carefully proportioned arrangement rather than the towering maximalism of some competitors — and the pineapple sauce is its centrepiece. Housemade from fresh Sarawak pineapple, slow-reduced with palm sugar and tempered with fish sauce, it is a luminous golden-orange, intensely sweet-sour and tropical, with a viscosity that coats each ingredient as the toss proceeds. The result has a distinctly Southeast Asian identity — the pineapple bringing associations of the region’s cooking into a form that is officially Cantonese. Refreshing and original.
Braised Six-Head South African Abalone
The six-head grade — sixteen per catty, each therefore substantial — is braised in an oyster and superior stock reduction until the surface achieves the characteristic dark-caramel gloss that signals correctly executed long-braised abalone. Cross-sectioned at table, the interior reveals a texture that is impossible to achieve through any method other than patient braising: uniformly smooth, moderately firm, with a grain that runs cleanly beneath the knife. The sauce pools on the plate in a deep mahogany lake, and the abalone sits in it like an island, its surface barely rippled by the ladle.
Steamed Australian Rock Lobster Braised with Aged Hua Diao Wine
Hua Diao — aged Chinese Shaoxing wine, at its best approaching the complexity of an amontillado sherry — is used here as a primary braising medium rather than a background seasoning, and the difference is discernible in every element of the dish. The lobster’s braising liquor is amber-coloured and deep, carrying the wine’s notes of dried fruit, roasted grain, and oxidative nuttiness, and the lobster flesh within has absorbed these flavours while retaining its natural sweetness. The wine’s residual sugars have reduced to a light glaze on the shell’s outer surface. Service on a bed of lightly wilted iceberg creates a contrasting freshness.
Chef’s Trio Platter — Drunken Prawn, Crispy Five-Spice Pork Belly & Steamed Crystal Dumpling
This contemporary trio platter is Cassia’s most modern statement on the menu, and the most revealing of the kitchen’s sensibility: disciplined, eclectic, and quietly original. The drunken prawn — marinated for twenty-four hours in yellow Shaoxing wine — carries its spirit on the surface: the shell is translucent and faintly wine-stained, the flesh within raw-firm and vibrant with fermented grain. The pork belly is roasted until the skin is a pale, brittle amber lattice above a layer of white fat above pink, yielding meat: the textural progression is textbook. The crystal dumpling — a pleated half-moon of translucent starch pastry, filled with fresh shiitake and black truffle — provides the meal’s most delicate note, its surface gleaming like sea glass.
Critic’s Verdict
Cassia is the most serene and distinctive dinner experience on the list, its removal from the city centre a feature rather than a limitation. The highest-rated restaurant in this survey (4.7★ on Google), and deserving of the accolade. Book the private room for the family patriarch.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★★
Ambience ★★★★★
Value ★★★★☆
Jiang Nan Chun
Four Seasons Hotel Singapore, Level 2, 190 Orchard Boulevard
Price Range From S$218++ per person
Reservations +65 6831 7653
Available Festive lunch and dinner
Ambience & Setting
Four Seasons’ Chinese restaurant occupies a room whose proportions are unusually generous for an Orchard Road address: high ceilings, widely spaced tables, and a palette of lacquered red, polished gold, and dark walnut that feels authentically oriented without recourse to pastiche. Natural light filters through frosted glass screens during lunch service; by dinner, the lighting transitions to a warm amber-directed scheme that makes the gold crockery appear to glow from within. Chef Alan Chan’s recent return to the kitchen has re-energised a brigade that had plateaued slightly, and the energy in the room is newly purposeful.
Dish by Dish
Prosperity Lobster Yu Sheng with Abalone, Surf Clams & House Dressing
At S$288 and S$388 tiers, this is among the most premium yusheng offerings on the island, and it presents accordingly: lobster is piled generously in the centre, with abalone draped to one side and surf clam slices fanned on the other. The clams are the most underrated element — brined, just-cooked, their surface silvery and their texture just slightly chewy in the way that gives the palate something to work against. The house dressing of plum sauce and pineapple paste is hand-shredded from fresh fruit and combines the tartness of plum with the tropical sweetness of pineapple in a proportion that changes subtly with the ratio of each to the season’s fruit quality. Root vegetables are shredded by hand into irregular, texture-dense threads.
Signature Pen Cai
Chef Chan’s pen cai is assembled layer by layer in the kitchen over two days, with each ingredient subjected to its own preparation — abalone braised separately, sea cucumber slow-hydrated and simmered, lobster poached and set aside — before being combined for the final reduction. The result, when the covered claypot arrives at table, is a vertical tapestry of the ocean and land: the summit is lobster and abalone, dark and glistening; below them, layers of fish maw and sea cucumber in progressively deeper hues of amber and umber. The broth, by the time it reaches the table, is an extraordinary reduction: the cooking liquors of every ingredient pooled and concentrated, its colour a deep, dark copper, its flavour an umami continuum that lengthens on the palate. It lingers, memorably, for half an hour.
Double-Boiled Soups
Offered across multiple varieties — black chicken with morel, shark’s fin melon with conpoy, pig’s lung with almond — these are prepared in sealed ceramic urns over a water bath for a minimum of four hours. The double-boiling method produces a broth of startling clarity — physically clear as pale amber glass and tasting of pure ingredient essence without any muddiness or bitter note. The black chicken version yields a broth of deep caramel-gold, tasting intensely of poultry sweetness and the dried mushroom’s earthy bass note. Morel mushrooms surface in the broth as dark, honeycomb-pitted caps: their texture is silken, their flavour rich and autumnal.
Critic’s Verdict
Jiang Nan Chun’s reunion offering is reliable, accomplished, and consistently satisfying. Chef Chan’s pen cai is one of the two best in the city this season, and the double-boiled soups represent this ancient preparation method at its most refined. An excellent choice for diners who value technical consistency above novelty.
Ratings
Food ★★★★☆
Service ★★★★☆
Ambience ★★★★☆
Value ★★★★☆
Summer Palace
Conrad Singapore Orchard, Level 3, 1 Cuscaden Road
Price Range S$368++ per person (Flavours of Martell pairing menu)
Reservations +65 6725 3288
Available Until 3 March 2026
Ambience & Setting
The one-Michelin-starred Summer Palace at Conrad Orchard occupies a room of deliberate elegance: arched doorways frame a dining space whose palette of ivory and gold has been calibrated to flatter both the food and its diners. In the Flavours of Martell format, the cognac partnership brings a further dimension to the evening — decanters of Cordon Bleu and XXO are presented at each course, their amber depths catching the light in a way that mirrors the dish beneath. Service is polished to a degree that suggests every front-of-house team member has been extensively cross-trained in both cognac service and classical Cantonese hospitality.
Dish by Dish
Geoduck & Crispy Kurobuta Pork Prosperity Toss
The most unconventional yusheng in the survey. Geoduck clam — the giant Pacific bivalve whose long siphon is prized in Cantonese cuisine for its intense, sweet brininess — is here thinly sliced and served semi-raw alongside strips of crispy Kurobuta pork belly whose rendered fat has contracted into a translucent amber glaze. The combination — raw seafood sweetness against crackling pork richness — is an act of genuine audacity that the kitchen’s technical confidence makes seamless. Pomelo segments provide a citrus reset between these competing intensities, and the house-blended dressing ties the composition together with a soy-and-citrus acidity.
Hot Stone-Braised Bird’s Nest & Fish Maw Soup (gently accented with Martell XXO)
The Martell XXO pairing is applied with surgical restraint: a few drops of cognac are introduced into the broth at service, not to flavour it directly but to carry the soup’s aromatics. The cognac’s own dried fruit and oxidative notes amplify the fish maw’s gelatinous richness and the bird’s nest’s delicate sweetness in a way that is unmistakeable but never overwrought. The broth itself is a masterwork of clarity and body: clear as amber glass, its surface undisturbed by any particle, yet carrying a weight on the palate that speaks of long, slow cooking. Fish maw floats in translucent, undulating sheets; bird’s nest strands move through the liquid like calligraphy.
Braised 18-Head South African Abalone in Supreme Oyster Sauce
In calibre, this is equivalent to Cassia’s six-head offering, but Chef’s approach to the sauce is markedly different: where Cassia’s relies on the abalone’s own braising liquor for depth, Summer Palace’s oyster sauce is a separate, independent construction — a blend of premium oyster extract, reduced superior stock, and Shaoxing wine — into which the braised abalone is finished. The result is a sauce of extraordinary gloss and depth, its surface carrying a visible sheen that reflects the room’s lighting like a dark mirror. The abalone itself is served on a bed of stir-fried gai lan whose jade colour and slight bitterness provide both visual and gustatory contrast.
Steamed Lobster with Organic Garlic Trio
Three preparations of garlic crown the steamed lobster: raw minced, slow-roasted to amber sweetness, and black-fermented (its complex molasses-like intensity subdued to a gentle background note). Together they form a gradient of the allium’s flavour spectrum — pungent, sweet, and deeply savoury — that proceeds from front of palate to back as the dish is consumed. The lobster beneath is barely steamed, its flesh at the point of translucency where texture is maximally yielding, and its natural sweetness is fully intact. One of the most conceptually considered main courses in Singapore’s festive dining landscape.
Critic’s Verdict
The Flavours of Martell format elevates Summer Palace’s already-accomplished menu into something close to a total dining experience. The cognac pairing is the season’s most inventive hospitality concept, and the kitchen’s execution of the geoduck yusheng and the garlic-trio lobster is exceptional.
Ratings
Food ★★★★★
Service ★★★★★
Ambience ★★★★☆
Value ★★★★☆
A Final Note
All nine restaurants in this guide represent the upper tier of Singapore’s hotel Chinese dining scene, and any one of them would constitute a worthy setting for a reunion of significance. The critical distinctions lie in character: those seeking unapologetic classical Cantonese mastery should look to Summer Pavilion and Li Bai; those drawn to creative reinvention will find their most compelling evening at Cherry Garden by Chef Fei or Peach Blossoms; and those for whom setting is inseparable from the meal should make the journey to Cassia at Capella Sentosa. One principle holds across all nine: book early. The reunion dinner is perhaps Singapore’s most anticipated annual dining event, and tables at these addresses are finite.
“Gong Xi Fa Cai — may your table be full and your year auspicious.”