Singapore for foodies

Best restaurants

Singapore eats across every axis at once, which is why a curated restaurant list here has to work harder than most. The hawker centre is the country's headline act, and rightly so, but the sit-down room deserves its own map: the neighbourhood trattoria that pulls in three generations of the same family on a Sunday, the corner curry house that stays open until midnight, the steakhouse hidden inside a shophouse podium beside a canal. This list stays away from the tasting-menu circuit and the marina-view hotels; it points instead at twelve restaurants that reward a taxi ride into a residential postcode. You will find Italian in four different registers, Thai royal cooking in an Arcadia Road bungalow, Spanish sharing plates in a Bukit Timah house, an Indian institution on Casuarina Road, and a seafood room on Stevens Road that argues, convincingly, for local cooking at a white tablecloth. Every address, phone number and service window below is grounded in the venue's own listing. Come hungry, and come with the postcode written down; several of these are worth the detour precisely because they are not where the tourist buses stop.