For all its bona fides—cleanest city, best airport, street food mecca—Singapore remains infamous for its prim veneer. Even the crowds at soccer games are polite. But projects like the Green Plan, a bold 10-year sustainable development program, show that change is underway. The latest ventures of young Singaporeans—dreamy restaurants, thoughtful tours, intimate home-dining experiences—reveal surprising sides of the city. Forward-looking hotels and the just-opened Thomson-East Coast MRT line, which snakes from the Orchard shopping belt through the culinary hub of Maxwell to the supertrees of Gardens by the Bay, invite visitors old and new. Less inhibited, more soulful: That’s the Singapore of tomorrow.
Hungry isle
A group of atmospheric new restaurants is redefining destination dining in the compact city-state. A rickshaw depot in the early 1900s, Born, is in a Edwardian-style building on Chinatown’s fringes now houses a dramatic dining room where original artworks, like a giant, billowing Peter Gentenaar paper sculpture, hang from the ceiling—a fitting stage for the theatrical flair of chef Zor Tan’s elevated Chinese French cooking. Chef Kevin Wong’s ode to the cuisine of the Malay archipelago, Seroja, won a Michelin star just months after opening, and it’s well deserved. From the briny oyster leaves grown at a local vertical farm to the nutty red rice sourced from a tribe in Borneo, this gently lit spot is among the best at harvesting the region’s diverse flavors.
