OdetteDinner on the ground floor of the gallery

His grandmother's name

National Gallery Singapore, Singapore — Contemporary French cooking, built on vegetables and origin.

The restaurant is named after the chef's grandmother. What Julien Royer says he took from her is that the best dishes can be made from the plainest ingredients, and that the difference lies in the small extra thing put in.

He grew up in Cantal, in central France, where the family farmed for four generations, and he was picking things in the garden as a child. His first kitchen was Michel Bras in Laguiole; then the French West Indies, then London; in 2008 he settled in Singapore. He now runs two other restaurants as well, and trains cooks.

When he arrived he cooked classic French food and used produce from France. Over the years the cooking loosened: vegetables, flowers and herbs now come mostly from farms on the island, and the dishes have opened up with them.

A restaurant inside a museum

Odette sits inside the National Gallery Singapore and opened in 2015. The cooking is contemporary French: a French base, with produce and method following this part of the world, so the vegetables and herbs carry as much of the menu as the protein does. The room is quiet, the service formal, and the whole thing is arranged around a fixed number of courses rather than a list.

Lunch comes in two versions, four courses and six, and dinner runs a single menu; a separate vegetarian menu of six courses is available at both services, so the count of courses stays fixed either way. The kitchen adjusts every day to what has arrived, which is why dietary needs are best stated at the time of booking rather than on the night.