Eight years after closing Restaurant André in 2018 at what he called ‘a moment of perfection’, the Taiwanese chef André Chiang is back in Singapore. He has chosen to return inside one of Asia’s most mythic addresses: the former Raffles Grill at Raffles Singapore, a high-ceilinged room that has hosted coronation dinners and colonial galas since 1887. That year – the hotel’s founding – gives the 42-seat restaurant its name, and its culinary conceit: a menu that moves through time rather than through courses.
Wallpaper* dines at 1887 by André
The mood: whimsical grandeur
Inspired by the idea of a leafy, tropical conservatory, the Bangkok-based interior designer Bill Bensley has kept the room's colonial bones – arched colonnades, original herringbone parquet – while imprinting his trademark extravagance into every surface. Towering metal-foiled Traveller's Palms rise toward a trompe-l’oeil glass ceiling complete with powder blue sky and wispy white clouds hand-painted by Bensley, whilst mechanised punkah fans, their blades cut in the shape of great green hearts, flap slowly overhead.
A curved glass cabinet at the entrance displays the hotel's silverware collection, including antique pieces buried in the hotel grounds during the Japanese occupation and unearthed after the war; and at the far end, a raised semicircular bar – its stools monogrammed, its marble top deep enough to dine at – accommodates walk-ins and solo diners. The room is unapologetically theatrical, and no one minds at all.
The food: time, unravelled
Chiang spent over a year in Raffles Singapore’s archives, rifling and leafing through sepia menus from the hotel’s past. What he found was quietly startling, not least wild rose ice cream, turtle soup as a Victorian luxury, and Duck Apicius roasted with ancient Roman spice. The result of all this gastro forensics is a menu that Chiang has conceived as a time machine in which each course represents a different era, and each table, depending on what is ordered, sits in a different year on the 1887-to-present continuum.
In practice, this means an intriguing trawl through nearly 60 dishes – Victorian, Singaporean and Chiang's personal signatures all present simultaneously – that dismantles the conventional tasting sequence entirely. For those who prefer a guide, three formulas named after French cultural figures – Monet, Eiffel, and Bernhardt – offer a curated path through the labyrinth.
But the invitation to roam freely is the point. A preview tasting yielded Légumes en Vessie Sarah Bernhardt – vegetables cooked inside a pig's bladder using a Belle Époque technique all but vanished from contemporary kitchens – alongside a more contemporary East-meets-West Blanquette de Bak Kut Teh and a Green Curry King Oyster Mushroom that needed, besides sheer culinary chutzpah, no historical justification at all. ‘You can stop anywhere you want,’ Chiang says. ‘Mix and match. Decide which time period you want to go to.’
Unlike his previous restaurants, which he tends to close just at the height of their fame and move on, 1887 by André is conceived as something more permanent – a place, he says, that generations of diners can keep coming back to.
Appropriately, the kitchen is helmed day-to-day by Ben Wang and Roy Kuo, both trained and seasoned by Chiang at RAW in Taipei, a restaurant he ran, he says, as ‘a gallery, a museum, an exhibition hall’ whilst staging seasons of grand classic French cooking and VR dinners before closing it at the end of 2024. A culinary academy will open in its place later this year.
For a chef who returned his stars, closed his restaurants at their peaks and built a cooking school, 1887 by André feels less like a comeback story (which, of course, it is) than an act of custodianship – for a city, and a culinary culture, he has never really stopped calling home.
1887 by André is at Raffles Singapore, 1 Beach Road, Singapore 189673