By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia.
It’s late morning, and the light is doing most of the work.
It pours through the high windows of Colony, at The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore, spilling across white tablecloths and the vintage prints on the walls. Marina Bay hums somewhere outside, but in here the room feels a step removed from it — slower, quieter, held.
I go to the carving station first. I always do.
A roast rests under the warm lamp, its edges bronzed and crackling, the centre still pink when the knife goes in. Juices gather beneath the blade and pool on the board. The carver works without hurry, laying down slices thin enough to fold. The smell of it — that deep, fatty warmth of roasting meat — reaches you before you’re anywhere near the plate.
I take a slice, and then I wander to the cold seafood on ice and take a prawn. Sweet, clean, cold. I eat it without sauce, because it doesn’t need one, and that small fact tells me more than any menu could.
This is what Colony does. It builds a buffet around seven open kitchens, each one its own small world with its own team — Indian curries in one corner, Chinese dishes in another, local plates, Western grills, the seafood, the desserts. Nothing feels thrown together. You move through it the way you’d move through a conversation, one thought leading gently to the next.
And here is the thing I keep turning over. In the middle of all that international abundance sits Hainanese chicken rice. A pot of curry that could have come from a shophouse down the road. The food we grew up on, plated in a hotel dining room with linen and quiet service.
That’s not a small thing.
Because a hotel buffet, for many of us, is how we mark the days that matter. The anniversary. The graduation. The birthday where three generations pull two tables together and someone insists on paying. We don’t go to Colony for a Tuesday lunch. We go when there’s something to hold onto — and we bring our home food with us into the grand room, and eat it there, together, on the good plates.
For a broader look at how hotel buffets turn abundance into a celebration table, read top hotel buffets in Singapore
There’s a tension in that I’ve never quite settled. The abundance asks you to take everything, and something in me wants to take less — one perfect slice of roast, one sweet prawn, the chicken rice I could get anywhere but chose to eat here. The room offers you the world. What you reach for, often, is what already tastes like home.
Maybe that’s what’s worth noticing. Not the scale of it. The restraint inside the scale — the plate you build when you could build any plate, and what that plate says about you.
I finish the roast slowly. The light has shifted a little on the tablecloth.
Somewhere behind me, a family is singing, badly and happily, over a cake. Nobody minds.
Some meals feed you. A few mark the hour you’ll remember later, when the light was warm and the people were all still at the table.
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By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. It is not yet seven, and the uncle at Heap Seng Leong has the pot going. He works the sock strainer over the tin cup with both hands, dipping and lifting, dipping and lifting, coaxing the coffee through the worn cloth. Steam rises between his fingers. The smell…
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It was raining the afternoon I went. Not the polite kind, the sort that drums against the glass of Guoco Tower and makes you glad you’re already underground. I hadn’t planned on soondubu. I’d planned on something quick, something I could eat between the errands piling up in my head. But the rain does something…
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By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. The lift doors open on a floor of Cuppage Plaza that has seen better decades. Peeling signage. A corridor that smells faintly of old carpet and cigarette smoke drifting from somewhere. Then a door slides shut behind me, and the noise falls away. Inside Hanashizuku Japanese Cuisine, the…
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The first time I ordered kimchi jjigae in Singapore, I made a small mistake. It came bubbling in a stone pot, and I ate it like soup, spoonful after spoonful, straight down, until my mouth was on fire and the bowl was half gone. The auntie across the counter watched me for a moment, then…
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Raffles Place Food Has the Restaurants That Understand the CBD Lunch Rush
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I used to think lunch in the CBD was a lost cause. You get an hour, maybe less. The lift takes ten minutes just to reach the ground floor. By the time you’ve queued, ordered, and found a corner to eat in, you’re already checking the clock. For a while, I gave up and just…
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By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. The pot has been going for a while now, and the whole kitchen knows it. Steam curls up from the surface, carrying that sharp-sour smell that reaches you before anything else. It’s not a gentle aroma. It pricks at the back of your throat a little, makes your…
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Vegetarian Asian Dishes at The Boneless Kitchen: A Korean Meal Built on Kimchi, Rice, and Restraint
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I didn’t expect to find Korean comfort food in an office building near Tai Seng. But there I was, on a Wednesday a little past 7pm, standing outside The Commerze @ Irving wondering if I’d read the address wrong. This isn’t the part of Singapore you go to for dinner. It’s the part you leave…
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The Soy Glaze on Kyoto’s Forgotten Rice Crackers
Dio Asahi | August 5, 2026
By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia. The old man works close to the coals, and the smell reaches me before I see what he’s doing. Soy meeting heat. That dark, caramel-edged smell that tightens something in your chest. His brush moves in short strokes across a rack of rice crackers, back and forth, patient….
