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.
Ordering Lunch From Co Hai Banh Mi, and Finding Out the Definition of Good Food Delivery
Dio Asahi | July 7, 2026
I ordered lunch from Co Hai Banh Mi & Phở Vietnamese Restaurant on a Thursday at 12:08pm, which is probably the worst and most honest time to test delivery food. It was raining lightly, the kind of Singapore lunch rain that makes every rider slower and every office worker hungrier. I had been thinking about…
Orchard Plaza Food: Hidden Japanese Restaurants and Local Eats Near Somerset
Eat Drink Asia Team | July 4, 2026
Orchard Plaza is one of those buildings we kept walking past before we properly understood it. From the street, it looks more like an office block than a dinner plan. But over repeated visits, usually after work or during odd lunch windows, we’ve found that the real charm sits behind lift doors, quiet corridors, and…
-
Salted Egg, Properly Treated: Sauce, Not Shortcut
Eda Wong | July 3, 2026
By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. The wok station is already hot when the cook lowers the flame. In the narrow back of a Singapore zi char kitchen, the air smells of butter, curry leaves, and the faint mineral edge of salted duck egg. A metal spatula presses cooked yolks through oil until they…
-
Fish Sauce at the Table: The Quiet Work of Fish Sauce
Dio Asahi | July 1, 2026
At a narrow lunch table in Bangkok, the bottle arrives before the rice has stopped steaming. It is clear glass, refilled many times, its plastic cap slightly stained from years of fingers and heat. Beside it sits a small bowl of sliced chillies floating in amber liquid, the cut edges pale and sharp. Someone nudges…
-
Eat 3 Bowls Bendemeer Review: A Taiwanese Comfort Food That Delivers
Eda Wong | June 30, 2026
I ordered Eat 3 Bowls @ Bendemeer on a Thursday at about 11:45am, which is my favourite test window for delivery food. It’s close enough to lunch for the kitchen to be in rhythm, but not so late that every rider in the neighbourhood is already fighting the office crowd. By 12:25pm, the bag was…
-
ABC Hokkien Mee After Renovation: What to Expect When the Woks Return
Dio Asahi | June 27, 2026
When I first walked past a hawker centre undergoing major renovations, the absolute silence unsettled me. The usual rhythmic scrape of metal spatulas against cast-iron woks was gone, replaced by the hum of construction. It made me realise just how much our culinary journeys are tied to the physical spaces we eat in. Right now,…
-
Claypot Rice Crusts: Listening for the First Crackle
Eda Wong | June 26, 2026
The narrow alleyway in Yau Ma Tei smells of charcoal and dark soy sauce, a thick coastal humidity pressing against the glow of the stoves. An elderly cook stands before a row of blackened sand-clay pots, a long metal tong in his right hand. He does not watch the flames; he listens to them. There…
-
Shiok Hokkien Mee and the Pleasure of a Plate That Clings: Tiong Bahru Hokkien Mee at Midday
Eat Drink Asia Team | June 25, 2026
I have always believed that the true test of a neighbourhood’s food scene happens right in the middle of the day. When the midday hunger hits, you don’t want a tasting menu; you want a fast, flavourful culinary journey that hits the spot. That is exactly what led me, representing the Eat Drink Asia team,…
-
When Curry Learns to Breathe
Dio Asahi | June 24, 2026
The rain taps lightly against the glass of a quiet Japanese diner, turning the pavement outside a slick, silver grey. Inside, the bowl arrives with steam first, then colour: pumpkin orange, aubergine purple, and a dark curve of chicken set against a broth that looks too light to carry so much heat. The spoon touches…
-
Hong Heng Fried Sotong Prawn Mee: Where Squid Turns Chewy, Broth Turns Glossy, and Time Turns Quiet
Eda Wong | June 23, 2026
There is something deeply comforting about a hawker centre right before the lunch rush hits. I visited Tiong Bahru Market on a Tuesday around 10:30 am, hoping to beat the infamous queue at Hong Heng Fried Sotong Prawn Mee. Even at that early hour, a line of six people had already formed, waiting quietly under…
