Sitting across from us, in the private dining room that allows guests a direct view into the kitchen, chef Sebastien Lepinoy wants to make something expressly clear. “Les Amis is not an institution. I hate that term. Once you call something an institution, it doesn’t move; it doesn’t change.”
And yet, as we speak to others for this story, the term is constantly used. How else are people meant to describe a restaurant that celebrates 30 years of continuous operations and, that is, for all intents and purposes, the country’s first independent fine-dining restaurant.
Les Amis opened on March 15 in 1994, but its roots trace back to 1983 when Desmond Lim, a young stockbroker, deepened his wine passion through the Draycott Wine Club, the now legendary wine appreciation group led by one of Singapore’s most famous pioneer wine collectors and writers, the late Dr NK Yong. A gastronomic tour of France in 1984 inspired Lim to emulate Europe’s independent fine-dining ethos in Singapore.
Singapore’s restaurant scene, now a global culinary destination with approximately 5,400 restaurants, was markedly different in the late 1980s. Western fine-dining was then predominantly housed within five-star hotels. The big names back then were places such as Le Restaurant de France at Le Meridien, Latour at Shangri-La, Fourchette at Mandarin Oriental, Maxim’s at Regent Singapore, and Harbour Grill & Oyster Bar at Hilton Singapore.
Wanting to start Singapore’s first independent fine-dining restaurant meant finding the right partners. Enter Ignatius “Iggy” Chan and Justin Quek, two ambitious and talented friends, former classmates and former colleagues. “I first met [Lim] when he began visiting Fourchette,” shares Chan, who was the restaurant’s sommelier at the time. “We got to know each other because Desmond
