You wouldn’t look twice at the building. Set within an unassuming apartment complex in Singapore, there is no signage, no anticipation of what’s inside. If you didn’t have the address, you’d miss it entirely.
This is Poon’s Supper Club, a dining experience hosted by Kevin, a Fiji-born Chinese chef and photographer. The supper club is an extension of his family’s story. His father, Poon Pak Noi, migrated from Hoiping in southern China to Nadi, Fiji, where he opened Poon’s Restaurant in 1970, a Chinese place that became central to the town’s dining culture.
Now, in Singapore, that legacy lives on. The food at the experience doesn’t settle into any one cuisine. Between courses, Kevin shares stories of migration, ingredients and techniques travelling across oceans over centuries, influencing each other to create and recreate new cuisines. From a ceviche that leans Pacific to a Nepalese-style momos that feel grounding and familiar. You eventually stop trying to place it in a box and realise this is a kind of Fijian-Cantonese-Singaporean-Indian diasporic cuisine that tells his family’s story. A cuisine you didn’t know existed.
To understand why something like Poon’s Supper Club feels so at home in Singapore, you have to understand the city itself.
Singapore’s culinary identity has never been singular. It has been assembled through waves of migration. Chinese, Malay, Indian, Peranakan, Eurasian communities, each bringing with them not just recipes, but entire food philosophies. What emerges is not a melting pot in the reductive sense, but something far more nuanced, a layered food culture where histories sit side by side.
This is a city where a single day of eating can take you from Michelin-starred hawker stalls serving recipes perfected over generations to some of the world’s most awarded fine-dining restaurants. Even institutions like UNESCO have recognised this. Singapore’s hawker culture was inscribed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage, not just for the food itself, but for what it represents.
And yet, to stop at hawker centres is to only scratch the surface because increasingly, Singapore’s most exciting food experiences are unfolding in quieter, more intimate spaces shaped not by scale, but by story.
In recent years, some of Singapore’s most interesting meals have moved into more intimate settings. Private dining rooms, supper clubs, chef-led counters, even theatrical, game-led formats — often housed within homes or small, self-contained spaces, and more often than not discovered through word of mouth. What they offer is the chance to encounter food outside familiar frameworks.
This is where Singapore becomes particularly compelling, even for the most well-travelled diner.
At one end of the spectrum are institutions that hold the line on tradition. Places like Guan Hoe Soon or the Peranakan Mansion set along Joo Chiat Road, where Peranakan cuisine (that of the famous Crazy Rich Asians) continues to be served much as it has been for decades. The setting, a colourful heritage shophouse preserved exactly how it would have been a century ago.
Alongside this is the newer, more experimental energy.
Experiences like Absurdities take a different approach altogether. A six-course, multi-room dinner that blends theatrical storytelling with culinary craft. Guests move through spaces as the meal unfolds, each course shifting the tone and setting.
Between these two ends sits a growing middle ground of chefs and hosts exploring food histories that don’t always have a fixed place within Singapore’s dining canon. Diasporic cuisines shaped by longer, less linear migration routes. It’s the kind of cooking that doesn’t always show up on lists and guides when travelling to a new place.
Poon’s Supper Club sits squarely within this space.
For a city so frequently described through its food, Singapore retains an ability to surprise. Part of that lies in its structure. The coexistence of established culinary institutions with smaller, less visible formats allows for constant renewal. New ideas don’t replace the old; they sit alongside them.
It also lies in the diversity of its influences. Migration has not just shaped the past of Singapore’s food culture, it continues to shape its present.
Experiences like Poon’s are a reflection of that ongoing movement. They don’t aim to define Singaporean cuisine, but to expand how it’s understood. And often, they exist just out of sight. It’s in places like these that Singapore reveals itself not just as a food destination, but as one of the most compelling culinary cities in the world.
