Les Amis

Les Amis is a French restaurant with three Michelin stars in the Shaw Centre on Scotts Road, in the Orchard area of Singapore. Sébastien Lepinoy leads its kitchen as the group's director of culinary and operations.

When it opened in 1994, Les Amis was the first independent fine-dining restaurant in Singapore. Its name is French for ‘friends’, and its founders were the restaurateur and sommelier Ignatius Chan and the chef Justin Quek, backed by Desmond Lim and Chong Yap Seng. After Chan and Quek left, the kitchen passed to Gunther Hubrechsen and later to Thomas Mayr and then Armin Leitgeb. Lepinoy, who spent 17 years with Joël Robuchon, came over from Hong Kong to lead it in 2013, cut the menu prices and persuaded the owners to rebuild the kitchen around a Charvet range made to measure.

The first Singapore edition of the Michelin Guide gave the restaurant two stars, and a third followed later, in the same edition that raised Odette; it has kept all of them since. The Forbes Travel Guide gives it its top rating for service. Desserts are the work of Cheryl Koh, once named Asia's Best Pastry Chef. The wine cellar, chiefly French and strong in Burgundy and Bordeaux, has won the World Gourmet Summit's award for an Old World wine list more than once.

The cooking is classic French haute cuisine with an occasional Asian touch, built on produce from across France, such as Le Ponclet, a rare butter from a Celtic breed of cow close to extinction. Angel hair pasta served cold with caviar, kombu and black truffle is the best-known dish. Other courses have included a salpicon of blue lobster in a velouté made from oyster juices with tapioca, and venison from the Black Forest with juniper berries and truffle beside a grapefruit compote, while the petits fours bring canelé, mont blanc and palmier. Kombu and caviar on cold pasta are where the Asian touch shows most clearly, while the venison and the petits fours keep to the French canon.