Kee's Restaurant & Bar

Money used to be sent home from here. Now it's where you spend it on breakfast.

Kee's is the best reason we know to walk to Carpenter Street before 10am: a restored 1936 remittance house that now opens at 8am with a brunch menu built from Singapore comfort food. Bring friends who think they have had every eggs Benedict in town, and bring time as well as appetite, because the dish to order takes a while. It is a sit-down breakfast, not a takeaway coffee stop.

The name is the clue. It comes from Chye Hua Seng Wee Kee, the remittance house where early immigrants sent money and letters home, and the room reuses 1930s timber and excerpts from original remittance letters. The building, restored by WOHA in a 1930s Art Deco style, is now part of 21 Carpenter, a boutique heritage hotel.

This is the restaurant's second act. In 2024 Kee's was a modern European bistro with Pan-Asian accents from Andrew Walsh, the chef behind Michelin-starred Cure. It has since rebranded as a modern Asian restaurant and bar, with Walsh as culinary director, and launched new day and night menus in September. The daytime kitchen is run by executive chef Sujatha Asokan, previously of Quenino and Botanico, whose cooking draws on Malaysian Chinese and Singaporean Indian influences. The brunch menu reads like a Singapore childhood rewritten for the weekend.

What to order: the chicken curry shakshuka with coin prata for dipping, the moment you sit down, since it takes 20 to 25 minutes. Then the eggs Benedict, which comes with Chinese olive and a calamansi brown butter hollandaise and is the dish that will end the Benedict argument one way or the other. The French toast takes its cue from bubur cha cha, the coconut-milk dessert of sweet potato and yam, and there is a kaya-stuffed brioche with ube. The crisp cod burger with mango slaw and curry leaf is called the Filet-O-Kee's (their pun, not ours); we'd leave it for lunch. Dessert is the Cham-Misu, a tiramisu made with kopi, teh peng and Horlicks, a nod to the coffee-and-tea mix you'd order at a kopitiam.

Coffee gets proper attention: a custom blend from Glyph, served classic or as a piccolo with coconut, gula melaka and sea salt. On weekdays there are set lunches, which makes it a useful address for the Boat Quay and Clarke Quay office crowd, and the bar side takes over in the evening.

How to do it well: book through SevenRooms or by phone at weekends, walk the four minutes from Clarke Quay MRT, and make it a weekday morning followed by a stroll along the river. Remittance houses were where migrant workers sent money back to families in China; a mixed-up Singapore menu in a building made for people far from home is a fair way to carry the story on.

Good to know 21 Carpenter Street, about four minutes' walk from Clarke Quay MRT. Book a table via SevenRooms or on +65 6373 6985.

Kee's Restaurant & Bar | 21 Carpenter Street, Singapore 059984 | Nearest MRT: Clarke Quay