The car turns onto the circular drive and the building appears—white facade, colonnaded verandas surrounded by lush greenery, and your first thought is that every photograph you have ever seen of it was not impressive enough. The doormen materialize in their whites. You are, it becomes immediately clear, somewhere else.
They are famous, these doormen—famous enough that the hotel sells replicas of them as souvenirs in the gift shop. They greet first-timers as though they are the only person who has ever arrived, and guests who regularly return as though they never left. Raffles has been doing this for 138 years. The hotel is older than the country, and carries itself accordingly.
To understand where this tradition began, go back to 1887: four Armenian brothers leased a ten-room beach house from a local Arab merchant on Beach Roa. They named it after a British colonial official who had been dead for sixty years. Within a decade, everyone knew exactly where it was.
Stamford Raffles had arrived on the island sixty-eight years earlier, in January 1819, and within days signed a treaty establishing Singapore as a British trading post. The move was a direct challenge to Dutch trade dominance in the region. He declared Singapore a free port—no duties, no taxes, open to any trader from any nation—and it worked faster than anyone anticipated. The population was a few hundred when he landed. By 1821, it was around five thousand. By 1822, when Raffles returned and found the growth chaotic enough to require a plan, it was still climbing. He commissioned what became known as the Jackson Plan—separate quarters for the Chinese, Malay, Indian, Bugis, and Arab communities, with right-angled streets and uniform shophouses. What feels today like organic cultural geography is also, in part, deliberate design.
The hotel that bears Raffles’ name arrived 68 years later. Over the next century, it became the place where Singapore’s mythology was assembled, bringing the city’s and the hotel’s histories together. Joseph Conrad came. Rudyard Kipling reportedly edited part of The Jungle Book on the veranda. Somerset Maugham wrote every morning under a frangipani tree in the Palm Court and once said the hotel ‘stands for all the fables of the exotic East.’ Noël Coward stayed. Tom Waits never made it—or at least there’s no record that he did—but he wrote a song called ‘Singapore’ anyway, which might be more revealing. His Singapore is a colonial fever dream, a port city on the margins of the known world where anything could happen and probably would. Singapore has always had a mythology larger than its geography.
A hotel that accumulates this much legend eventually has to decide whether to honor it or trade on it. The 2019 restoration was an answer to that question. It took two and a half years and the kind of attention that involves sourcing replacement floorboards for the Tiffin Room from early 1900s photographs. It was led by Champalimaud Design, whose previous work includes the Carlyle and the Dorchester, a designer who knows how to restore a great hotel without turning it into a museum. The result is 115 suites across nine categories, each one feeling less like a hotel room than a private residence that someone has thought very care fully about on your behalf.
My suite opened onto a small table and two chairs above the courtyard, as a kind of private porch. On the first morning, I sat there with coffee ahead of the heat, watching the grounds come to life: gardeners moving through the palms in watery early sunlight, other guests drifting back from poolside yoga. Inside, teak floors, rattan furniture, a four-poster bed, a front parlor with a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. The layout—parlor first, then bedroom—gave the suite the logic of a private villa, a place designed for settling in rather than passing through. It was a room designed for staying, not just sleeping. A few doors down, one of two rock stars in residence that week had apparently reached the same conclusion—he was out on his own veranda every morning with coffee, a book, and occasionally, a companion.
The hotel has spent its modern era leaning into its literary past. In 2019, alongside the reopening, Raffles introduced a Writer’s Residency Program: a few weeks at the hotel for one writer a year, expected to return with a book about the place. The first invited resident was Pico Iyer, who had been visiting Raffles since 1984 and whose resulting book, This Could Be Home: Raffles Hotel and the City of Tomorrow, treats the property as a frame through which to read the city. New Zealand travel journalist Vicki Virtue followed him, and in 2023, the poet Madeleine Lee became the first Singaporean writer in the role.
The fourth resident, appointed in April 2025, is the program’s first chef: André Chiang. His book “Fragments of Time” takes its title from a Chinese idiom about a fragment of a feather from a mythological creature, used to describe something rare and precious. This year, Chiang opened 1887 by André in the hotel’s historic formal dining room. Building his menu on Singaporean flavors interpreted through French technique, he operates a 42-seat restaurant with an à la carte menu, a deliberate rejection of the long tasting-menu format. Dishes are presented on heritage silverware, including a silver beef trolley that was buried in the Palm Court during the Japanese occupation and recovered after the war.
At Yi by Jereme Leung, in the Raffles Arcade, the Singaporean chef who left for Shanghai in 2002 and returned to open his first Singapore restaurant in 2019, works through provincial Chinese cuisine—his signature hundred-ring cucumber with poached sea whelk is a single cucumber meticulously sliced into a continuous spiral that retains its wholeness. The Tiffin Room dates to 1892, and eating there feels like the accumulation of all those years. Chef Kuldeep Negi’s North Indian dishes arrive table side in copper tiffin boxes, course by course. The cooking is traditional in technique and surprising in combination: jumbo prawns marinated in yogurt and rose powder, grilled in the tandoor, arrive as something you could not have anticipated and will not forget. Upstairs at Butcher’s Block, wood-fired plates from Chef Jordan Keao arrive trailing smoke, paired with wines from a cellar that runs from Burgundy to Hokkaido–his signature dry-aged duck breast and grilled dumpling matched with sake, a bold Bordeaux with French toast and salted caramel.
Singapore has 288 Michelin-recognized establishments as of the 2025 guide, but some of the city’s best food will never appear in any of them. On the recommendation of hotel staff, we found our way to The Warung at lunch—Balinese home-style cooking, fluorescent lighting, plastic menus, food behind glass cases. We ordered most of the menu.
If you can pull yourself away from the property, the Singapore Botanic Gardens is the first and only tropical botanic garden on the UNESCO World Heritage List. There are 44 designated Heritage Trees within the property, a tract of primary rainforest older than the gardens themselves, and a Tembusu that has been standing since before the gardens were founded in1859. Our guide pointed out a set of stairs built by Australian prisoners of war during the Japanese Occupation, with the inscriptions still visible. I encountered a Red Jungle fowl near the end of the walk, so vivid it seemed improbable, and spent the next ten minutes trying to capture it on my iPhone. Impossible.
Some things resist the iPhone; others, you can take with you. Returning to Raffles, the boutique feels less like a gift shop than a cabinet of curiosities: artifacts from the hotel’s past sit alongside home goods and clothing you imagine will work as well in New York as it does pool side in Singapore. There are tributes to the tiger that escaped from a nearby circus in 1902, took refuge under the hotel for a night, and was eventually dispatched by a local headmaster who missed three shots before finding his aim. The hotel’s signature frangipani fragrance—the same scent drifting through the property and present in the bath amenities—is available as a diffuser, eau de toilette, and room spray. I debated purchasing it longer than necessary, decided against it, and have regretted it since.
The Long Bar is just up the stairs and open to the public, which makes it easy to dismiss as a tourist trap. It is both of those things. Go anyway. Bartender Ngiam Tong Boon invented the Singapore Sling here sometime around 1915. The original recipe was lost when the bar stopped serving the drink in the 1930s and was painstakingly reconstructed in the 1970s. Peanut shells still scatter the floor by tradition. There are worse reasons to be a tourist than drinking the original version of a drink at the bar where it was invented.
It was a week before the Formula 1 Grand Prix, so we crossed the circuit on foot in an effort to reach Marina Bay Sands. We took the elevator to Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant on the sky park terrace, where the downtown skyline fills one side and the Strait of Singapore fills the other, overlooking dozens of container ships at anchor, so still they look less like vessels than a city of their own—the same waterway where Arab and Bugis and Peranakan Chinese traders waited out the tides seven centuries ago. We ordered rosé to fend off the heat and humidity, and ended up with a long, slow afternoon on a terrace above one of the world’s great city views. At the table next to us, a mother and daughter from Perth were at the start of a girls’ weekend at Raffles. They had flown in that morning. On the way back, we walked through Gardens by the Bay, where the super trees—those impossible vertical gardens visible from the highway on the drive in from Changi—turned out to be even more improbable up close.
On my final evening, I found myself at the Writers Bar with a Balcon French 75, an absinthe-laced variation inspired by Madeleine Lee’s poem “Balcon” from in the book she wrote while in residence.
At some point during the week, it occurred to me how far I was from home and simultaneously how close I was to everywhere else. Several staffers I met talked about traveling to Vietnam and Japan the way New Yorkers talk about Florida.
Some destinations are worth the flight. Singapore is worth every hour of it—and the moment you land at Raffles, you already know you’ll be planning your next visit.
Sidebar
A note on getting there: New York to Singapore is roughly 21 hours on Cathay Pacific, routed through Hong Kong—one of the better long-haul options available, in part because the Hong Kong layover rewards anyone willing to build time around it. The airport itself operates at a level most cities can’t match at street level: luxury retail, serious dining, and the recently reopened Wing First lounge, which Cathay has just renovated into a very well-considered private club. The Dining Room offers full table service featuring Hong Kong flavors and regional Chinese classics, including dishes developed in partnership with Mott 32, one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated Chinese restaurants. The Retreat has seven treatment booths and shower suites for the overnight leg. On the return, the Cathay lounge at Changi operates with the same philosophy: the signatureNoodle Bar, a shower, and a quiet hour before the long flight home. For a journey this length, the airline is not incidental. Cathay has been flying this region for decades, and it shows in the food, the service, and the ease of a crew that knows these routes.
