Yì By Jereme Leung

The Setting: Raffles Arcade and What It Signals

Singapore's colonial civic core, the stretch of North Bridge Road anchored by the Raffles Hotel complex, has long functioned as a staging ground for restaurants that want heritage address without the full weight of a hotel dining room. The Raffles Arcade, a retail and dining annexe at the edge of that compound, occupies a particular position in that geography: accessible, recognisably prestigious, but operating at one remove from the hotel's own flagship tables. Yì By Jereme Leung sits on the third floor of that arcade at 328 North Bridge Road, and the address alone does a certain amount of work before the food arrives. The Raffles postcode carries implied standards and a visitor profile that skews toward informed diners rather than passing trade.

Contemporary Chinese restaurants in Singapore have spread across a wide range of settings over the past decade, from hotel ballrooms converted into sleek tasting-menu rooms to shophouse ground floors in Chinatown. The arcade format places Yì in a middle register: formal enough for business meals, open enough for anniversary dinners, without the ceremony-heavy atmosphere that can make Singapore's leading Chinese fine-dining rooms feel procedural.

Contemporary Chinese Dining in Singapore: Where Yì Fits

The city's Chinese dining scene has bifurcated sharply. At one end sit the Cantonese fine-dining rooms, places like Summer Pavilion, where classical technique and premium ingredients operate within recognisable Cantonese frameworks. At the other end, a smaller set of kitchens applies genuinely experimental thinking to Chinese cuisine, often with tasting-menu formats borrowed from European fine dining. Contemporary Chinese as a category sits between those poles, applying modern plating sensibility and cross-regional Chinese reference points to dishes that remain grounded in recognisable tradition.

Yì holds a 2024 Michelin Plate, the Guide's signal that a kitchen is cooking at a level worth attention without yet reaching the starred tier. In practical terms, that means Michelin's inspectors found consistent, competent cooking across visits but did not award a star. Within Singapore's Chinese dining segment, that places Yì in a cluster of restaurants doing creditable work at the $$ price range rather than competing directly against the multi-starred European rooms, such as Odette, Les Amis, or Zén, which operate at $$$$ and anchor the best of the city's fine-dining structure.

The $$ price bracket in Singapore's restaurant ecosystem is worth understanding clearly. It positions Yì above casual dining but well below the tasting-menu ceiling occupied by Jaan by Kirk Westaway ($$$) or Meta. For contemporary Chinese cooking with proper kitchen investment and Michelin recognition, that price point represents accessible entry into a genre that elsewhere in the region can climb considerably higher.

Awards and Critical Standing

The 2024 Michelin Plate is the primary trust signal here, and its significance is contextual. Singapore's Michelin Guide has become increasingly granular in how it grades Chinese cooking, recognising a wider range of regional traditions and modern interpretations alongside the established Cantonese and Hokkien lineages.

Aggregated ratings at that volume are not uniform, but a 4.4 over 600-plus responses suggests consistent satisfaction rather than a split audience. Restaurants with uneven execution or service tend to cluster lower, or show sharper variance. The combination of Michelin recognition and sustained public rating places Yì in a reliable tier: not a destination that demands advance planning months out, but a room that delivers at its price point with reasonable consistency.

Forbes Travel Guide has also announced an expansion of its Star Ratings program to include this restaurant, with a rating expected to follow. That signal, while not yet resolved, suggests a level of institutional attention that tracks with the Michelin Plate.

For comparison across the contemporary Chinese category in other markets, Da Dong in Shanghai and Gastro Esthetics DaDong in Beijing illustrate how the genre scales upward in China's major cities, while Demon Duck by Alvin Leung in Dubai and Bao Li in Madrid show how contemporary Chinese has moved into non-Chinese cities with varying degrees of critical traction. Wild Yeast in Hangzhou and Cheng Yuan in Yangzhou represent the domestic Chinese end of the same conversation. Yì sits at the Singapore node of a genuinely global contemporary Chinese dining network.

The Cuisine: What Contemporary Chinese Means in Practice

Contemporary Chinese as a culinary designation covers a wide range of approaches, from light reinterpretations of regional classics to near-architectural plate compositions that reference Chinese ingredients through a European fine-dining lens. The category in Singapore has been shaped by both the city's own multicultural Chinese diaspora and by the international exposure of chefs who trained across different culinary traditions before returning or relocating to Southeast Asia.

At the $$ price tier with a Michelin Plate, the expectation in this category is cooking that demonstrates knowledge of classical Chinese technique — knife work, heat control, the balance of aromatics, an understanding of regional variation — while applying enough modern thinking to the format and presentation to justify the contemporary label. That balance is harder to maintain than it appears. Restaurants that tip too far toward novelty lose the grounding that makes Chinese cuisine coherent; those that tip too far toward tradition operate more as heritage restaurants than as contemporary ones.

Jereme Leung's profile within the broader contemporary Chinese restaurant world gives Yì a positioning credential that connects it to a well-developed culinary conversation across the region. For readers tracking contemporary Chinese kitchens beyond Singapore, the Gastro Esthetics at DaDong in Shanghai and 24 Suns in Oceanside offer useful reference points for how the category evolves in different geographic contexts.

Planning Your Visit

Yì By Jereme Leung is located at 328 North Bridge Road, #03-02 Raffles Arcade, Singapore 188719. At the $$ price range with Michelin Plate recognition, reservations are advisable, particularly for weekend evenings. The Raffles precinct draws both hotel guests and city residents, so the dining room tends to run at capacity on peak nights. Visiting on a weekday lunch or early dinner sitting generally means a less pressured room. For the broader Singapore dining picture, our full Singapore restaurants guide maps the city's key tables across all categories and price points. Travellers planning across multiple dimensions will also find value in our Singapore hotels guide, our bars guide, our wineries guide, and our experiences guide.