Meet the Chef - Julien Royer

Our new book Odette: Terroir to Table, Heart to Plate is an intimate and elegant tribute to the people, places, and philosophies that shaped three Michelin star chef Julien Royer's career. 

At Odette – one of Asia’s most lauded restaurants – Royer balances French technique with Southeast Asian terroir to create a cuisine defined by grace, clarity, and emotional resonance.

Odette: Terroir to Table, Heart to Plate opens with a series of deeply personal essays exploring the chef's upbringing in rural France, the culinary influences that shaped him, and the values that guide his restaurant – from hospitality and mentorship to design and storytelling. It also features forewords by Daniel Boulud and Dominique Crenn.

The second section of the book features 80 recipes, arranged to reflect the rhythm of a meal at Odette – from playful starters to vegetables, fish and seafood, meat and poultry, and desserts.

Iconic dishes such as Mushroom Tea with Sabayon, Rosemary-Smoked Organic Egg, Pigeon, Beetroot, Cherry, and Marukyo Uni appear here, accompanied by stunning images and essays sharing the inspiration behind each plate. We caught up with Royer when he was in London recently and asked him a few questions about the book, Odette, and his approach to life.

 Singapore Garden. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim 

Who inspired you to cook? My grandma, on my mum's side. That's why when I became a chef I said if one day I open a restaurant, the restaurant has to be called Odette, just like my grandma. She inspired me because she fed me very well as a kid and she showed me how much love and emotion and happiness you can give to people through food. 

Every guest who comes to Odette goes home with a little jar of jam. Why jam? Because the first memory of food I have, is the jam that she made. We lived on a mountain - 800 or 900 meters altitude - and there were a lot of berries and so we always ate a lot of jam. That was my first smell and food memory. I loved making the jam. I learnt the whole process too. She always used the same wooden spoon, and I’d pass my finger over it to gauge whether it was cooked. 

Crab, Peas, Horseradish. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim 

 
What was the first proper meal you made? It was a roast chicken with a very classic French gratin of potato. And then, as a dessert, I made chou a la creme, one chocolate and one vanilla. That was the first meal I cooked for my family a long time ago, I was like, I don't know, maybe 12-years-old. It wasn’t bad I think!

And your first big culinary disaster? Oh, the first big disaster was when I was a young chef and I started working in a very regional restaurant of my hometown in Salers, in a small village in Cantal. And I was supposed to make a dessert. It was a recipe of chocolate cake with cinnamon, and I actually inverted the weight of cinnamon and chocolate powder. So the cake was barely edible. Super strong cinnamon, and very little chocolate. It was supposed to be the opposite. And I made a big batch, maybe 20 cakes, you know. The chef was not too happy.

Le Puy Lentils, Pork Belly. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim 

 
Is there any food you just can’t stand the taste of? It's funny because I’ve lived in South East Asia for 15 years, but one thing that is quite repulsive to me is the smell of dry shrimp paste. And shrimp paste in south east Asia is very common.
 
How would you describe the food that you create at Odette? The food has evolved drastically from when we started more than 10 years ago. More than 10 years ago, it was more or less, classic French cuisine. Now, 10 years later, it has evolved a lot, and this French cuisine, the DNA of the cooking stays, but it has been infused by Asia. It has been boosted by Asian sensibilities, through produce, ingredients, techniques, flavors, methods of cooking. I will not call it fusion because fusion, for me is vast and fusion can be confusion sometimes. But I would say that our cuisine now, is French DNA with lots of Asian sensibilities. 

Odette. Photography: Courtesy Julien Royer

 
Was there a point when you realised that was happening to your food? Yes. For me, it happened not long ago. I've become really comfortable with that idea of infusing Asia into French cuisine four to five years ago. When you start as a young chef, you think that what you have learned is the best, but when you start to travel, you begin to open your mind. I travel a lot in Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, a lot. And those travels have inspired me and shown me that we need to stay humble. When you go to Japan, for example, and you look at one person perfecting one craft for their whole life, just dedicated to it, it's really inspiring. 
 
So travel and meeting people has helped me to understand there is a certain sense of place in the cuisine that we do at Odette in Singapore, that is very important. I don't think you could cook the same food in London, Paris, New York as Singapore. It's important to understand who you cook for and what people where you are working like to eat. In Singapore, in particular, people don't like too salty, they don't like sourness, they love texture, they love charcoal, they love umami, they love spice. So we have infused that into the cooking story. 

Ibérico Pork ‘Grenobloise’, Cévennes Onions, Fuji Apple. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim

 
How do you get your character onto the menu and into the restaurant? The character in the menu comes from who I am. I always try to never forget where I'm from. My family never had money, but we always ate very well. We had a small farm, and we lived with the farm. That’s the way we were living, you know. So what I like to do is go back to my roots and speak with the people around me. I have about five or six core team members at the restaurant that are very important in the recipe making process. We cook together, we taste together. 99% of the time, we agree on one thing and one direction. And we follow that one. 

What's the meal at your restaurant you would happily eat every day of your life if you could? One of the dishes that I really love at a restaurant right now, because it's really a symbol of the style of cooking we do is pigeon with peppercorn crust. This is really a dish that makes me proud, and it took so long to get it right. We worked a long time on it. The pigeon is classically cooked, roasted on the crown. We separate the leg because the leg tends to cook slower. We want to keep the meat soft and juicy. The thing that is really nice is the contrast between the soft meat and the slightly spicy crust. It's a real example of the cooking we are doing today. 
 
We make a crust of peppercorn coming from Cambodia. They produce one of the best peppercorns in the world. And we have taken three different stages of maturity, the green peppercorn, bringing the freshness; the black peppercorn, bringing the robustness; and the red peppercorn, brings the finesse, almost the fruity side of the peppercorn; because we wanted to have something with a lot of balance and fruitiness. 

Turbot, Marchand de Vin, Bone Marrow. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim 

What's the thing you always make at a dinner party? I love to cook a whole bird, whether it's guinea fowl or chicken, because it’s something that always makes people happy. For me, it’s the epitome of a sharing dish. Big poultry with maybe a gratin  dauphinoise - like the first thing I cooked -   or some potatoes. This is something that is humble, delicious, and that makes people happy.
 
What music goes well with it? Usually, my wife is in charge of the playlist. I'm very eclectic. I love rock and roll. I love French hip-hop from the 90s. MC Solar, people like that. A little bit of Queen, a little bit of Oasis. A mix of things. 
 
What would your last meal on earth be? My last meal on earth, hopefully, will be with the people I love. I’ll want something simple and delicious. What matters is the people around you. 

Odette. Photography: Courtesy Julien Royer 

 
If you could cook for anyone who would you love to have in your restaurant? I would have loved to have cooked for Barack Obama. When he came to Singapore, we were supposed to cook for him, but we had something else on at the same time so we could not do it. And I would love to cook for my grandma because when we opened the restaurant, she was already gone. So I know she's watching from up there and I know she's very proud, but my ultimate dream would be to cook for her in my restaurant.

Do guests ever make special requests? Or do they come knowing that it's a tasting menu? We have a tasting menu, but we are flexible because we have a lot of regular guests and we try to customise the experience for every guest. That's why the work done by the front of the house is crucial, they have to read the mind of the guests. What do they want to eat? How long do they have today? Are they celebrating something special? Is it business or pleasure? 
 
It comes with a lot of practice and experience. Are you left-handed? Are you right handed? Do you put back your napkin on your knee each time? What do you do with your water glass? It's really fascinating,  they have a mechanism on how to read people's minds. You can cook the best food in the world, but if it's not delivered in a proper way, there's no point.
 
Along with that, we will customise the experience. It's very important nowadays to do that because what we have seen over the last couple of years, is that people tend to want to eat in a shorter period of time. The comfort window is around three hours maximum. The days of a 25 course menu with six hours at the table are gone. 
 
Now we do five or seven courses maximum. More substance, more quality, less blah blah. This is the trend I see right now – less, but better; less, but more focussed.  We have put a lot of time effort and resources in building this very genuine sense of hospitality where, OK, it's a fancy place, but you can come as you are. I want you to feel comfortable. I want you to feel at home because the best moment at a  table you're going to have, is when you start to feel at home, when you are being yourself. Then the magic can happen. 

Pithiviers Grande Cuisine. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim 

In another life, what restaurant would you be running? There’s a place in the Basque it's called Asador Etxebarri. It's a grill, an asador. There's one guy, the chef, everything that he cooks is grilled,  whether it’s dessert, peas, fish, meat, seafood - everything is grilled with a sense of finesse and is incredible. He knows all the farmers nearby. What he uses comes from just 20 kilometres around the restaurant. For me this is the ultimate dream and luxury. I can imagine doing this one day, on a small scale. Cook for maybe a handful of people similar to cooking for a big family,  10, 12 people. If the chef takes a lot of pleasure cooking it translates into happiness in the place and on the plate. I would definitely think about doing something smaller at some point.

Do you go out into the restaurant and talk to diners? All the time. Not only me. I really encourage the team and the chef to go and speak to the guests, and they do it super well. It's such a plus value for the guest experience. Because when you have cooked the dish from scratch, you know exactly how to how to explain the story. It creates some magic and I feel the guests really want this.
 
One thing that makes me super happy, even more since COVID, is that people realise what you put in your body is what makes you in good health or not so good health. A lot of people ask us about the food. Where is your carrot from? Where is your seabass from? We’ve seen more and more of this in the last five years, from 20-year-old kids to70-year-old adults. People are curious about the quality of food they eat. When you are a cook you acquire some skills, but what's important as well is the sourcing. 50% of our job is sourcing quality ingredients from which farmer in which season. 

Odette team. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim 

 
How do you decide when a dish is done? With the pigeon dish I mentioned, it took us years to refine it until we said wow, I think we’ve got it, don't change a thing! Then sometimes we start from a very simple idea that came very fast and in one week we nailed it. There is no fixed rule. Sometimes it takes three days. Sometimes it will take three hours and sometime after three years, you give up because it's still not working!
 
Have you ever set a kitchen on fire? Not yet, touch wood. But I was cooking once in San Francisco in the Saint Joseph’s Art Foundation. It's a church housing a private art collection. Obviously the kitchen facility was not that great. It's not a professional kitchen. During the middle of the dinner for 50 people the alarms went off, and we could not figure how to stop them. Two big trucks from the San Francisco fire department came with their sirens blaring and the firemen ran into the building and people were like, what’s going on? We were cooking lobster on the grill, and the smoke set the alarms off. But other than that, so far, we're good. 

 Avocado Gourmandise. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim

How would you describe modern French cooking to somebody who only knows the classics? Modern French cooking nowadays is happening because of a young generation of chefs. People of my age and a bit younger are finding their own style, own personality and they are not scared, they have no fear of breaking traditions. 
 
In French cuisine, the young French chefs have a very strong heritage to carry. Sometimes it can be very heavy. Some people are very comfortable producing classics and can do it for their entire career, which is fine, I love a really good classic meal. But some chefs are wanting to bring their input, their personality and want to help write the new page of French gastronomy.

Thanks to that generation of chefs, there are a lot of new things happening. There is so much diversity, so much energy, so many new ideas, over the last 10 or so years, that actually, for the first time, I think, we are able to say, OK, we are proud of our tradition, but we are not scared of innovation, and we are going to be the bridge between that world and the next one. That's the key to writing the new chapter of French gastronomy. Tradition is great, but it needs to be questioned. 
 

Julien Royer. Photography: Edmond Ho and Jovian Lim

And finally, where is fine dining going right now? I think over the last maybe 20 years, some people have forgotten the sense of the word, restaurant - restaurée. What does it mean? It means taking care of people, feeding people, making sure you take good care of them, and make them happy. Some fine dining restaurants went too far into storytelling and almost become too intellectualized. At some point they, forgot that while they may explore the soul it’s also about the stomach. And it's nice sometimes to have a bit more honesty to have something that is more genuine and I feel that many restaurants that are successful now are the ones who come back to the basics of hospitality and who offer flexibility. 

Diners come from near and afar to sample Julian Royer's three Michelin star cooking at Odette. If you can't make it to Singapore (or even if you can) take a closer look at Odette: Terroir to Table, Heart to Plate.