In this week's cookbook review, we turn our attention to Odette: Terroir to Table, Heart to Plate, the debut cookbook from Julien Royer, chef-owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant of the same name at Singapore's National Gallery. Since opening in 2015, Odette has earned three Michelin stars, been named Best Restaurant in Asia, and ranked consistently among the World's 50 Best Restaurants. It has also received the Art of Hospitality and Chefs' Choice awards — a rare combination that speaks to both the quality of the food and the depth of the experience it creates.
Originally from Cantal, France, Royer trained with some of the most formative figures in contemporary French cuisine, including Michel Bras, before relocating to Singapore. He is also the chef behind Claudine in Singapore and Louise in Hong Kong. Featuring forewords by Daniel Boulud and Dominique Crenn, two of the most decorated French-born chefs working internationally, Odette arrives with considerable editorial weight behind it.
The book opens with a portrait of Royer's formation: his childhood in Cantal, where his grandmother Odette first sparked his passion for food; his training with Michel Bras; and the creative expansion that followed his move to Singapore. These are not perfunctory biographical notes — they give the book its emotional spine and explain the sensibility behind every dish that follows.
Royer's cooking is classically French in its technical foundations but shaped profoundly by the ingredients, traditions, and sensibilities of Asia. That interplay, disciplined European technique meeting the tropical, the fermented, the umami-forward, has become his signature. Odette provides the most comprehensive account yet of how that synthesis was arrived at and what it looks like in practice.
The recipe chapters follow the rhythm of a meal at Odette: starters, vegetables, fish and seafood, meat and poultry, and desserts. There are 80 recipes in total, including many of the restaurant's most celebrated signatures, Mushroom Tea with Sabayon, Rosemary-Smoked Organic Egg, Potato Gaufrette with Smoked Crème Fraîche, and Prawns with Shiso. Each recipe is accompanied by an essay illuminating the thinking and sourcing behind the dish, with particular attention to provenance and producer relationships.
It is worth being direct about accessibility: these are not recipes for a weeknight kitchen. Readers approaching Odette as a reference for technique, or as a document of a specific culinary moment, will find it far more rewarding than those hoping to replicate the dishes directly. That is not a criticism, it is simply the honest measure of what kind of book this is.
The book's design, by Astrid Stavro, was conceived to mirror the restaurant's original interiors prior to a renovation in December 2025. The result is a volume with a coherent visual identity, warm, restrained, and precise, that reinforces rather than merely decorates the content.
The newly commissioned photography captures both the elegant minimalism of Royer's plates and the emotional warmth that underpins the restaurant's hospitality. At 272 pages and 290 x 214 mm, the book is well-proportioned for its subject and sits comfortably alongside the finest chef monographs Phaidon has published.
Odette: Terroir to Table, Heart to Plate is a serious and beautifully produced debut. It documents a restaurant, and a chef, at the height of their powers, with the intelligence and care the subject deserves.
For readers interested in contemporary French-Asian fine dining, or in Singapore's place as one of the world's most compelling gastronomic cities, this is an essential book, and one of the most significant chef monographs published this year.
Odette is a beautifully realized debut from one of the world's most admired chefs, personal, technically serious, and genuinely illuminating about what makes the restaurant what it is.
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