THE GREAT SINGAPORE FLATBREAD SURVEY
The World Is Flat
It begins, as so many Singaporean food crazes do, with a wave. Sourdough came first during the pandemic years, a fevered bloom of starter cultures and flour-dusted countertops. Then came pizza, with wood-fired ovens firing up in every postcode. Now, in the early months of 2026, the city finds itself in the grip of a gentler, dimpled obsession: the Italian flatbread. Specifically, focaccia and its thinner Tuscan cousin, schiacciata. And they are not merely being baked and topped — they are being stuffed, folded, pressed and reimagined as the sandwich vehicle of the moment.
What makes this wave different from those that preceded it is its breadth. Focaccia sandwiches are appearing in cheesecake chains and artisan bakeries, in post-industrial cafés in Geylang and in the polished dining room of a Guoco Tower restaurant. They are being filled with Italian cured meats, Sri Lankan curry chicken, Thai green chilli beef and Nutella laced with pistachio cream. They cost anywhere from $9 for a half-portion of Nutella-stuffed joy to $24 for a lavish San Daniele. The trend, in other words, is not a niche affectation. It is a genuine culinary moment.
This editorial is our attempt to take that moment seriously. We visited five establishments that are leading the charge, ate through their menus, and subjected each bread and each filling to the kind of scrutiny we think they deserve. What follows is not a simple ranking. It is a portrait of a city’s evolving palate, told through the language of olive oil, fermented dough and audaciously generous sandwiches.
L’Arte Pizza & Focaccia
The Pioneer — Quiet Confidence Since 2022
Address: Guoco Tower, Wallich Street, #01 (tower-level retail)
Hours: Lunch and dinner daily
Price Range: $19 – $22 per focaccia sandwich
Delivery: Available via GrabFood; recommended to dine in for bread at its best
Before the current wave crested, L’Arte was already quietly doing this. The restaurant began serving focaccia sandwiches in 2022, a matter of months after it opened, making it the earliest adopter among the establishments reviewed here and the one against which all others must, in some sense, be measured.
THE BREAD
L’Arte’s focaccia is a study in classical Italian restraint. The crumb is voluminous and wildly airy, its interior a lacework of large, irregular holes that speak to confident hydration and patient fermentation. The exterior carries the characteristic golden-olive hue of a bread that has been blessed with generous olive oil before, during and after baking — it emerges from the oven with a surface that is simultaneously glassy and yielding, the kind of top you press a fingertip against just for the tactile pleasure of it. There is a slight chew at the crust without the jaw-bruising resistance that can plague lesser specimens. The salt crystals, distributed with evident care, provide percussive little bursts of seasoning.
THE SANDWICHES
Three variations are currently on offer, priced between $19 and $22. The core filling language is classical Italian: prosciutto, salami, mortadella, fresh mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, rocket, shavings of aged Parmigiano. These are not combinations that seek to surprise; they seek to satisfy, and they do so with considerable aplomb. The fat from the cured meats seeps gently into the bread’s open crumb, creating a richness that feels earned rather than excessive. The rocket provides bitterness and structural contrast, cutting through the unctuous cheese. The whole is harmonious in the way that only dishes built from genuinely good ingredients can be.
Upcoming variations — smoked salmon with stracciatella, and roast beef with caramelised onions — signal an intelligent broadening of scope. Deputy General Manager Aaron Ang notes that the airy texture of the bread is specifically suited to more robust fillings. He is right: this bread can handle weight. It does not collapse. It absorbs.
VISUAL CHARACTER
The sandwiches arrive halved on a board, the interior cross-section revealed: a topography of amber and cream, the pink of good ham, the dark green of rocket. There is no architectural excess here, no precarious tower of ingredients. The presentation is European and confident — the food knows what it is.
“The fat from the cured meats seeps gently into the bread’s open crumb, creating a richness that feels earned rather than excessive.”
VERDICT
L’Arte is the benchmark. It does not offer the most adventurous sandwiches in this survey, but it offers the most considered ones. Come here when you want to understand what focaccia can be at its most classically realised. The room, within the polished canyons of Guoco Tower, provides a welcome counterpoint to the grab-and-go urgency of most of its competitors.
Mamma Mia Focaccia
The Purist’s Grab-and-Go — Spain via Amoy Street
Address: 94 Amoy Street
Hours: 9.30am – 9.30pm, Monday – Friday only
Price Range: $9 (half) – $24 (full) per sandwich
Delivery: Takeaway focused; no listed delivery platform. Walk-in or call ahead.
Houssein Haffian did not set out to open a focaccia shop. The Spanish-born chef had his sights on a pastrami bar. What intervened was an observation: in Spain, focaccia sandwiches were becoming the dominant grab-and-go format, and the ingredients being applied to them — quality cold cuts, artisan cheeses, bold dressings — were precisely the ingredients he had always wanted to work with. The pivot was, by his account, obvious. The result is Mamma Mia Focaccia, which opened in October 2025 on Amoy Street and has, by any measure, been an immediate success.
THE BREAD
The dough at Mamma Mia undergoes a 24-hour proof followed by a secondary three-hour rise, and the result is a bread with an architecture that immediately distinguishes itself from its peers. The crust is assertive — a sharp, crackling snap on first bite that gives way almost instantly to an interior of exceptional lightness. The colour is a deep, burnished amber at the edges, fading to a warm cream within. There is a slight tang to the crumb, the residue of extended fermentation, that lifts the flavour above the merely pleasant into something genuinely interesting.
THE SANDWICHES
The menu runs to ten sandwiches, available in full and half portions, and its range is the broadest in this survey. At one end sits the Vegetariano ($14 full, $9 half): grilled zucchini, red pesto, mascarpone, pickled onions, tomatoes and grilled artichokes. This is a sandwich of brilliant chromatic diversity — the deep burgundy of the pesto, the pale yellow of the zucchini, the ivory of the mascarpone, the translucent rings of pickled onion. It is also technically accomplished; the acidity of the onions and tomatoes cuts through the richness of the mascarpone with surgical precision.
At the other end: the San Daniele ($24 full, $14 half), which pairs the magnificent Italian ham — its Prosciutto di San Daniele designation indicating air-cured in the Friuli hills — with buffalo mozzarella, pesto and tomato. The ham is extraordinary, its fat a translucent pink-white that melts on the tongue before the bread has been swallowed. The buffalo mozzarella is purchased fresh and distributed generously; it weeps slightly into the crumb, which does not mind at all.
The ‘Nduja sandwich deserves particular mention. The Calabrian spreadable salumi, brick-red and aggressively spiced with Calabrian chillies, is applied with confidence. Its heat builds slowly, warming the throat long after the bite is over. Paired against the cooling neutrality of mascarpone, the effect is one of considered tension, each element preventing the other from becoming overwhelming.
And then there is the Nutella ($14 full, $9 half): the hazelnut chocolate spread layered with mascarpone, pistachio shavings and pistachio cream. It is unabashedly indulgent, the kind of sandwich that makes you feel you should not be eating it and simultaneously grateful that you are. The pistachio cream is the masterstroke, its faint grassiness a foil to the sweetness of the Nutella.
DELIVERY & PRACTICAL MATTERS
Mamma Mia does not appear on major delivery platforms, which is both a limitation and a philosophy. Mr Haffian is explicit that he assembles every sandwich in-store for reasons of quality and consistency. This is the correct instinct: a focaccia sandwich begins to deteriorate the moment the bread meets the dressing. If you cannot visit Amoy Street in person, the sandwich you receive via a third-party courier will be a lesser version of what the kitchen intended. Dine in, or arrive for the walk-in.
“The ‘Nduja’s heat builds slowly, warming the throat long after the bite is over — paired against mascarpone, the effect is one of considered tension.”
VERDICT
The most complete focaccia sandwich operation in Singapore, full stop. The range of the menu, the quality of the imported ingredients, the technical rigour of the bread — these combine to produce a restaurant that punches well above its modest, grab-and-go premises. If you visit only one establishment from this survey, make it this one.
Cat & The Fiddle
The Unlikely Innovator — Cheesecake Meets Schiacciata
Address: Westgate, 3 Gateway Drive, #01-11; Tampines 1, 10 Tampines Central 1, #01-41/42
Hours: 11am – 10pm daily
Price Range: $12.90 – $15.90 per sandwich
Delivery: Available via Grab and Deliveroo; note schiacciata travels better than standard focaccia due to its denser, crispier structure
It would be easy to dismiss Cat & The Fiddle’s entry into the flatbread sandwich market as opportunism — a cheesecake chain pivoting towards a trend. That dismissal would be wrong. Founder Daniel Tay, 55, is a baker of genuine seriousness, and the schiacciata he has developed for these two new concept stores reflects both his technical knowledge and his acute understanding of what Singaporean diners want.
THE BREAD: SCHIACCIATA VS. FOCACCIA
The choice of schiacciata over standard focaccia is itself an editorial decision worth examining. The Tuscan flatbread is thinner, flatter and crispier than its Ligurian cousin, with a tighter crumb and a more pronounced exterior crunch. Mr Tay’s version, made with paté fermentée — fermented bread dough incorporated to add flavour depth — and baked at high heat in a steam oven, achieves a particular equilibrium: the exterior shatters on first bite with the satisfying crackle of a good croissant, while the interior is soft and airy, offering none of the resistance the exterior suggests.
The colour is distinctive: a rich, mottled gold at the surface, blonding to pale yellow in the cross-section. The twelve-hour cold fermentation in the refrigerator before baking contributes a nuttiness to the flavour that distinguishes it from more quickly made versions. This is bread that has been given time.
THE SANDWICHES
Four options are available. The Beef Pastrami ($15.90) is the showpiece: thick-cut, properly smoked, its deep mahogany colour and black pepper crust contrasting visually and texturally with the pale mascarpone spread beneath. The filling also includes Emmental, grated Parmigiano, rocket, spinach, tomato, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. It is a sandwich of considerable generosity, built with an evident awareness that the crispier schiacciata can support more structural filling than a softer focaccia.
The Smoked Salmon ($15.90) is the more delicate option, the salmon’s coral-pink against the ivory of the mascarpone and the deep green of the spinach creating a palette that is as pleasing to look at as the sandwich is to eat. The Turkey Ham and Honey Baked Chicken Ham ($12.90 each) offer accessible price points without sacrificing the quality of the bread.
DELIVERY CONSIDERATIONS
The structural integrity of schiacciata makes it the most delivery-friendly bread in this survey. Its denser crumb resists sogginess more effectively than the more open structure of a standard focaccia, and its rigid exterior maintains some crunch even after thirty minutes in a delivery bag. Available on Grab and Deliveroo, these sandwiches arrive in better condition than most of their competitors.
VERDICT
A genuinely impressive pivot from an unexpected source. The schiacciata is technically excellent, the fillings are generous and well-considered, and the pricing is the most accessible of any establishment reviewed here. The suburban mall locations — Westgate and Tampines 1 — mean these sandwiches are available to a demographic that might never find themselves on Amoy Street or at Guoco Tower. That is a service worth acknowledging.
Big Mouth Bakehouse
The Local Whisperer — Asian Soul in an Italian Frame
Address: Wisma Geylang Serai, 1 Engku Aman Road, #01-06
Hours: 10am – 6pm, Tuesday – Sunday (closed Monday)
Price Range: $12.50 per focaccia sandwich
Delivery: No listed delivery platform; takeaway available. Given the bakehouse’s early closure, plan your visit before 5.30pm to ensure availability.
Nursyazanna Syaira Md Suhimi — who previously ran the beloved halal bakery Fluff Bakery — has relocated her creative energies to Wisma Geylang Serai, a shopping centre whose cultural specificity provides an interesting frame for the work she is doing. At Big Mouth Bakehouse, focaccia is not treated as an Italian import to be reverently preserved. It is treated as a format — a magnificent, porous, yielding format — into which the flavours of her personal and culinary heritage can be poured.
THE BREAD: A PHILOSOPHICAL STATEMENT
It is worth dwelling on Ms Nursyazanna’s articulation of her bread philosophy, because it is one of the most honest things said by any baker in this survey: “Personally, when I eat a sandwich and the bread is too crusty, it hurts the top of my mouth. I think we Asians inherently like something softer.” This is not anti-Italian. It is pro-local, and there is a crucial difference.
The resulting focaccia, fermented for twelve to fifteen hours, is the softest of any reviewed here. The exterior offers a light, shattering crust rather than a hard one — the kind that yields rather than resists. Internally, the crumb is exceptionally spongy, almost pillowy, with a moisture content that seems designed to maximise the absorption of the flavourful sauces that accompany the fillings. The colour is a uniform pale gold, modest in its appearance but expressive in the mouth.
THE SANDWICHES
The Thai Beef Salad ($12.50) is the flagship, and it rewards close attention. The beef, inspired by a preparation from the baker’s mother-in-law’s helper — using sliced shabu-shabu beef with oyster sauce — is thin, tender and deeply savoury. The Thai green chilli sauce, similar in character to nam jim seafood, introduces a sharp, herbaceous heat that cuts through the richness of the meat with admirable precision. The sauce also performs a practical function: it keeps the sandwich moist from first bite to last without making the bread soggy, a balance that is difficult to achieve and here achieved with apparent ease.
Weekend specials have included a Mexican Chicken with Pineapple Salsa and chipotle chillies in adobo sauce — a combination that manages to be simultaneously sweet, smoky and acidic without any single note dominating — and an Avocado Fried Egg Chilli Crisp that belongs to a recognisably global brunch idiom but is executed with sufficient textural awareness to elevate it above the generic.
DELIVERY & ACCESSIBILITY
Big Mouth Bakehouse does not appear to offer delivery via major platforms, which is understandable given its small-batch production and relatively short operating hours. The Geylang location, while not central, is accessible by MRT (Aljunied or Paya Lebar) and represents an opportunity to explore a neighbourhood whose food culture is among the most vivid in the city.
“Focaccia is treated not as an Italian import to be reverently preserved, but as a format into which the flavours of a personal and culinary heritage can be poured.”
VERDICT
The most culturally specific focaccia sandwich operation in Singapore, and the one most interesting to those who believe that truly good food is always in conversation with its place. The bread is tailored to local preferences with intelligence and honesty. The fillings are not fusion for fusion’s sake; they are the natural product of a baker who cooks from her own experience. Visit on a weekend to catch the specials. Arrive early.
Yeast Side
The Archipelago Dreamer — East Meets Focaccia
Address: myVillage, KAP Mall, lyf@Farrer, Trifecta Riders’ Lounge (four outlets)
Hours: Varies by outlet; check yeastside.sg
Price Range: $15 – $18 per focaccia sandwich
Delivery: Available via GrabFood at select outlets. The four-outlet network makes this the most geographically convenient option for many Singaporeans.
Yeast Side introduced focaccia sandwiches to its menu in April 2025, and by the chain’s own admission, the initial reception was slow. Focaccia was not widely known among the customer base, and there was educational work to be done. Nine months later, that work appears to have paid off, and the menu that has emerged from that process of gradual introduction is one of the most conceptually ambitious in this survey.
THE BREAD
The focaccia here is made with biga, the Italian pre-ferment that involves combining flour, water and a small amount of yeast and allowing the mixture to ferment for an extended period before incorporation into the final dough. The effect on flavour is significant: biga-based breads tend to have a more complex, slightly wheaty aroma and a crumb that is more structured than that achieved by direct methods. Proofed for four hours before baking at high temperature, the Yeast Side focaccia produces a bread with a good, confident rise, light interior and a crust that has genuine presence without being punishing.
THE SANDWICHES
The menu’s Asian orientation is its defining characteristic. The Sri Lankan Chicken ($16) fills the focaccia with curry chicken prepared in the Sri Lankan style — darker, more coconut-forward, with the characteristic warmth of curry leaves and black mustard seeds — alongside a hash brown that introduces a satisfying crunch, and a lime yogurt that performs the essential function of acid in a rich filling. The combination is not subtle. It is exuberant, and it works.
The Miso Prawn ($16) is the most technically interesting sandwich in the Yeast Side range. A prawn patty — minced, formed and fried to order — is accompanied by a red miso butter whose umami depth provides a bass note against which the sweetness of the prawn registers clearly. The miso butter also seeps into the crumb during assembly, creating a focaccia that tastes of itself and of its filling simultaneously.
The Mr Crabs ($18) — crab meat dressed with green harissa, a North African herb and chilli condiment — is the boldest flavour combination reviewed in this entire survey. The harissa’s heat is tempered by the crab’s natural sweetness, and the result is a sandwich that is at once deeply familiar (crab is a beloved Singaporean ingredient) and genuinely new in its framing. The Bestside Sandwich ($15), with maple bacon, egg salad and fried onion rings, is the crowd-pleaser of the range: baroque in its caloric ambition, unapologetically satisfying.
DELIVERY PERFORMANCE
With four outlets and availability on GrabFood, Yeast Side is the most practically accessible establishment in this survey. The biga-based bread holds reasonably well during delivery, though the hash brown in the Sri Lankan Chicken will lose its crunch; if ordering for delivery, the Miso Prawn or Mr Crabs are better bets. New fillings are due in April 2026.
VERDICT
The boldest flavour imagination of any operation reviewed here. The sandwiches at Yeast Side are not always the most technically refined, but they are often the most exciting to eat, the kind of thing that makes you want to immediately describe them to someone else. The chain format and delivery availability make this the entry point of choice for the focaccia-curious who do not yet wish to make a special journey.
EDITOR’S RECOMMENDATIONS: ALSO WORTH TRYING
Super Dario Lasagne — City Square Mall
The Stuffed Focaccia ($12.50) has been on this menu for nine years, making it one of the oldest focaccia sandwiches in Singapore. Filled with mozzarella, sundried tomatoes and a choice of pesto, olive paste or truffle cream, it is the historical baseline against which all newer entrants should be measured. The truffle cream option, in particular, rewards the $12.50 it costs.
Da Paolo
The Italian dining group’s multiple outlets include focaccia among their bread offerings, and while the emphasis is on the focaccia as accompaniment rather than vehicle, the quality of the bake is consistently high. A useful point of comparison for understanding what the bread tastes like before it becomes a sandwich.
Marymount Bakehouse — Race Course Road
A neighbourhood bakery that has developed a focaccia with genuine personality: thick, generously oiled, topped with seasonal ingredients. Not a sandwich shop, but worth the detour for the bread alone.
Burnt Ends Bakery — Dempsey
The celebrated barbecue restaurant’s adjacent bakery operation offers focaccia among its daily baked goods. Given the sourcing rigour that defines Burnt Ends’ main operation, the bread here is made with equivalent seriousness. Arrive early; it sells out.
One Prawn & Co — New Bahru
The prawn noodle specialists have incorporated focaccia into their evolving bread programme at the New Bahru development. An interesting case of a Singaporean-focused restaurant making space for the flatbread, and worth watching as the format continues to evolve.
A Note on What This Wave Means
The focaccia sandwich moment in Singapore is not simply about bread. It is about a city that has metabolised enough of the world’s food cultures to begin refracting them through a genuinely local sensibility. At Big Mouth Bakehouse, an Italian flatbread carries Thai nam jim and shabu-shabu beef. At Yeast Side, it holds Sri Lankan curry chicken and a North African condiment. At Mamma Mia, it is filled with the canonical products of Italian gastronomy, assembled by a Spanish-born chef in a city-state that was, until recently, largely unfamiliar with focaccia as a bread.
What unites all five operations reviewed here is a shared understanding that bread is not neutral. It has texture, flavour, colour and cultural history, and the fillings placed within it are in dialogue with all of these qualities. The best sandwiches in this survey — the San Daniele at Mamma Mia, the Thai Beef Salad at Big Mouth, the Mr Crabs at Yeast Side, the Beef Pastrami at Cat & The Fiddle — are successful not because the fillings are good (though they are) but because the relationship between filling and bread has been thought through with care.
The wave will continue. New establishments will open. The menu at Yeast Side will expand in April. L’Arte will introduce its smoked salmon and roast beef variations. Big Mouth’s weekend specials will evolve. And somewhere in the city, someone is at this moment developing a focaccia sandwich that does not yet exist, that we cannot yet imagine, that will make us wonder why we ever ate anything else.
That, in the end, is what a good food wave feels like from the inside.
TASTE & TABLE
Singapore’s independent guide to dining, drinking and the culture of the table.