21 Binjai Park, Singapore 589827 · February 2026
THE ROOM
The first thing a returning diner notices is the silence. Not the dead silence of an empty room, but the warm acoustic hush of a space that has been deliberately tamed. The post-2025 renovation has halved the footprint of IVINS at Binjai Park, yet paradoxically the restaurant feels more fully itself — more considered, more composed, more honest about what it is and what it has always been.
Where the old dining room stretched into a cavern of hard plaster and echoing tile, the new interior is lined with materials that drink sound rather than bounce it back. On a weekday lunchtime, nearly every seat occupied, the room hums at a convivial pitch rather than roaring into overstimulation. Conversation is possible at normal register. This is, in a city of often deafening restaurants, a genuine luxury.
Amber incandescent tones wash over Peranakan floor tiles in deep teal and terracotta, producing a lantern-glow effect throughout service hours. There is no cold overhead fluorescence. Timber, ceramic, and soft furnishings were chosen as much for their acoustic absorption as their aesthetics — the tiles themselves recall the five-foot way heritage of the Straits Chinese shophouse. A dedicated waiting area, an afterthought in many Singapore establishments, signals care for the full guest experience, not merely the moment of seating.
The new neighbour, 7 Gourmet — a Japanese grocery and prepared food outlet now occupying the reclaimed half of the old space — introduces a curious adjacency, as though the old IVINS has quietly sub-let its excess ambition and kept only the essential. The reduction in scale is not a loss. It is an act of editorial discipline: an acknowledgment that a great Peranakan meal was never about grandeur but about intimacy, repetition, and the quiet pull of return.
THE MEAL
The weekday set lunch, priced between S$17.90 and S$20.90 depending on the main course, is a remarkably coherent proposition. Two mains, three side dishes, a soup and a dessert arrive in the familiar Peranakan procession — communal, layered, deeply reliant on rice as the mediator between the vivid and the subtle. On this visit: beef rendang and ayam buah keluak as mains, Nyonya chap chye, tauhu goreng and bakwan kepeting soup completing the table.
The ayam buah keluak is the crown of the Peranakan table and the dish by which any serious Nonya kitchen must ultimately be judged. Each buah keluak nut arrives having been braised long enough that the dense, tar-black paste within has partly emerged into the surrounding gravy, staining it a deep mahogany. The chicken thigh yields at the pressure of a spoon. The paste inside the nut must be scraped free with a small implement and folded into the rice yourself — the dish does not give itself up easily, and this is entirely intentional. What you extract is intensely earthy, faintly bitter, unmistakably mineral: the flavour of fermentation, of time, of patience compressed into something dense and almost geological. The portion, calibrated for a single diner within a set lunch, is strikingly generous. The buah keluak at IVINS deserves special mention. It is wonderful.
The beef rendang is a dish measured in hours rather than minutes. The beef has been cooked past tenderness into something approaching collapse — the muscle fibres loosened sufficiently to pull apart at a nudge. The rempah clings to the exterior in a dark, caramelised crust built from lemongrass, galangal, chilli and kerisik. It is sweet, fierce, fat-rich and deeply savoury at the finish, the coconut oil having separated and re-absorbed during the long reduction, carrying every spice compound deeper into the meat. The portion is again substantial.
The Nyonya chap chye performs an essential and underappreciated function at the table. Clear, lightly sweet from the fermented bean paste, with glass noodles that have absorbed the delicate stock into translucent strands, it serves as a palate reset between encounters with the two more aggressive mains. Lily buds and dried tofu skin contribute their faint, clean bitterness. It is not as intense as the versions served at kitchens that prefer a more forceful hand — IVINS cooks it in a lighter, more classical style, and this restraint is a considered choice rather than a deficiency.
The bakwan kepeting soup arrives pale and almost deceptively clear. The broth carries an oceanic sweetness from the crab, the meatballs sitting dense and faintly springy at their centres, loosening outward as they cool in the bowl. Bamboo shoots add a fibrous chew. The overall profile is gentle and precise — a counterpoint to the richness accumulating elsewhere on the table, and once again an example of IVINS favouring elegance over intensity.
THE HUES
A Peranakan lunch is one of the most chromatically complex meals in Southeast Asian cuisine, and the spread at IVINS ranges across a spectrum that spans, in effect, geological time. The buah keluak paste is near-black, a colour almost without warmth — this is the result of months of fermentation inside the toxic seed of the kepayang tree, detoxified by burial in ash and water before any cooking begins. The mahogany of the braising gravy surrounding the nuts edges toward deep burgundy as the dish cools. The rendang achieves its darkest tone at its caramelised exterior crust — the specific burnt-amber of kerisik, toasted grated coconut pounded into paste, its oils released by dry heat. Moving outward from the mains, the chap chye registers a pale celadon green, the colour of Chinese cabbage held at the precise point where it softens and sweetens without collapsing into grey. The bakwan kepeting broth is nearly ivory, almost luminous in contrast to everything surrounding it. Dessert closes the chromatic sequence: pulot hitam in deep obsidian, the black glutinous rice bleeding its violet-dark pigment into the sweetened broth, with coconut milk swirled in at service to produce a brief marble effect — one of the most visually dramatic moments in the Peranakan dessert tradition.
THE TEXTURES
Texture in Peranakan cooking is rarely accidental. The cuisine evolved in household kitchens over generations, calibrated by feel as much as by taste. The mouth’s experience of an IVINS lunch unfolds across a wide range of resistances — from the near-liquid surrender of the braised beef to the faintly springy resilience of a bakwan kepeting meatball fresh from its broth.
The rendang presents what might be called a textural gradient: the caramelised exterior offers brief resistance and an almost imperceptible crunch before the interior muscle fibres — broken down by hours of low-temperature braising — yield completely. The contrast between these two zones within a single bite is among the most satisfying sensations in Malaysian-influenced cooking. The chap chye glass noodles, having absorbed stock during their braise, carry a trembling, gelatinous give that is neither firm nor loose but precisely suspended between the two states. Dried tofu skin, where it survives the braise with structure intact, adds a spongy layer that holds broth like a small reservoir, releasing it under compression. The lily buds punctuate this smoothness with a fibrous chew.
The buah keluak paste demands active engagement from the diner. It is dense and slightly grainy, somewhere between a very stiff pâté and dry marzipan in its resistance to the spoon, and it must be worked into the rice rather than simply spooned. This labour is part of the pleasure. It slows you down and makes the eating deliberate.
Dessert closes on two contrasting notes. Pulot hitam is monochromatic in both colour and texture — a single sustained chew of swollen glutinous rice grains softened to the edge of porridge, the coconut milk a liquid foil. Buboh cha cha, by contrast, is a study in multiplicity: cubes of yam and sweet potato cooked to different consistencies, sago pearls, coconut milk jelly, each component offering a different resistance in the same spoonful. For this reason, the buboh cha cha is the more interesting dessert of the two. It asks more of you.
THE RECIPE: AYAM BUAH KELUAK
This dish begins three days before it is served. The buah keluak nuts — the seeds of the kepayang tree, native to the coastal mangrove forests of Southeast Asia — are toxic in their raw state and must be detoxified by soaking in repeatedly changed water over several days before cooking. Plan accordingly.
For four to six people you will need eight to ten buah keluak nuts, one whole chicken jointed into eight pieces, cooking oil, tamarind pulp soaked in water to yield approximately 400 millilitres of tamarind liquid, palm sugar, salt and several bruised kaffir lime leaves. For the rempah — the spice paste that is the aromatic foundation of the dish — you will need fifteen dried red chillies soaked until soft, eight shallots, six garlic cloves, fresh galangal, fresh turmeric, the white portions of two lemongrass stalks, a teaspoon of toasted belachan, and a tablespoon of soaked dried shrimp.
Begin by scrubbing the nuts under running water and submerging them in a bowl of fresh water. Change this water twice daily for three full days. On the day of cooking, use a small implement to crack a hole in the pointed end of each nut and loosen the paste within with a skewer. Do not remove the paste — it should remain inside the nut and will partly emerge during braising.
Blend all the rempah ingredients with a small amount of oil until the paste is very smooth. Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat and add the rempah. Fry it, stirring constantly, for fifteen to twenty minutes. The paste will darken from brick-red to a deeper, more burnished tone, and at a certain point — the moment the Nonya kitchen calls pecah minyak, the breaking of the oil — the coconut oil will separate from the paste and pool visibly at the edges of the pot. This is the critical threshold. The rempah is not ready until this happens.
Add the chicken pieces and the prepared nuts, stirring to coat them thoroughly. Add the tamarind water, palm sugar, kaffir lime leaves and salt. Bring to a gentle simmer, cover, and braise over low heat for forty-five to fifty-five minutes until the chicken is completely tender and the gravy has reduced to a rich, coating consistency. Taste carefully for the balance of salt, sweetness and acidity that defines Nonya cooking — adjust with additional tamarind water or palm sugar as needed. Allow the dish to rest for at least thirty minutes before serving, and note that it is consistently better the following day, when the flavours have had time to consolidate. Serve with steamed jasmine rice, with a small implement provided so that diners can extract the paste from each nut at the table and fold it into the rice themselves.
THE VERDICT
What IVINS offers in its renovated form is not the most incendiary version of Nonya cooking in Singapore. Kitchens with a more aggressive spice architecture and a greater willingness to push the tamarind to its limit exist, and they offer a different kind of pleasure. What IVINS offers instead is reliability, craft, and now, a considerably more pleasant setting in which to encounter both. The food earns a solid three out of five — competent and frequently enjoyable without aspiring to greatness. Service at four out of five reflects a team that is attentive without intrusiveness. Value at four out of five is defensible given the portion sizes, particularly within the set lunch format. Atmosphere at three and a half out of five represents a genuine improvement on the old room and an honest appraisal of a restaurant that has become, with renovation, more of what it always wanted to be.
There is a particular kind of restaurant — not fashionable, not invisible, not trying too hard — that quietly anchors a neighbourhood. IVINS has always been that restaurant for Bukit Timah. The renovation has simply made it more itself.
Hours: 11am to 3pm and 5pm to 9pm daily. Closed Thursdays. Weekday set lunch from S$17.90.