Johanne Siy opens Árō in Singapore with a S$268 menu
Asia's Best Female Chef of 2023 has taken over the former Esora shophouse on Mohamed Sultan Road. The money is her own and the larder is largely Philippine.
Johanne Siy, Asia's Best Female Chef in 2023, has opened Árō, her first restaurant as owner, at 15 Mohamed Sultan Road in Singapore. The 26-seat room serves a tasting menu at S$268 and was listed by Time Out Singapore on 2 October among the city's openings of the month.
The doors opened on Friday 25 September in the conservation shophouse that used to house Esora, the one-Michelin-star kappo restaurant that closed in 2025. It adds a chef-owned address to a city whose range we map in our list of the best restaurants in Singapore. Árō runs from Thursday to Monday and is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Johanne Siy, 45, was head chef at Lolla, where she won the 50 Best award; that restaurant closed earlier this year, Time Out reports. Her CV runs through Noma and Relæ in Copenhagen, Fäviken in Sweden and Restaurant André in Singapore, according to The Peak.
Twenty-six seats, one tasting menu and no group behind it: Árō is a bet on produce.
What Johanne Siy puts on the plate
She calls the cooking “creators' cuisine”: the menu is built around producers rather than a national tradition. Much of the larder comes from the Philippines. CNA lists gamet seaweed from Ilocos, stingless-bee honey from Laguna, pili nuts from Bicol and Asin Tibuok, a salt made in Bohol.
On the opening menu the gamet is served with Gillardeau oysters, the pili nut becomes a custard with jamón and caviar, the honey meets blue cheese and the salt lands on a cucumber sorbet. The avocado with smoked eel and jalapeño granita, familiar to Lolla regulars, has made the move too. “At the end of the day, chefs are like the agents, and the produce is really the hero,” Siy told The Peak.
A self-funded room of 26 seats
The Peak reported in August that the restaurant is financed by Johanne Siy, her husband and a close circle of friends, at a cost in the low seven figures. The layout, as described by Little Big Red Dot: a counter for 10, two tables of four and a private room with four tables of two.
The Japanese studio Keiji Ashizawa Design did the interior, with a walnut counter, oak chairs and rattan-clad walls; the shophouse's fluted stairwell and skylight were kept. Jhonel Faelnar, former beverage director of Atomix in New York, runs the drinks. Elaine Ng, formerly of La Dame de Pic at Raffles Hotel, handles pastry.
The name means “love” in Pangasinan, the language of Siy's home province. A shorter menu is planned to bring diners back more often, and that is the harder test. Árō enters the top price bracket of a city where, as our guide to what to eat in Singapore shows, a good meal can cost a few dollars.
