Tiffany & Co.’s First Singapore Blue Box Café Has Julien Royer At The Helm
The jewellery house’s dining outpost at ION Orchard serves up a distinctly local menu.
Fans of Hollywood star, Audrey Hepburn—and that of Tiffany & Co.—will be familiar with one of the actress’s most iconic silver screen moments. Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly stepping out of a taxi in New York City in the morning, a coffee and pastry in hand, peering into the window of Tiffany & Co.’s boutique in the opening scene of Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
More than 60 years on, you, too, can have a taste of what enticed Hepburn’s character with the opening of the Blue Box Café in Singapore, located on the third floor of Tiffany & Co.’s the ION Orchard flagship boutique.
The Blue Box Café marks the first of its kind in Singapore, and the jewellery house has entrusted the kitchen to Julien Royer, the chef-owner behind three-Michelin-starred Odette, and its newer sibling, Claudine.
The pairing appears unusual at first: a legendary 189-year-old American jewellery house and a French-trained chef who has built his career in Asia. However, the menu suggests otherwise.
Breakfast can get theatrical at the Blue Box Café, arriving on a two-tiered stand with granola, smoked trout, and Royer’s version of soft-boiled eggs, made with Oita eggs from Japan and finished with a spoon of Oscietra caviar.
Afternoon tea keeps to the house’s three-tiered format but swaps in a croque madame wrapped in filo pastry and a wagyu cecina roll under black truffle, with pastries built from pandan and calamansi rather than the expected scones and clotted cream.
The all-day menu carries the clearest statement of intent. Royer’s confit yellow chicken reworks Singapore’s chicken rice with Niigata rice and a sake-seaweed sauce, cooked claypot-style until the base crisps; an Alaskan spot prawn “dumpling” channels the flavour of a Singaporean prawn noodle broth built from Obsiblue prawns.
Dessert, too, is quite divine. A must-try is the chocolate-and-salted-caramel bar called SniX, which sits beside the Tiffany Island, a reworked île flottante finished with Vanuatu vanilla and orange blossom water.
Whether you come for the cinematic nostalgia or simply for the menu designed by Royer, the Blue Box Café gives Orchard Road its own version of that dawn moment outside the window. Except this time, there is a seat waiting inside.