In my tiny home country of Singapore, we're all obsessed with overseas travel. Our closets are stuffed with a baffling quantity of winterwear, considering we live in year-round tropical heat. Supermarkets stack suitcases for sale next to carts of durians. Grocery runs to neighboring Malaysia are weekly affairs. A study by Visa once ranked Singaporeans the most frequent leisure travelers in the world. But when the 2020 lockdown happened, we were forced to do something we'd never done before: look inward and consider what our own 280 square miles had to offer.
The result of this introspection? Our collective soul has risen to the surface. With borders closed, local entrepreneurs had time and space to grow their passion projects, in some cases ushering into life entire new subcultures around them. Along Orchard Road, best known for its hulking malls and twinkly designer boutiques, throngs of young street musicians play to swooning fans they have won over on TikTok—an unexpected phenomenon in a nation that has never looked at music as a viable career. Indoors, the next big thing in a country crazy about eating is private-home dining—where you pay for a meal at someone's home—with some waiting lists longer than those at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Le Cordon Bleu–trained Rishi Arora recently fed my family a flurry of dishes prepared at Part Thai, as he has dubbed his cozy flat in the Clementi neighborhood: pad thai made with crispy wonton skins instead of noodles, a fiery red curry sweetened with fresh lychees, and slices of juicy rib-eye steak on perfectly chewy sticky rice. The meal was a creative ode to Arora's Singaporean Thai heritage, served with relish as his elderly beagle quietly looked on.
All over this compact, gleaming metropolis, a softer side is emerging. One morning, seeking a break from the chaotic city, I visited the new Bird Paradise, a designated sanctuary in the freshly carved-out Mandai Wildlife Reserve—among several recently opened nature-focused spaces. From the top of an aviary, I saw a sight rarer than the endangered straw-headed bulbul warbling next to me: a lushly forested horizon, unpierced by a single building.
Greenery is creeping its way into our hospitality spaces too. The Pan Pacific Orchard, an imposing, futuristic landmark by the local architecture firm WOHA, brings nature into the heart of the city with its foliage-clad columns and sustainable features, like a system that turns food waste into cleaning water. And while the storied Raffles is the world-famous symbol of Singapore's past, several hotels are staking a claim to represent its future: The new COMO Orchard—a vibrant complex made up of the sleek COMO Metropolitan Singapore hotel, a wellness facility, and first-in-town eateries like a Cédric Grolet patisserie—contains many of Singaporeans' favorite pastimes. And next year, Raffles will unveil a new face with Raffles Sentosa Resort & Spa, Singapore's first all-villa property—a poetic return to the coast of the South China Sea for the brand whose flagship property overlooked what was then the shoreline when it opened in 1887.
Of course, everything readers know and love about Singapore is still here: the marriage of East and West that makes this place at once so foreign and so familiar; the pristine, tree-lined streets; the buzzy hawker centers filled with the smoke-kissed aroma of char kway teow and the scraping clang of wooden spatulas against iron woks. Only now, more than ever, there's a palpable sense of identity crackling through. Truly, Singapore is coming alive.
This article appeared in the November 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
