A luxury restaurant used to be judged almost entirely on what came out of the kitchen. That’s changed. In Singapore’s higher-end dining, the room itself has become part of the evaluation, formal enough now to have its own award circuit, judging criteria, and credited designers, separate from whoever runs the pass.
Part of the shift is practical. At the luxury end, most kitchens already operate at a high technical standard, narrowing the gap a menu alone can create between one restaurant and the next. The room becomes one of the few remaining places left to differentiate, particularly for special-occasion dining, where a guest is choosing a whole evening rather than just a meal.
There’s also a simpler cultural shift behind it: diners increasingly expect a restaurant to look considered, not just taste good. A private dining room, a bar built to be watched rather than just used, a space that feels distinct from the street outside these have moved from nice extras to something closer to a baseline expectation at the top of the market. That expectation is what’s pushed interior design from an afterthought into something worth formally judging on its own terms.
Not every well-decorated restaurant qualifies as a design achievement. What separates a genuinely award-considered interior from a nicely furnished one usually comes down to whether the space was built around a specific idea, rather than assembled from trending finishes picked one at a time.
Judges in this category tend to look at how consistently a concept carries through the whole room: the materials chosen, how the layout moves a guest through the space, and whether the design actually reinforces what the restaurant is trying to be, rather than sitting on top of it as decoration.
That distinction matters more in Singapore’s luxury dining scene than it might elsewhere, simply because there’s enough competition at the top end that a beautifully lit room alone no longer stands out on its own.
The main body recognising this work in Singapore is the Singapore Interior Design Awards (SIDA), which runs a dedicated F&B design category covering restaurants and café spaces. Entries are split by type: a Completed category for finished, operating spaces, and a Concept category for the design idea itself, judged on how well it was executed rather than purely on the finished photographs.
Within F&B, restaurant projects are judged separately from cafés, and awards run from Gold through Silver, Bronze and Honorary Mention, with a separate Youth category for student and early-career work.
It’s worth being precise about what this kind of award actually measures. A SIDA win says something about spatial design, material choices and how well a concept was carried through construction. It says nothing about the food, the service or the wine list, and shouldn’t be read as a substitute for a restaurant review.
Across Singapore’s award-recognised restaurant interiors, a few approaches keep showing up, even though each project executes them differently. Some designs reuse a heritage building rather than building from scratch, letting existing architecture set the tone instead of imposing one on a blank shell.
Others centre the room around something meant to be watched, an open bar where drinks are prepared as a visible performance, or an ageing or preparation process left deliberately on display, so part of the kitchen’s work becomes part of the interior itself.
A third common approach splits one restaurant into several distinct rooms, each with its own mood, so the experience changes depending on where a guest is seated rather than staying uniform across the whole floor.
None of these approaches guarantees a win on its own. What tends to get rewarded is how deliberately and consistently the chosen idea is carried through, rather than which idea gets picked.
One recent example of that consistency is The Manor in Tanjong Pagar, an Indian fine dining restaurant inside Amara Singapore, which was awarded Silver in the Concept category for Best in F&B Design, Restaurants, at SIDA 2025, with the design credited to Eso Torra Indesigns.
The brief there was built around the idea of a private manor estate rather than a generic fine-dining template, which is the kind of specificity judges in this category tend to reward over a simply expensive-looking room.
For someone choosing where to book a special occasion, a design award is a useful but limited signal. It tells you the room was built with intent, which usually means more than one type of space under one roof: a main dining hall for scale, and often smaller private rooms designed for a different mood entirely.
It’s worth asking, when booking, whether a restaurant’s private dining space was designed as its own room or is simply a curtained-off section of the main floor, since that difference tends to track closely with whether the interior was actually part of the design brief or added afterward.
What a design award won’t tell you is anything about the kitchen. Treat it as one input alongside a menu, a chef’s background and, where available, an actual review of the food, rather than a stand-in for any of them.
It recognises the physical design of a space, including layout, materials and how well a concept was executed, judged by design industry panels rather than food critics.
Not necessarily. Interior design awards and food reviews are judged separately, by different panels using different criteria, so one shouldn’t be assumed from the other.
Yes. SIDA, for example, separates Completed projects from Concept entries, judges restaurants separately from café spaces within its F&B category, and runs a distinct Youth category for student work.
Approaches that carry one clear idea through the whole space, such as reusing a heritage building, building a room around something meant to be watched, or splitting a restaurant into distinct spaces with different moods, tend to stand out more than a room decorated purely for photographs.
Yes. The Manor in Tanjong Pagar won Silver in the Concept category for Best in F&B Design, Restaurants, at SIDA 2025, with the interior credited to Eso Torra Indesigns.