Mid-May is a strange time of year. Half of 2026 is already gone and most Sundays in Singapore blur into the same brunch rotation but not this one. This is unique and can’t be slotted into a pre-made template.
Wildcard sits beside the Furama Riverfront on Havelock Road. Lo-fi wines, classic-ish cocktails, comfort plates, a vinyl bar at the centre of the room, a semi-open kitchen where you can see the actual cooking. The walls are textured white, the art quiet. Their tagline is "We are what we drink" and the wine list exhibits the belief with wines sourced seasonally from independent farmers and artisans, chosen for the story behind them as much as what's in the glass.
Thursday nights there's jazz. Sundays they run the Test Kitchen, a rotating series where a guest chef takes over the kitchen with a menu built entirely around their own world. No fixed format, no recurring dishes. This Sunday was Test Kitchen #27: Nikoi 2.0, dishes from the team behind Nikoi Island and its sister property Cempedak Island, two private islands off the eastern coast of Bintan in Indonesia's Riau Archipelago.
Both islands started as someone's personal escape. In 2004, Australian banker Andrew Dixon, then based in Singapore, bought an uninhabited island off Bintan with five friends. They wanted a weekend place that was none of what existed nearby: no plastic sun loungers, no resort theatre, no disconnect from where they were. Nikoi opened in 2007.
A decade later, Dixon opened Cempedak on a second island 14 miles south, built from 50,000 pieces of sustainably harvested bamboo. Both are now Global Ecosphere Retreats, the highest sustainability certification awarded by The Long Run. The recognition includes a World Travel and Tourism Council Social Impact Award and Condé Nast coverage. Their Island Foundation runs learning centres across the Riau Archipelago, has put 1,500 teachers through training programmes, and worked with Seven Clean Seas to pull 350 tonnes of plastic from Bintan's waters.
The food comes from the same place the ethos does.
Getting there takes a Tanah Merah ferry to Bintan, a car across the island, then a private speedboat. Under three hours from Singapore. Nikoi is family-friendly; Cempedak is adults-only, maximum 40 guests. Both run on full-board: three meals a day, menus on a blackboard each morning based on what arrived fresh. Chicken and eggs from their own permaculture farm on Bintan, vegetables, herbs and chillies the same, seafood in daily from local fishers.
I've always had a practical question about full-board island stays. The setting sells itself; the food is the part nobody talks about in enough detail. Test Kitchen #27 filled that gap.
Chef Dika, Executive Chef and F&B Director at Restaurant Biru on Nikoi, cooked Sunday's menu. Restaurant Biru is an open-sided teak-and-thatch dining room on the island, the kind of place where lunch runs to three hours and that's entirely the point. Biru means blue in Bahasa Indonesia; from the restaurant, you understand why immediately.
The meal opened with Gohu, prawn marinated in coconut milk, lime juice, chilli, shallots and basil. A dish from the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia, where raw seafood is dressed in citrus and coconut rather than cooked. Clean, coastal, a strong start. Lobster is the other version on the island; we had prawn. Then Indonesian Lumpia Daging: minced beef and vegetables in homemade lumpia skins, deep-fried, with mango salsa. The skins were thin and properly crisp, the salsa cutting the richness without competing with it.
Before the mains, a salad worth naming. Built around cempedak, the fruit the adults-only island takes its name from. Cempedak is the more intense cousin of jackfruit: smaller, juicier when ripe, with a musky sweetness that sits somewhere between mango, banana and honey. Dressed with turmeric, fennel, pine nuts and what appeared to be bottarga, it was exactly what a course between starters and mains should do: interesting enough to notice, measured enough not to steal the scene.
The mains were a dish called Balinese Harmony: marinated chicken with mixed rice, vegetables and sambal matah, the raw Balinese mix of sliced shallots, lemongrass, chilli and lime that sharpens everything it touches. Then The Beauty of Samosir Island: grilled snapper in tombur sauce with Batak-style noodles. Tombur is a spiced coconut sauce from North Sumatra's Batak people, built on andaliman pepper and torch ginger; earthy, aromatic, deeply savoury on a well-cooked snapper without heaviness. Both mains were genuinely nourishing while still being delicious.
There's a Balinese philosophy called Tri Hita Karana, which translates as the three causes of happiness: harmony with God, harmony with people, harmony with nature. Sunday lunch at Wildcard, working through a menu built on a farm, a fishing community and two islands that take all three seriously, was a quiet reminder of what a meal can actually be.
Dessert was a Spicy Chocolate Tart: mixed-spice ganache in shortcrust pastry with turmeric cream. The turmeric came through as warmth rather than earthiness, a detail that took some skill to land.
The wine throughout was the Sextant 2021 Bourgogne Blanc from Saint-Aubin in Burgundy. Made by Julien Altaber, a natural winemaker who trained under biodynamic pioneer Dominique Derain and sources 90% of his grapes from other growers specifically to give them a reason to farm better. Organic, aged on the lees for a year for texture. Honeyed grapefruit, citrus peel, toasted green apple, nervous acidity, a thread of salinity through the finish. A wine with a producer philosophy that sits comfortably alongside everything else on the table that afternoon.
Wildcard and the islands have intricately woven philosophies. Wildcard sources seasonally from independent producers, shifts the menu with the kitchen's instincts, and stays grounded. The islands run a farm and a foundation. The collaboration makes sense because the values were already the same before anyone made the introduction.
Over the National Day long weekend on 9 August, it reverses. Chef Angelo of Wildcard takes his kitchen to Cempedak, cooking for guests as part of the standard board rate. If Sunday's test kitchen was the preview, that weekend is worth the ferry ride.
For reservations, visit here.
Wildcard: 405 Havelock Rd, #01-03 Furama RiverFront
Sunday Test Kitchen from 11 a.m.
