Gourmands who have dined at Odette would know that Royer and his team’s cooking reflect a strong grasp of the fundamentals, from making their own sauces and stocks from scratch to perfecting techniques such as braising and poaching to coax out the best flavours from the ingredients. “I understood the importance of the basics of cooking early on from [Maître Cuisinier de France] Bernard Andrieux,” shares Royer. After staging with Bras, he spent two years with Andrieux in Auvergne, France. “This experience was fundamental in my career and without it, it would have been difficult to develop my own [culinary] identity.”

While Andrieux helped lay the foundation for his cuisine, it was Antonin Bonnet, former executive chef of the now-shuttered The Greenhouse in London, UK, who further honed Royer’s creative spirit in the kitchen. “It was there that I learnt to cook with a lot of creativity, but without forgetting the backbone and the roots of the cuisine,” he says. Royer only stayed for one year, but Bonnet clearly remembers the high level of cooking by the young chef. “Julien had much more freedom than other chefs … he was very innovative and was coming up with new recipes all the time,” he tells us.

Even though Royer trained under renowned stars of the culinary world, he is quick to point out that “the most fundamental training in produce, tastes, seasonality, and the pleasures of eating came from my family”, especially the women in his life, namely his grandmothers Odette and Louise, and his mother Claudine, after whom he named his three restaurants—two in Singapore, and one in Hong Kong.

Growing up humble in the Cantal region of Auvergne, France, Royer says while the family didn’t have much money, they always ate well. “Seasonality was a way of life for us,” he affirms. They harvested vegetables such as potatoes, leeks and squash during summer; peas and garlic during spring; and a variety of mushrooms during autumn at their family garden. One of his favourite dishes was his grandmother Odette’s roast chicken with cream and mushrooms, which she would often serve with rice. “It was just a simple dish using high-quality chicken, but it was delicious,” he shares. This dish, alongside his love for Singapore, inspired the cultish tribute to his grandmother’s dish at Odette, poularde de Bresse with Niigata rice and albufera sauce, which regulars love to order.

The family home was surrounded by forests, rivers, hills and mountains. His mother would often forage for wild herbs, flowers and fungi, which were used in preparing family meals. “My mum would pick wild raspberries,” he shares, “which my grandmother Odette would make into jams.” As a little boy, barely tall enough to reach the kitchen counter, Royer would stand on a stool and watch how his grandmother would prepare these freshly picked fruits. This cherished memory inspired the house-made jam that guests are gifted after their meal at Odette. He explains: “The flavour changes according to the season, but I want diners to experience the same happiness I felt with my grandmother’s jam.”

Since his early days as a chef, Royer has always been fascinated by Asian flavours. So when the opportunity to move to Singapore came in 2008, he grabbed it. “I was in Bora Bora, in French Polynesia, for some time already,” he shares. His then-boss Frédéric Colin, the former executive chef at The St Regis Bora Bora Resort—who is now the chef-owner of Brasserie Gavroche on Tras Street since 2011—had asked him to join the pre-opening team of French restaurant Brasserie Les Saveurs at The St Regis Singapore. Royer stayed for two years. His biggest break, however, came when revered chef Otto Weibel, the godfather of Singapore’s culinary fraternity, and Nigel Moore, the ex-director of F&B at Swissôtel The Stamford, hired him as the executive chef of French restaurant Jaan in 2011 (now helmed by Royer’s former sous chef Kirk Westaway).

Royer is the first to admit that he had big shoes to fill as an up-and-coming culinary talent, especially as Jaan had become one of Singapore’s top restaurants under Taiwanese chef André Chiang. “I am thankful that Nigel and Otto gave me a lot of freedom to express my creativity in my cooking,” he says.

The chance to establish Odette came at a rather fortuitous moment. Royer had been with Jaan for four years, and was thinking of going back to Europe to start something of his own. His friend, cookbook author and food consultant Shermay Lee, convinced him to meet Wee Teng Wen, the managing partner and co-founder of The Lo & Behold Group, to see if there was an opportunity to work together. “I met Teng Wen for coffee at Raffles Hotel Singapore and we instantly clicked,” recalls Royer. From that first meeting, Wee also fondly remembers Royer as “humble yet ambitious—and these traits are very much aligned with the group’s culture and what we value in the right long-term partner”.

Odette opened to much fanfare at National Gallery Singapore in 2015, garnering praise from gourmands and critics alike, and earning the Best New Restaurant award from Singapore Tatler’s Best Restaurants Guide (now known as Tatler Dining Guide) in 2016. For Royer, it was the platform he yearned for to showcase his own cooking style, still intrinsically rooted in French cuisine yet never afraid to incorporate Asian flavours and produce.

“It’s French cuisine with a zest of Asia,” he says. His signature roasted pigeon perfectly encapsulates how a classic French dish can be imbued with these Asian accents. “The pigeon is classically cooked but we use green, red and black Kampot peppercorns to give it a peppery crust. We serve this with the salmis de pigeon, a kind of pâté that you put on toast, but we decided to put it in a Chinese bowl.”

Odette quickly established itself as one of the best French restaurants in Singapore and Asia, with accolades such as the Asia’s Best Restaurant title in 2019 and 2020, and consistently placing on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list since 2018. Royer himself received a string of awards, including the Restaurateur of the Year honour at the Les Grandes Tables du Monde in 2022, and the esteemed Estrella Damm Chefs’ Choice Award in 2023, the only peer-voted award at the The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

What do these awards mean to Royer? “It means that my team is doing a great job,” he stresses. He is lucky enough to have a “dream team” that has been with him for many years: executive chef Levin Lau, who has been by his side for 13 years; head chef Adam Wan, who has been working alongside him for a decade; chef de cuisine Yeo Sheng Xiong, whom he has mentored for over 10  years; and recently promoted wine director Vincent Tan, who has been with Odette since its opening.  “We already have this automatism in the kitchen where we can read what each other needs,” says Royer. He even credits florist Jérôme Desfonds, for coming up with seasonal floral arrangements that enhance the dining experience at Odette. The always generous chef paused our interview to introduce Desfonds to us while he changed the flower displays before lunch service.

Royer’s role has also evolved from being purely a chef to chef-restaurateur with the opening of Louise in Hong Kong in 2019, and Claudine at Dempsey Road in 2021. “I am at Odette 70 per cent of the time,” shares Royer, who splits his time running his three restaurants and travelling the globe for work engagements. He doesn’t want to stop there, though, as he has plans to grow his culinary empire by opening a patisserie and a vegetarian fine-dining restaurant in Singapore in the near future. So who helms the Odette kitchen when he is away? “The same people as when  I am in the kitchen,” Royer states, quoting the late French chef Paul Bocuse when he was asked the same question.

As Odette nears its 10th anniversary in 2025, we ask Royer about his future goals for his first restaurant. He pauses to think about his reply, before saying that he wants to remain relevant in the next 10 years and more. “I want Odette to be an institution in French fine‑dining in Singapore.”

With his role as a hospitality leader, Royer is on a mission to train the next generation of chefs and hospitality leaders by “teaching and nurturing them” and giving them the tools and opportunities to learn and discover new cultures and food destinations. Ultimately, he wants to bring the message across of how food cooked with love brings happiness to people, and dining at restaurants makes them forget about their way of life, even for just a few hours. This thought takes him back to a childhood memory in his home in Cantal where his grandmother Odette prepared the family meal. “I was eating my grandmother’s cooking and it was so good. I was happy and everyone at the dining table was smiling. It was magical.”

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