7 dining rooms in Asia with histories worth knowing

Within it, Odette, led by chef Julien Royer, holds three Michelin stars and reopened in December 2025 after a three-month renovation. The redesign was led by Sacha Leong of Nice Projects, who replaced the original pastel palette with warm beurre and tawny umber against oyster and cherry timber. Timber marquetry referencing French Art Deco techniques, mohair velvet upholstery, and cast mirrored glass panels work alongside the building’s Corinthian columns. A new entrance artwork by Singaporean artist Dawn Ng completes the refresh.

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Armenian Street in George Town is one of the most studied stretches of shophouse architecture in Southeast Asia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site corridor where the street’s 19th-century trade history remains legible in its built fabric. Farm Architecture’s restoration of two adjoining shophouses at number 88 is among the more considered examples of adaptive reuse in Penang. The shophouses now operate as 88 Armenian, a six-room boutique hotel, with Tong, the hotel’s ground-floor restaurant, anchoring the street-facing space.

The single-piece copper bar that anchors the interior is a direct reference to the street’s earlier incarnation as Coppersmith Street, when metalworkers occupied the ground floors of these same buildings. The shou-sugi ban wall panelling, timber charred in the Japanese manner, references a fire that destroyed the original structures on the site. Both choices are grounded in the specific history of this particular address rather than a general evocation of George Town heritage.

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Built in 1889 and serving as the Soviet and then Russian Embassy from 1948 until 1999, The House on Sathorn is a protected historic building registered with Thailand’s Fine Arts Department. The Neoclassical mansion, with its symmetrical facade, wrought-iron balustrades and sequence of reception rooms, now sits within the W Bangkok hotel complex. 

Paii, the Thai seafood restaurant that occupies the building, operates in spaces that functioned as diplomatic reception rooms for the better part of a century. The heritage site designation has constrained the scope of the interior intervention, which means the building’s original architecture takes clear precedence over the hospitality brief.

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In 1961, Geoffrey Bawa took over a private house on Alfred House Road in Colombo, whose client had withdrawn before completion, and converted it into his own office. The site was long and narrow, 15 metres wide and 70 metres deep, and Bawa arranged three courtyards along its length to produce an interlocking sequence of indoor, semi-outdoor and outdoor spaces. It is an early example of the spatial logic that would define his career: the calibration of natural light through carefully considered voids, the use of local materials, and the dissolution of the boundary between interior and exterior. 

Designer Shanth Fernando of the Paradise Road group opened the building as a restaurant and gallery in 1998, with Bawa’s personal approval. The courtyard logic of the original is preserved, with a lily-pad pond, rotating exhibitions of Sri Lankan art by established and emerging local artists, and contemporary interiors that Fernando developed in close conversation with Bawa’s existing fabric. Desserts are displayed on Bawa’s old desk.

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Three on the Bund, formerly the Union Building, was completed in 1916 to designs by Palmer & Turner and stands as Shanghai’s first steel-framed structure. Its Neo-Renaissance facade, with Baroque detailing and Ionic columns flanking the entrance, anchors the northern stretch of the Bund’s heritage building corridor. American architect Michael Graves restored and converted the building in 2004, and it was Graves’s office that first brought Neri&Hu partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu to the project. 

When the firm was later commissioned to redesign Jean-Georges, the fourth-floor restaurant by chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, they stripped back accumulated finishes to reveal the original plasterwork cornices and classical arched columns of the 1916 Beaux Arts interior. New brass volumes were inserted to define the bar, show kitchen and private dining rooms without obscuring what the demolition had uncovered. The building’s original heritage windows frame views across the Huangpu River to Pudong.

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Kengo Kuma’s renovation of the 1926 Kyoto Central Telephone Office, a red-brick Taisho-era building in Nakagyo-ku, involved one of the more technically demanding decisions in the project brief: the addition of a new building alongside the original, connected to it while maintaining the heritage structure’s primacy on the streetscape.

The resulting Ace Hotel Kyoto, which opened in 2020, places its restaurants, including the farm-to-table Kosa, Mr Maurice’s Italian and the PIOPIKO bar, within interiors that bring together handcrafted Japanese lighting, custom artworks by the late folk artist Samiro Yunoki and a copper reception desk. The red brick of the 1926 building and the contemporary materials of Kuma’s addition remain legible as separate architectural moments, with the 1926 facade reading as a street presence distinct from the new structure behind it.

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The former Central Police Station compound is, in terms of scale, the most ambitious heritage conversion on this list. The compound, built between 1862 and 1925 and comprising 16 historic buildings and two internal courtyards, covers 300,000 square feet at the edge of Central. Herzog & de Meuron led the restoration and adaptive reuse of the entire site, working with conservation architects Purcell and executive architects Rocco Design, and added two new structures — the Old Bailey Galleries and the Arbuthnot Auditorium — clad in cast recycled aluminium panels. The project, completed in 2018, preserved the compound’s Neoclassical and Roman-arched architecture without altering the massing of what stood before it.

Within the compound’s Central Magistracy building, Black Sheep Restaurants has installed two dining rooms by Joyce Wang Studio: the Magistracy Dining Room, a British brasserie occupying the courthouse’s former public rooms, and Prince and the Peacock, an Indian restaurant on the second floor whose interior draws on the decorative vocabulary of the subcontinent’s royal courts.

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