Tokyo Michelin-recognized Sio Pasta opens first overseas outpost in Singapore

The queue outside Sio Pasta at Raffles City Shopping Centre told the story before the first bowl hit the table. The 28-seat room had no reservations, and that scarcity helped turn a Tokyo-born pasta brand into one of the most talked-about openings in Singapore’s dining scene.

Sio Pasta opened its first overseas outpost on March 26, bringing the first international extension of sio AOYAMA, the Tokyo restaurant that has been featured in the MICHELIN Guide Tokyo for six consecutive years. The draw is easy to understand: fresh handcrafted pasta starts at $13.80, a price that makes the brand feel far more approachable than its pedigree suggests.

The kitchen is set up to make that promise visible. Diners can spot the pasta machine in the restaurant, where fresh batches are turned out every other hour using 00 flour and semolina to produce noodles with the kind of silky, elastic bite fresh-pasta regulars look for. The menu runs to 11 pasta dishes, with sides, pizzas and desserts filling out the offer, but the pasta is the reason people are lining up.

That demand matters because Singapore is already in the middle of a pasta moment. Scarpetta, the Amoy Street pasta bar that opened in February 2025, drew queues of up to two hours after launch and also kept to a walk-in-only model. It started with six pasta dishes at $17, proving there is an appetite here for compact, chef-led rooms built around fresh pasta and a sense of limited availability. Sio Pasta enters that same lane with a stronger international story and a lower starting price.

Much of that credibility comes from chef Shusaku Toba. Before he entered professional cooking at 31, Toba spent time as a J-League football trainee and later worked as an elementary school teacher. He opened sio in 2018 after training in Tokyo kitchens including Florilège and Aria di Tacubo, and the MICHELIN Guide has described his approach at sio AOYAMA as “Italian of points,” a style built on exact temperature, flame control and restraint.

The Singapore opening was not handed off casually. Toba personally approved the recipes and proportions, while the local head chef trained in Japan under his direct supervision for about a month. Toba will keep oversight with visits every two months in the first year, then twice annually afterward. CapitaLand Malls describes sio pasta as a casual Italian restaurant built around balance, clarity, natural flavours, house-made dough, seasonal ingredients and precise technique. That mix of price, process and pedigree is why the line formed, and why Sio Pasta already feels bigger than a single opening.