Arbora at Mount Faber Peak: The View Sentosa Cannot Give You

Almost everybody who rides the Singapore cable car passes directly under Arbora without registering that it is there. It sits at Mount Faber Peak, at the top of the hill the cable car leaves from, and it is the reason to arrive early rather than turning up five minutes before your cabin.

What kind of place it is

Arbora is a hilltop garden bistro rather than a fine-dining room — all-day casual, open sides, greenery pressing in on it. The kitchen puts an Asian turn on Western plates, which sounds like a press release until you read the menu and find Hokkien mee served as pasta and laksa built around lobster. It is the sort of cooking that gives a table something to talk about, which is most of what you want from lunch on a holiday.

It is open through the day and late into the evening, seven days a week, with a slightly earlier start on Sundays and a last order around ten.

The view is a different view

This matters more than the menu. Every rooftop bar in Singapore sells you the same photograph — Marina Bay Sands, the CBD towers, the river. Mount Faber sells you the opposite direction: rainforest hillside in the foreground, the harbour and the Southern Islands beyond it, and the cable car cabins crossing in front of the lot. It is the greenest view of Singapore available from a table, and it does not appear on anybody else's Instagram feed from the same trip.

Sunset is the obvious hour and the busiest. Lunch is quieter and the rainforest looks better in daylight.

How to build a day around it

The natural shape is Mount Faber first, Sentosa second. Come up to the Peak, eat, then take the cable car down over the harbour and into the island — you arrive at Sentosa fed, unhurried and above the crowd that queued at HarbourFront. Reversing it works too, and makes Arbora the calm end of a loud day, which for a family with children is often the better order.

Getting up the hill is the part people underestimate. It is a genuine hill in genuine humidity, and the walk up from HarbourFront is not the pleasant stroll it looks like on a map. Take the cable car, or arrive by car.

Worth knowing

• Book if you want a table at sunset or a table by the edge. Walking in at 7pm on a Saturday is optimistic.
• It is open-sided. A heavy afternoon shower changes the experience.
• The address is on Mount Faber Road, at the Peak — not at HarbourFront, where taxis will try to leave you.

Planning this into a Singapore trip

Arbora is the kind of stop that turns a cable car ride from a fifteen-minute crossing into an evening, and it is easy to fold into the Sentosa day you were already having.

We are a Singapore ground operator, so the itinerary we quote is the one our own team runs — hotels, airport transfers, attraction tickets and a car when the day needs one. Tell us your dates and who is travelling on our plan my trip page and we will come back with a costed day-by-day plan.