Odette’s longtime wine director Vincent Tan is leaving after 10 years to join Park90

Odette’s longtime wine director Vincent Tan is leaving after 10 years to join Park90 Vincent Tan, who helped shape the three-Michelin-starred restaurant’s wine programme, is taking on a new group role at Park90 as it expands across Southeast Asia. On paper, the headline is a change of address. Park90, the sommelier-led wine programme that spent its first eight years at Regent Singapore and, later, Conrad Singapore Orchard, has relocated to Pan Pacific Orchard’s Garden Terrace. It now operates as an independent brand in partnership with the hotel rather than as part of it. The programme brings more than 1,000 labels, including verticals of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti and allocations of Screaming Eagle, to what is billed as Singapore’s first luxury hotel with a fully integrated, sommelier-led wine programme. The scale of that integration is worth spelling out. Across Pan Pacific Orchard’s four themed terraces, the programme extends from poolside pours to the hotel’s Claymore Ballroom on Level 18. A Neo-French menu developed with Michelin-starred Marguerite chef Michael Wilson sits alongside a wine-led cocktail programme created with Anthony Zhong of Shin Gi Tai. Hotel guests can also book the Park90 Stay Experience, a package running through December that includes lounge access, evening cocktails and a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild on arrival. That, however, isn’t really the headline. The headline is who’s arriving to run it. From Oct 19, Park90’s wine direction passes to Vincent Tan, who is leaving his role as Odette’s wine director after 10 years – effectively since the three-Michelin-starred restaurant opened – to become Park90’s newly appointed group wine director. It is arguably the most consequential sommelier move Singapore’s hospitality scene has seen this year: A respected figure leaving one of the country’s most decorated dining rooms to lead a wine programme with ambitions beyond a single venue. Ask him how he intends to run the team he’s inheriting, and he doesn’t reach for a leadership platitude. He reaches for penguins instead. “If I were to go in and dictate that everyone on the team behaves like me, I’m taking away a lot of what makes Park90 unique,” he said. “I’d rather not have a bunch of tuxedo-wearing penguins recommending the same wine.” 10 YEARS, ONE CONVERSATION Leaving after a decade rarely comes without friction, and Tan admitted there was some. “I did say no, actually,” he said of an earlier approach from Park90. It wasn’t a cold approach. Tan has known Park90’s owners for years, but casual conversations about a role turned serious only after longtime wine director Mason Ng left the company at the start of 2026. Even then, the timing didn’t feel right. Odette was mid-renovation and preparing to reopen, and Tan had already decided he would not leave before that was done. “It was something I felt I needed to complete before I could go,” he said. Chef Julien Royer’s reaction, when the conversation finally happened, was brief – the kind of exchange two people rarely need to spell out after 10 years of working together. “He said to me: you’ve already given me 10 years. Whatever I’m going to do, he’s going to support,” Tan recalled. What stings, he said, isn’t the handover itself. “Ten years is a long time to put a system in place, and to believe in that system, knowing I could disappear tomorrow and things wouldn’t change.” The harder part has been telling regular clients and suppliers who assumed he would be there indefinitely that he is moving on. “Every conversation got a little more personal,” he said. While his succession at Odette remains unresolved, Tan said the process is being handled with restraint. He has given Royer a shortlist but deliberately stayed out of the final decision. “I didn’t want to overly influence it,” he said. “I want to have a clean break, without people saying, this is what Vincent did, or this is what Vincent would have done.” Tan isn’t in a hurry to put his own stamp on Park90’s programme before he has properly started, either. He has seen what the team has shared with him, but wants to taste through the list and experience the space himself before committing to specifics. Some of the most eye-catching details already announced predate him, including a Screaming Eagle-by-the-glass offering and an upcoming Members’ Night lineup featuring wine figures such as William Kelley, Sylvain Cathiard and Kei Shiogai. “I won’t claim to say I’ve had much involvement in this,” he said of the lineup, “but I do agree with it.” His belief that rare wines are meant to be tasted rather than kept as trophies is not merely theoretical. Park90 founder Soo Hoo Khoon Peng made headlines earlier this year after uncorking an 1899 Romanee-Conti at a private tasting in Burgundy. The 127-year-old bottle even predates the oldest wine in the domaine’s own stock, which dates to 1911. If a bottle can be the reason someone falls in love with wine for life, as Tan said happened to him, that is reason enough to pour it. It’s the same posture he takes toward his own title. Tan arrives to find a leadership structure already in place, with joint head sommeliers Terry Lim, who has been with Park90 since 2019, and Zhen Jie New in Singapore, and Justin Ho as regional head sommelier. The structure comes ahead of planned launches in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, part of a renewed ambition to grow Park90 into a wine hospitality platform across Southeast Asia. Tan’s own title suggests his remit will extend across that same footprint, though, true to form, he isn’t ready to define exactly how yet. Tan’s group wine director title suggests his remit will extend across that same footprint, although, true to form, he is not ready to define exactly how. NOT JUST FOR WINE PEOPLE If there’s one thing Tan isn’t hedging on, it’s Park90’s image – and changing it is near the top of his list. Despite being open to the public since its early days as a wine bar, the brand has long been dogged by the misconception that it is members-only. “It’s perhaps one of the main challenges Park90 faces,” he said – less a gripe about the operation he is joining than a diagnosis of something he wants to fix. Tan traces a deeper industry problem to a conversation with a hospitality group’s HR director about why the trade struggles to recruit junior sommeliers at all: Many graduates in their early 20s do not even know what the job entails. His answer is not to lean further into wine media or wine-literate circles, but to go around them entirely – meeting people where they already gather for reasons that have nothing to do with wine, whether over a pickleball game or a round of golf. “We should stop talking to wine people,” he said, half-joking. His approach to leadership starts from an equally blunt premise. “The type of wine is probably secondary. The pricing of the wine is very much secondary,” he said. What matters more is the person recommending it. He points to Park90’s own history as proof – sommeliers who have passed through the programme over the years, each memorably different from the last. “Whether it’s Mason Ng, Yeo Xi Yang, or Celine Jung, they’re all very different people,” he said of Park90’s past and present wine leadership. “The beauty is in that difference.” It is the same instinct behind his line about tuxedo-wearing penguins, and why he would be genuinely disappointed to become the only person deciding what makes it onto the list. He wants sommeliers to feel comfortable pushing back when they think he is wrong, rather than deferring simply because of his title. Any producer relationships he brings over from Odette, he added, will only make it onto Park90’s list if the team agrees they belong there. And with more than 1,000 labels already on the list, he said the goal is not to impress collectors with every bottle, but to ensure there is something worthwhile at every price point. THE THRILL OF DISCOVERY If one detail captures how much Tan still loves wine beyond the leadership talk, it is the story of a bottle he spent nearly a year chasing. A friend in Singapore’s small sommelier circle told him about Domaine Guilbert-Gillet, a young estate in Savigny-les-Beaune founded in 2020 and run by winemaker Benjamin Guilbert and his wife, Caroline. The domaine farms just 3.6 hectares across Savigny and Chorey. “The parcels are less impressive, generally speaking,” Tan said, “but they’ve bought high-quality old vineyards, and when you give good material to a talented producer, that’s where the excitement comes from.” After being impressed by the wines at a tasting, he now plans to bring the producer into Park90. It offers perhaps the clearest preview of his approach to selection: Not simply chasing famous labels or prestigious regions, but paying attention to the people and philosophy behind a bottle, wherever it comes from. “I want it to be a treasure box,” he said of the programme he is looking forward to building. He wants both the enthusiastic newcomer and the serious oenophile to walk in and find something worth returning for, each chosen with the same conviction. And when someone asks what is good on the list, he wants his team to be stumped – not because nothing stands out, but because everything does. “Every single bottle was selected either by themselves or by someone they trusted,” he said. “I never want a bottle there just because corporate said so.”