If you’re feeling even slightly jaded, Singapore is a city where you’ll be spoiled for choice, starting with the food. Before you even set foot in a hawker centre (a culinary cornucopia and cultural icon disguised as a seemingly ordinary food court), you’ll have to decide which one. There are 120 hawker centres here, with more on the way, all on an island smaller than New York City.
So where to start? Wandering through the small Singapore City Gallery, I stumble upon a small tribute to shopping malls, including a display of cute plates illustrated with Singapore’s most beloved national dish, with the slogan “die die must try!” That’s Singlish (locally spoken English) for something so impressive you have to have it, no matter what.
The dish in question is Hainanese chicken rice, which I take as a clear sign and an obvious lunch plan, especially with Maxwell Food Centre, one of the city’s favorite hawker centers, right next door to the gallery. Maxwell is no secret treasure; it’s where Anthony Bourdain, on a 2008 episode of “No Reservations,” proclaimed Tian Tian to be the best place he could find for chicken rice.
Tian Tian is closed that day, so I join the longest line I see: in front of arch-rival Ah Tai. A proudly displayed newspaper clipping titled “CHICKEN RICE WAR” informs me of the deal: after Tian Tian fired its longtime boss, the dismissed employee set up his own stall in 2012. Some whisper that he has outdone his former boss. Hawker centres have not been spared from inflation, but you can still get lunch there for SGD5 (CAD is about the same).
Ah Tai, rival of the famous Tian Tian, proudly displays his media coverage of the “Chicken and Rice War”.
This no-frills national dish is the antithesis of Instagram food. It’s nothing fancy. But the poached chicken is miraculously tender; the rice, fried in chicken fat and then cooked in chicken stock, is rich and fragrant. Basic accompaniments of sliced cucumber, dark soy sauce, and chili sauce are all you need. It’s tasty, carb-rich comfort food on a plate that’s affordable and accessible to everyone.
That, of course, is the problem. Street food centres are commonly described as community dining halls; food stalls are traditionally family-run micro-enterprises, serving meals based on generations-old recipes. These centres are so quintessentially Singaporean that they are listed as an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.
The roots of hawker culture date back to the 1800s, when this port city was a landing place for sailors from China, Malaysia, India and elsewhere. These newcomers found easy trade selling food on the streets, bringing the flavors of their homelands; inevitably, the dishes were adapted to local tastes. (Hainan chicken rice is thought to have been invented in Singapore, by immigrants from the Chinese island province of Hainan.)
In the 1950s, street vendors came under fire from government officials, who considered their unhygienic practices a public nuisance. The solution: encourage them to set up in cleaner, more organized spaces. After Singapore became a sovereign state in 1965, a program to license street vendors and set them up in markets was launched.
In 1971, the Newton Food Centre, which would later become the setting for the movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” became the first hawker centre in Singapore to be built without a fresh produce (or perishable goods) market. A year later, the historic Lau Pa Sat was transformed into the city’s most famous hawker centre. It is a national landmark of Victorian cast-iron architecture and a temple to cheap and cheerful food stalls.
Located in a national monument, now surrounded by skyscrapers, Lau Pa Sat is Singapore’s most famous hawker centre.
As the city’s social meeting places, shopping malls reflect Singapore’s ethnic diversity, evident both in the ethnic diversity of diners and the wide variety of cuisines on offer. (Racial and religious harmony isn’t just a warm and fuzzy concept here. It’s also a matter of law, through laws like the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act.)
On an outing to the Chinatown Complex with other travel writers, I can barely scratch the surface of Singapore’s largest hawker centre, home to some 700 stalls. I skip past the absurdly long queue at Hawker Chan, whose Michelin-fuelled popularity (it was the first hawker stall to earn a star) has yet to wane. I sample the “black and white carrot cake,” a savory carrot-free dish reminiscent of turnip cake dim sum. And I satisfy my craving for laksa, a spicy coconut noodle soup that, I learn, originated in Peranakan Chinese cuisine.
The Peranakan are Singapore’s Straits people of mixed heritage, tracing their origins to marriages between a foreigner and a local. They are often (but not always) first-wave Chinese settlers who married local Malay or Indonesian women. They are one of Singapore’s lesser-known cultures, but Candlenut, a renowned contemporary Peranakan restaurant in the trendy enclave of Dempsey Hill, is increasingly drawing attention to them. For me, the tasting menu, which includes dishes like yeye (grandpa) crab curry and udang nanas (jumbo tiger prawns in pineapple broth), has familiar notes remixed into something new.
Everywhere I turn, I find another window into Singapore’s multicultural soul. A two-minute walk from Maxwell Food Centre is a hip cocktail bar called Elephant Room, which aims to represent the city’s Indian community while paying homage to hawkers and spice vendors. Ingredients are sourced from Tekka Centre, a hawker centre and market that primarily sells Indian food. If you’ve ever wanted a biryani-inspired drink, with vodka, ghee sake and basmati makgeolli, this is the place to find it.
Botan Shrimp at Fiz, a modern Malaysian restaurant from rising star chef Hafizzul Hashim.
A few doors down, we have one of our last dinners in town at Fiz, a fine-dining take on modern Malaysian cuisine run by rising star chef and restaurateur Hafizzul Hashim. The elegant setting and refined dishes, like botan shrimp with pineapple sorbet, are a far cry from the city’s humble hawker stalls. But as I sip “the broth that soothes,” as he’s called a piping hot cup of kampong chicken soup, I think about the common threads, like Hashim’s ambition to celebrate the diversity of Southeast Asian cuisine and his nostalgic desire to honor recipes passed down through generations.
With all there is to see in Singapore – the top, the bottom, the 13,000 or so hawker stalls, the 283 Michelin-recommended restaurants – one trip is just a taste. As I board my long-haul flight back to Toronto, the easiest choice is to plan a return visit.
If you are going to
How to get there: In April, Air Canada launched the only non-stop flight between Canada and Singapore: YVR-SIN, which takes about 16 hours. This highly anticipated route is the airline’s longest in terms of distance. If you’re flying from Toronto to Singapore, plan for at least one stopover.
Where to stay: For luxury accommodation with impeccable service and a convenient location just off Orchard Road, the city’s most exclusive shopping street, book into the Four Seasons Hotel Singapore, where rooms have been recently renovated in a contemporary style.
What else to do: Singapore is known as a garden city (first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew believed that a “dilapidated urban jungle of concrete destroys the human spirit”). Admire the greenery of the colonial-era Singapore Botanic Gardens and the futuristic Gardens by the Bay, both major tourist attractions for good reason, with different interpretations of nature.
Wing Sze Tang traveled as a guest of Air Canada, which has not reviewed or approved this article.
