Singapore Travel Guide
Eating Singapore
How to eat like a local in Singapore: how hawker centres work, the etiquette, the dishes to order by name, which centres to visit in each neighbourhood, and when to splash out on chilli crab.
Food is the national passion in Singapore, and the best of it costs very little. The city's hawker centres, open-air food courts of small family-run stalls, were added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2020, recognising a tradition that grew from street vendors moved into permanent centres from the 1960s onward. Several stalls hold Michelin recognition, and locals will happily queue half an hour for their favourite bowl of noodles. This is how to eat well.
How a hawker centre works. Find a seat first, especially at peak times; a packet of tissues on a table means someone has reserved it, a custom known as "choping". Note your table number. Walk the stalls, choose, order and pay at the counter, then either wait or take a buzzer; some stalls bring food to your table. Each stall specialises, so a group typically orders from several and shares. Drinks come from a dedicated drinks stall. When you finish, return your tray and crockery to the return points; it is expected. Cash is still common, though many stalls accept cards or e-payment. Stalls keep their own hours and close on different days, and popular ones sell out, so go early for famous names.
The dishes to know. Hainanese chicken rice is the unofficial national dish: poached or roasted chicken, rice cooked in chicken stock, with chilli, ginger and dark soy. Laksa, especially the Katong style, is a rich, spicy coconut noodle soup with prawns and cockles. Char kway teow is wok-fried flat rice noodles with lap cheong sausage and egg, smoky from the wok. Hokkien mee is prawn noodles fried in a seafood stock. Bak chor mee is minced pork noodles tossed in vinegar and chilli. Satay, grilled skewers with peanut sauce, is best in the evening. Nasi lemak is coconut rice with sambal, fried anchovies, peanuts and a choice of sides. Roti prata is a crisp, flaky flatbread with curry; thosai is a South Indian rice-and-lentil pancake. Carrot cake, confusingly, contains no carrot: it is a savoury radish cake, fried white or with dark sweet sauce. Bak kut teh is a peppery pork rib soup. For breakfast, kaya toast with soft-boiled eggs and kopi, the local coffee, is the classic. For dessert, try ice kachang, chendol or, if you dare, durian.
Where to eat, by neighbourhood. In Chinatown, Maxwell Food Centre is compact and famous for chicken rice, and Chinatown Complex, above a wet market, has over two hundred stalls. In the CBD, Lau Pa Sat is a beautiful Victorian cast-iron market whose side street closes to traffic in the evening for satay stalls; Amoy Street and Hong Lim are lunchtime favourites with office workers. In Little India, Tekka Centre is excellent for Indian food from biryani to thosai. Near Marina Bay, Satay by the Bay sits inside Gardens by the Bay and is perfect before the light show. Beyond the centre, Old Airport Road, Tiong Bahru Market and Newton are local favourites worth a trip; Tiong Bahru also has a charming art-deco estate and independent cafes.
Beyond the hawker centre. Chilli crab, the city's celebration dish, is a restaurant meal: mud crab in a sweet, spicy tomato-and-egg sauce, eaten messily with fried buns, called mantou, to mop it up. Black pepper crab is the drier, spicier alternative. Seafood restaurants along the East Coast and by the river serve both, and the price is by weight, so ask before ordering. Peranakan cuisine, the food of the Straits Chinese, is the city's most distinctive home cooking, with dishes like ayam buah keluak and beef rendang; Katong and Joo Chiat, with their pastel shophouses, are its heartland. Singapore's fine-dining scene is among the best in Asia, and its cocktail bars, many in shophouses on Keong Saik Road, Club Street and Haji Lane, appear regularly on international best-bar lists.
Kopitiam culture. Coffee shops, or kopitiams, are the neighbourhood version of hawker centres, usually in the ground floor of public housing blocks, and they are where many Singaporeans eat breakfast. Ordering kopi has its own language: kopi comes with condensed milk, kopi-o is black with sugar, kopi-c has evaporated milk, and kosong means no sugar. Teh is tea, following the same rules, and teh tarik is milk tea pulled between two cups to make it frothy.
Practical tips. Go early for famous stalls and avoid the noon office rush in the CBD. Carry tissues, as napkins are rarely provided. Drink plenty of fresh lime juice or sugarcane juice in the heat. Order a little from several stalls rather than a lot from one. Do not worry about hygiene: stalls are graded and inspected. And make at least one meal a hawker crawl, sharing four or five plates among the group. It is the cheapest great meal you will have, and the one most likely to bring you back.
A one-day food crawl. Start with kaya toast and kopi at a neighbourhood coffee shop, then go to Tekka Centre in Little India for thosai and teh tarik. Walk to Kampong Gelam for a murtabak lunch on North Bridge Road. Rest through the afternoon, then take the MRT to Chinatown for chicken rice at Maxwell and a plate of char kway teow at Chinatown Complex. Finish at Lau Pa Sat, where the satay street fills with smoke and long tables in the evening, or at Satay by the Bay before the Supertree light show. Share everything, and leave room for a durian, or at least for the story of trying one.