Insight: Singapore-style Hawker Food

A visit to the city-state is incomplete without a meal at one of its food centres, where an astonishing variety of dishes are cooked on the spot.

The hawker centre offers multi-ethnic Singapore cooking at its best. Whether it’s a simple dish of noodles for S$3 or a S$20 three-course meal of barbecued fish, chilli prawns and fried vegetables with rice, the cost is a fraction of what you would pay for a similar meal in a restaurant. Prices apart, the experience is unique, and a pleasant reminder of your stay in this food-crazy city. When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain visited Singapore, he proclaimed, “I love the hawker centres. The whole style of casual eating here is sensational.”

For the uninitiated, here’s how you order a meal at a hawker centre. If there’s a group of you, have one person sit at a table to chope (meaning reserve in local parlance) seats for the rest of the party. Don’t be surprised if you see seats with bags or packets of tissue paper on them; it’s a sign that they have been taken. The others, having noted the table number, should order their food and tell the stall owner the table number they are seated at, unless of course it’s a self-service operation. If you’re on your own, you can share a table with strangers. As you savour your meal, you will realise why true-blue local gourmets will head for their favourite food stall at every opportunity.

Images at a hawker stall make it easy to pick a dish.

Vincent Ng/Apa Publications

Changing times

In the old days, there was no such thing as a hawker centre. Instead, the roving hawker was a familiar fixture in the neighbourhood. The sound of an ice-cream bell, or the clacking of a bamboo stick against a wooden block, or the chant of the mua chee man selling sticky nougat-like candy, would send children – and their parents – scrambling from their homes into the streets to buy their favourite snack. The fare on offer was amazing, from bread and bowls of steaming noodle soups to peanuts and poh piah (spring rolls).

Then came the roadside hawkers, who set up their makeshift stalls on the streets after dark, when parking lots were emptied of cars and replaced by wooden tables and stools, and pushcarts which doubled as mobile kitchens. By 1987, with urbanisation and an obsession with cleanliness, the last of the roadside hawkers were cleared. The only places where you can find roadside hawkers today are Chinatown’s Smith Street (which recently underwent major renovation) and Glutton’s Bay at The Esplanade. These sanitised recreations of yesteryear do their best to resemble the city’s once bustling and colourful street life.