Singapore is known for its incredible food culture with Chinese, Malay and Indian influences. Located in Southeast Asia, this island city-state offers visitors the perfect opportunity to combine food and travel. Singapore hawker centres, or food courts, have a growing international following, especially since being featured in Hollywood hit Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Netflix’s Street Food (2019). These massive halls host hundreds of food stalls that typically serve up just a few dishes that have been honed for generations. In addition to quality, hawker centre food stalls are also known for being affordable. According to the 2019 Michelin Guide, Hawker Chan, a stall formerly known as Liao Fan Hong Kong, serves one of the most affordable Michelin-starred meals in the world. Its signature dish, Cantonese soya sauce chicken and BBQ pork, costs around 4 USD.

Photo by Swapnil Bapat

To help better understand the local food culture, Travel Observed reached out to Luke Lee, a Singapore-based food expert and founder of Dine Inn, an online platform that operates like a free market connecting people that are passionate about making and eating delicious food. Luke shares his restaurant recommendations, favorite local dishes, tips for Singapore hawker centres and more.

Courtesy of Dine Inn

How would you describe the food culture in Singapore? And, what makes it unique?

The food culture in Singapore is often described as a “melting pot” where elements of our different cultures combine and intertwine with each other. There are two main camps on food among locals; the “originators” and the “innovators.” As you can tell from the name, the originators are people who like to indulge in our traditional local food and enjoy food from age old heritage recipes, while the innovators push the envelope on food, exploring new and fusion food, creating their very own modern Singaporean food.

Courtesy of Dine Inn

What are hawker centers in Singapore? Do you have any travel tips?

Hawker centres are essential to our local culture and a big part of our everyday lives. The hawker culture has even been submitted to UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity this May. The lively and bustling hawker centers mean that visitors may feel a sensory overload from sound, smell and sight. So, if you are overwhelmed when you get there and clueless on what to eat, ask around the locals eating there and they are usually more than happy to recommend you their favorite stall. Alternatively, if you are too shy to ask, the stall with the longest queue is usually a good one to try.

Embrace the food sharing culture like locals. If you are going in a group, order small portions from different stalls so you can try more food that the hawker centre offers. Hawker centres are everywhere around the island, but there are two must-visit hawker centres in Singapore. The first is Chinatown Complex Food Centre, the largest hawker centre in Singapore holding over 260 food stalls, including the world’s first Michelin hawker stall. The second, Old Airport Road Food Centre, is one of the oldest food courts and houses many famous stalls established over the years.

Photo by Lily Banse

Can you name a few dishes or foods that visitors must try in Singapore?

For first time visitors, a few must-try dishes would be the chilli crab and chicken rice. However, the variety of food available in Singapore is massive, and for more adventurous visitors, they can try out the pig organ soup or kway chap. Both dishes are made with pig organs, but done in different traditional local Chinese styles – one as a soup, and the latter braised. They can also try roti prata, an Indian-influenced flatbread, often featured in different styles like roti plaster, roti tisu, and with different fillings from eggs and onions to bananas and chocolate. As a snack or dessert, visitors can try the nyonya kueh, our local Peranakan style of pastries. As a cultural mix between the Malays and Chinese, kueh are made intricately and in a variety of colors and shapes, such as the Ang Ku Kueh (a small pastry with sticky glutinous rice flour skin wrapped around a sweet filling) or Ondeh-Ondeh (a soft skin made with sweet potato or glutinous rice flour infused with pandan juice and filled with Gula Melaka rolled in freshly grated coconut).

What do Singaporeans usually drink with their meals?

The most common drinks would be tea or coffee ordered according to preference. There is a unique way of ordering these drinks here, adding suffixes behind the kopi (coffee) or teh (tea) for different types of drinks, like “kopi-o” (coffee with sugar), “teh-c” (tea with condensed milk), “teh siew dai” (tea with reduced sugar). These words come from a jumble of different languages commonly spoken among locals as a result of the multicultural society in Singapore.

Beyond tea and coffee, there are other special drinks like Milo dinosaur, fresh juices, and homemade drinks like sugarcane juice, Michael Jackson (cincau with soy bean milk) and many more. For the late night crowd, the local brand Tiger Beer is one of the most popular beers around.

What is your favorite Singapore dish? And, why?

Handmade chee cheong fun is one of my favorite local dishes to prepare. Chee cheong fun are steamed rice rolls filled with different ingredients, accompanied with sweet sauce and chilli. This dish is very versatile and it allows me to create new flavours and always experiment with the fillings to bring out different tastes and textures. Some of the more unique fillings I have done are chives, green dragon vegetables, scallops and char siew (roasted pork).

Are there any food-related social errors that travelers should avoid when in Singapore?

In many hawker centres and food courts, the tray return stations are in fact divided into halal and non-halal food. Travelers should return their trays to the respective stations. If they are unsure as to whether you have ordered from a halal stall, they can identify halal stalls by the sign pasted on the front of the stall.

There is also a unique “chope” culture, especially in hawker centres. Whenever a tissue pack, umbrella, or just about any other common item is placed on a table, this is actually a sign that the table has been “chope,” a local slang for reserved. So, those tables in fact already have people sitting and they should find other seats.

Photo by Joyce Romero

Thank you, Luke!

About Dine Inn
Dine Inn was designed to connect the makers and lovers of home-cooked food via an online platform that operates like a free market. Dine Inn opens up a new culinary frontier of home-style cooking with more than 3,000 home-cooked dishes available from a variety of services, such as dine at host’s place, delivery, self-collection or even chef for hire. Just like typical home-cooked meals, Dine Inn hosts allow clients to customize their meals according to preference and budget. Dine Inn also delivers to just about anywhere in Singapore, including hotels, so travelers can try home-cooked food not found in restaurants or hawker centres. The concept was the brainchild of Singaporean F&B veterans Chef Eric Teo, who possesses over 30 years of culinary experience, and Luke Lee, business owner of six dining establishments in Singapore.

Website: https://sg.dineinn.com/
Phone: +65 6796 9340 (Mon to Fri, 9.30am – 6.30pm, excluding public holidays)
Email: [email protected]

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