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The Best Show in Town

Singapore Street Food, Hawker Style

They once roamed the streets of Singapore, itinerant food hawkers who fed a mostly male populace 100 busy earning a living to cook for themselves. Today, hawkers no longer ply their trade in the streets, but have been relocated inside permanent food centres which most Singaporeans persist in calling hawker centres.

Today, most women in Singapore work outside the home, and home-cooked meals are therefore something of a weekend event rather than a dally necessity. Most people eat out at least once a day, and the top Choice for a quick, tasty meals the food centre or the Increasingly more upmarket food court Food stalls are now permanent fixtures in a variety of places ranging from an open-air setting to covered markets and food centres, 10 air-conditioned food courts with more comfort and better decor.

The ubiquitous Chinese noodles were and still are the staples of any good food centre Take your pick from rice, wheat, mung or soya bean noodles. They come thin, thick, flat, round or square, fresh, dried or friend in oil. You can have your noodles braised, stir-fried, tossed in spicy sauce mixture or dunked in plain of spicy soup. They also come in Chinese, Indian Of Malay styles. The choice at a regular food centre now stretches even further, beyond noodles to rice with a variety of Chinese dishes. Malay or Indian curries, barbecued seafood, to hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks and chops, and even pizza!

Kreta Ayer Wet Market is famous for its array of fresh market produce and more exotic delights such as turtle meat, frogs and eels.

The Singaporean government lakes the national pastime very seriously Some roads, like this junction in Chinatown, are blocked off to traffic in the evenings till early morning, and are dedicated to street-side dining.

Eating at a food centre involves all your senses Your ears are assailed by the shouts of the cooks, the clatter and bang of ladles on giant woks or kualis; your nose twitches with every waft of fragrant steam from bubbling pots and kualis sitting over roaring fires. It is amazing how experienced hawkers have developed their own unique method to the madness. Using a system of spoons, coins, and even clothes pegs, hawkers have created a reliable way to remember the many different orders and the special requests customers have. A good rapport is necessary to establish a loyal clientele in the face of such fierce competition—and if the hawker remembers his customer's regular order, even before they ask for it, that is one sure way of showing who is boss.

A reputation for good food or a convenient location make some food centres more popular than others, and if you come at peak hours, you may even have to stand over someone having his meal in order to get a table. Some die-hard foodies would not bat an eyelid at the hour-long queues for their favourite hawker dish.