Asia Travel Guide

Along with shopping, eating ranks as the Singaporean national pastime. An enormous number of food outlets cater for this obsession, and strict government regulations ensure that they are consistently hygienic. The mass of establishments serving Chinese food reflects the fact that Chinese residents account for more than three quarters of the population.

North and South Indian cuisines give a good account of themselves too, as do restaurants serving Malay, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese food. The closest Singapore comes to an indigenous cuisine is Nonya , a hybrid of Chinese and Malay food that developed following the intermarrying of nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants with Malay women. Several specialist Chinese restaurants and a number of Indian restaurants serve vegetarian food , but otherwise vegetarians need to tread very carefully: chicken and seafood will appear in a whole host of dishes unless you make it perfectly clear that you don’t want them.

By far the cheapest and most fun place to dine in Singapore is in a hawker centre or food court , where scores of stalls let you mix and match dishes at really low prices. Otherwise there’s a whole range of restaurants to visit, ranging from no-frills, open-fronted eating houses and coffee shops to sumptuously decorated establishments. Most open 11.30am-2.30pm and 6-10.30pm daily.

Western breakfasts are available, at a price, at all bigger hotels, most famously at the Hilton or Raffles. For a really cheap fry-up you can’t beat a Western food stall in a hawker centre, where S$8 buys steak, chops and sausage. The classic Chinese breakfast is congee, a watery rice porridge augmented with strips of meat, though dim sum tend to be more palatable to Western tastes. An abiding favourite among Malays is nasi lemak, rice cooked in coconut milk and served with sambal ikan bilis (tiny crisp-fried anchovies in hot chilli paste), fried peanuts and slices of fried or hard-boiled egg.

Although hawker centres are kept scrupulously clean, they are often housed in functional buildings which tend to get extremely hot, so an increasing number of smaller, air-conditioned food courts are popping up, where eating is a slightly more civilized, if less atmospheric affair. Hawker centres and food courts are open from lunchtime through to dinner time and sometimes beyond. Avoid the peak lunching (12.30-1.30pm) and dining (6-7pm) periods, and you should have no problems in finding a seat.

Useful dining guide: Foodlane.sg , Yum.sg