Food is the “buzzword” in our Singaporean way of life!
You shouldn’t diet in Singapore. Eating is said to be the second national pastime of Singaporeans. Singaporeans live to eat and while you’re here, you might as well join them!
Singaporeans love to eat and their concern for culinary matters means that finding good food here, at the right price, is no problem. The variety of food available in Singapore is just staggering and amazing! There are places to suit all budgets and tastes, from the popular hawker centers and coffee shops to chic and contemporary restaurants.
Few places in the world can offer such a diverse, exotic and utterly engaging food scene as Singapore. The city has every imaginable cuisine, for every imaginable budget. Within a few hundred metres, there can be a hawker stall selling Indian, Peranakan, Chinese and Malay specialties for S$4, a food court with stalls selling Japanese, Korean and Thai cuisine, a cafe serving grilled seafood and laksa, an Indian shop making wafer-thin roti prata and chicken curry, and an air-conditioned French restaurant where a bottle of wine costs more than a clerk’s monthly salary. domestic day. And that’s not counting the endless sweets and snacks. No wonder Singapore is often touted as “Food Heaven”!
After all, Singapore is a multiracial and multicultural society. As a multi-ethnic country, Singaporean food comprises a multitude of cuisines that can be broadly categorized based on the major cultures present here. It’s no surprise, then, that local food favorites constitute the melting pot of richness, tastes, and quirks of each unique culture. Singapore is a cornucopia of different cuisines and the variety of dishes available is enough to keep one eating all the time. Whether you like haute cuisine, ethnic foods, vegetarian or spicy local dishes, you’re sure to find plenty of great food options.
As a large proportion of Singapore’s population is Chinese, it’s not surprising that Chinese cuisine (in its many varieties) dominates, but major cuisines include Indian cuisine and Malay cuisine. For a more uniquely Singaporean meal, you should try the local hybrid food of Peranakan (or Nonya) cuisine, a mix of Chinese and Malay cuisine that is very popular and widely available. However, be aware that some of the local food is spicy as Singaporeans are known to have a fondness for spices and cold.
The food from these cultures began as dishes from the various homelands, but over time, these culinary delights have evolved to take on a Singaporean identity after being exposed to regional and ethnic influences. Indonesian cuisine, Japanese cuisine, Thai cuisine, and Vietnamese cuisine are also well represented.
As a major crossroads in Asia, Singapore’s food culture has evolved as successive waves of immigrants have moved, settled and adapted to their new surroundings. With no distinctive products of their own, local varieties of homeland staples have developed more slowly, but there are dishes that can truly be called Singaporean; spicy crab, fish head curry, and “yu sheng” (Chinese raw fish salad) are three prominent examples.
The wide variety of cuisines marks Singapore as a truly international city. Everything is available, from the familiar Thai cuisine, Japanese cuisine, Korean cuisine, Italian cuisine, Mexican cuisine, French cuisine and Middle Eastern cuisine to the more unusual African cuisine or Russian cuisine. Some cuisines have their own geographic epicenters, like the Golden Mile Food Center for Thai cuisine or the Arab Street area for Middle Eastern cuisine.
In the Barrio Colonial and the Docks, expensive restaurants dominate and here you will find the highest concentration of international food. East Singapore is well known for its seafood and Peranakan cuisine.
Everywhere from the city to the heart of it, you’ll find countless hawker centers, food courts, and cafeterias, where most ordinary Singaporeans spend an extraordinary amount of their time.
Whether you’re looking for the best street food or prefer to flip your credit card at fancy restaurants, if you don’t leave Singapore with puffy cheeks and a full belly rubbing, you’ve missed it!
It’s hard to tell if this crowd inspired the Singaporean food obsession or if the obsession inspired the crowd. Either way, Singaporeans are obsessed with food. They don’t think to drive across the island to try out a famous Sambal Stingray, and every time a new fad hits town, they happily queue for an hour to get their hands on it. Food is a major topic of discussion and debate; everyone has an opinion on what’s best about this and where to get the best of that. Maybe it’s a substitute for politics (just kidding!), but then if you had that much great food on your doorstep, you’d probably take it seriously, too.
For Singaporeans, what’s on the plate is far more important than the quality of the china (or plastic, for that matter). The best-dressed businessman is as comfortable sitting on a cheap plastic chair at a plastic table tucking into a S$3 plastic plate of “char kway teow” as if he were eating S$50 crabs in an air-conditioned restaurant. Combine this lack of pretensions and you have the best dining opportunities in Southeast Asia, if not all of Asia.
However, not all are superlatives. If you’ve had your taste buds surgically removed, you’ll have no trouble finding one of the many fast-food chain outlets dotted around the island.