Chicken rice is not a complicated dish. Poach a bird, save the fat, cook the rice in it, slick the whole thing with ginger and chilli and dark soy. Every step is simple. And yet Singaporeans will drive across the island, queue for forty minutes, argue with strangers about which hawker stall does it best – because in Singapore, “simple” and “serious” have never been opposites.
That’s the thing about Singaporean food that keeps pulling travellers back, long after the duty-free and the infinity pools have lost their novelty. This year TripAdvisor ranked Singapore the world’s number one cultural destination, ahead of Paris, Rome and London – a headline that sounds absurd until you remember its hawker culture carries UNESCO heritage status, the same shelf as Belgian beer and Neapolitan pizza-making. Somewhere between the Gardens by the Bay and the SkyPark selfies, Singapore has quietly become one of the most interesting places on earth to eat.
The food itself explains why. Singaporean cuisine was never one cuisine – it’s what happens when Hokkien, Teochew, Malay, Tamil and Peranakan kitchens all end up trading in the same port for two hundred years. Nobody agreed to merge; the merging just happened, dish by dish, hawker stall by hawker stall. Char kway teow gets its smoky punch from a wok run so hot the noodles blister (“wok hei,” they call it – the breath of the wok). Laksa is coconut milk and dried shrimp and chilli paste simmered down until it’s somehow both a soup and a dare. Bak kut teh is white pepper and garlic and pork ribs, built for grey mornings and hangovers alike. Visitors still receive instructions to order chilli crab, sticky-fingered and faintly ridiculous to eat in polite company, before they even land.
None of it is precious. That’s rather the point – Singapore’s most celebrated food comes from hawker centres, not tasting menus, and the country has spent real effort making sure it stays that way, subsidising stalls and training up the next generation of hawkers so a $5 plate of chicken rice doesn’t become a museum piece. It’s also, notoriously, the only place in the world where a bowl of noodles has a Michelin star pinned to it – Hawker Chan’s soya sauce chicken rice held one for years, proof that the line between “street food” and “fine dining” was always more about real estate than talent.
That tension – heritage stall versus hatted restaurant – is what makes Singapore such good value as a food destination right now. You can eat like royalty for the price of a bus fare, then walk 15 minutes and eat like royalty again for considerably more, and neither meal feels like the lesser experience.
Sydney doesn’t get much of this first-hand. Which is what makes The Fullerton Hotel Sydney’s latest move worth knowing about. From 17 July to 8 August, the hotel is running The Singapore Table, a lunchtime takeover of its restaurant The Place by Christopher Chia, Senior Sous Chef at The Fullerton Hotel Singapore – flown in for the first of what the two properties are calling a series of cross-property collaborations. It’s a fitting pairing: both hotels are heritage-listed former general post offices, one on Martin Place, one on the Singapore River, sharing more architectural DNA than most sister hotels manage.
Chef Chia has spent the better part of a decade at the Marina Bay flagship, and what he’s bringing to the buffet is close to the real hawker canon rather than a five-star gloss on it: Hainanese chicken rice with the requisite ginger-chilli-soy trio, char kway teow off a wok pushed hard enough to blister, a peppery bak kut teh built on garlic and white pepper, a coconut-rich laksa, and chilli crab lala – clams standing in for crab, tossed through the same sweet-hot tomato-chilli sauce that made the original famous. It’s a tighter edit of the hawker centre than any one stall could offer alone – five icons, one sitting, no queueing in the humidity.
The hotel calls it the first of several planned exchanges between the Fullerton family’s properties in Singapore, Sydney and Hong Kong, and there’s a neat symmetry to where it has landed. Both hotels occupy former general post offices — Sydney’s on Martin Place, dating to 1874; Singapore’s on the river, a National Monument in its own right – so the collaboration is really two heritage buildings with near-identical origin stories comparing notes over a shared kitchen. Daily, Monday to Saturday, $69.95 a head, no flight required.
It won’t replace an actual trip to Chinatown Complex or Maxwell Food Centre, and it isn’t trying to. What it offers is a fortnight’s worth of proof – right there on Martin Place – that the fuss around Singaporean food isn’t tourism-board spin. It’s a cuisine built by people who have spent generations arguing over the correct ratio of ginger to chilli, and are still doing it, one hawker stall at a time.