Soaking up Singapore

While there’s a plethora of upmarket options, the quintessential Singapore experience comes from sitting under the fans in the balmy tropical air in an open air hawker centres or the breezy local kopitiam, or coffee shops.

One of the best hawker experiences in Singapore comes at the bustling Maxwell Road centre in Chinatown.

Praise from luminaries such as Anthony Bourdain has elevated humble stalls such as Tian Tian chicken rice to fame, and queues snake around the plastic tables and chairs at lunchtime as locals and tourists alike wait to be allocated their fix.

It is worth the hype, an exercise in simplicity. Gently poached chicken, richly flavoured rice, cooked in the chicken stock, a bowl of soup that sings of essence of chook, with some cucumber for balance. Added flavour is added with a chilli sauce roughly the same in intensity as sriracha.

But Tian Tian does not hog all the headlines at Maxwell Road. Chinese families are happy to queue for the best part of an hour on a Sunday for Zhen Zhen’s congee.

Rice porridge can come with chicken, fish or century egg - topped with spring onion and shallots, it's comfort in a bowl.

Other lesser-known treats at the market include Ha Ha, which focus on Malaysian style dishes as mee siam and mee rebus.

The mee rebus is a stand out: hard boiled egg and green chilli and dark soy sauce meld perfectly with the hokkien noodles and make an interesting Asian twist on eggs for brekkie.

Another little delight not well known in Australia is soon kueh. The English translation of turnip cake does not do these little dumplings justice. A mix of crunchy grated turnip, shiitake mushroom and dried shrimp inside a translucent dumpling wrapper is coated with kecap manis and makes for a nice contrast from other, better known dim sum.

Branching further afield in the neighbourhood there’s a dizzying array of local kopitiam to choose from, with various businesses renting space from the shop owner to prepare their own speciality.

On South Bridge St, there is a string of late night places frequented by a mix of hungry bankers spilling out of the uber-trendy bars on nearby Club St, the sizeable local gay community and grizzled locals.

Further to the south, around Tanjong Pagar, there is a slower, more family orientated vibe in the coffee shops with cuisine reflecting the ethnic Chinese groups that initially settled in Singapore, including Hokkien, Hakka and Teochew, along with the better known Cantonese.

In the mornings, Singapore turns to comfort food, and two of the most popular venues for kaya toast are Ya Kun Kaya Toast at the top end of Chinatown and Nanyang Coffee House.

Both offer the coconut flavoured kaya toast, which comes with soft boiled eggs, and syrupy Singaporean coffee, with the eggs traditionally doused in soy sauce and topped with white pepper.

Nanyang also offers bak kut teh, or pork bone ‘tea’, a complex, medicinal soup studded with tasty morsels of pork, best enjoyed with a cool kopi peng, or iced coffee on the side.

Across the other side of town, in Little India, there is also a lot of delicious hawker food, naturally centring on the sub-continent.

With the majority of Indian workers hailing from the south, there’s a swathe of vegetarian thali options around the area as authentic as anything you’ll eat outside of Tamil Nadu.

There’s more upmarket options too. Kebabs’n’Curries may sound like a balti house on a desolate English high road, but in fact it commands one of the greatest views in Singapore from the top of the buzzing Mustafa centre, where it is possible to duck down at 3am and buy yourself a TV should you have the urge. Down below, the ex-pat Indian labourers pack out the area on a Sunday afternoon like so many worker ants, but from up high it is all calm amid twinkling lights and greenery.

Upstairs, it's an Indian greatest hits parade, including succulent kebabs, as the name suggests, and that great Indo-Singaporean classic, fish head curry, this version featuring a meaty chunk of sea bass.

The fun of Singapore is how an area can change character in metres, and heading back just half a block to Jalan Besar (Besar-st) and you’ll find yourself firmly back in Chinese territory.

Occupying a corner block, dim sum restaurant Swee Choon is an institution among clubbers, defying the traditions of dim sum as a morning food by opening from 6pm to 6am.

Along with classics like char siew pau (roast pork buns) and some of Singapore’s best shao lin bao (soup dumplings), there are other delights, like the prawn and tofu roll, kind of like the best crab stick you ever ate.

Katong is a spot in eastern Singapore famous for its Peranakan cuisine. The Peranakans are the descendants of Chinese and Malays and occupy a special place in the city’s culinary heritage.

Old-style restaurants like Chilli Padi are the place to enjoy ayam buah teluak (chicken with black nuts), a fascinating dish featuring a relative of the candle nut that needs to be treated to be leached of toxins, but adds a fascinating richness to the dish.

Further across the suburb, the bustling Katong 328 laksa stall, despite its location in the far east of the island, people travel from all over the nation to sample its definitive version of curry laksa.

Noodles are pre-chopped and you are issued with just a spoon to eat, with the iodine-flavoured cockles complemented the coconut flavoured broth just nicely. The side dish of choice is otak otak, a pounded mackerel cake, which has the distinction of being far better than it sounds. A paste of mackerel and aromatic spices such as ginger and galangal is folded into a banana leaf and is a smooth counterpoint to the laksa.

In spite of the bounty of top notch food in Singapore, the real delight is not the restaurants, but the knowledge and the pride Singaporeans take in their culinary habits.

Food takes up the place of sport in many other places as the nation pass time. Where else could you find a taxi driver obsessively dedicated to finding the country’s best nasi lemak? Where else will strangers eagerly draw you a map to find a particularly promising kopitiam in an obscure location?

It’s this overall dedication to the joys of the table that makes Singapore a must for the food tourist.