Nana and I didn't just go to Singapore for the history--we also went for the food!
Now, you can find just about every Asian cuisine, from Turkish to Taiwanese, in just about any hawker center in the land, but Singapore is best known for the cuisines brought by Singapore's three major ethnic groups: Indian, Chinese, and Malaysian.
What's more, the food is super cheap--with the exception of a late dinner at a pricey sushi place, Nana and I never spend more than about $10 US on a meal--and eating is widely recognized as the national pastime! Which is good, because it would take a lifetime to sample all the different flavors Singapore has to offer.
Indian
Indian food is a staple in Singapore. Most breakfasts, including the buffet served at our hotel, include plain roti (a flat fried bread) and mild curry. Pancakes dipped in curry sauce is a snacktime favorite, available almost anywhere in town.
The best places to go for Indian food, however, are Little India (not surprising there) and Kampung Glam, which is the Muslim district, where delicious halal specialties abound. Below you can see our spread at Singapore Zam Zam Restaurant, right across the street from the mosque.
The place is famous for its murtabak, which is a stuffed bread of Arabic origin. You can see the lamb and onion murtabak in the foreground--with, of course, two bowls of Indian-style curry for dipping!Indian sweets are also a treat. In Little India, Nana and I drifted into a shop and asked the clerk to fill a bag with her favorites. Below you can see (note--I'm so sorry we've forgotten the names!) a fried saffron doughnut, several variations on the theme of extremely buttery shortbread, and a little chocolate-and-pistacio cake.
You can also see an increasingly punchy Nana.Chinese
An amalgam of Cantonese-influenced southern Chinese cuisines is probably the baseline of Singapore's various cuisines, which makes sense, considering that the Chinese form a sizeable majority. Most of the Chinese dishes in Singapore will be familiar to Americans, since many of the same ethnic groups who moved to Singapore to open restaurants did the exact same thing in the States. The fresher ingredients make a huge difference, though--most Chinese food in Singapore comes off tasting rather light.
And yes, you're still hungry 30 minutes later.
Singapore does boast a few Chinese regional specialities that are tough to find in the US, however, most of which were brought by immigrants from Hainan. Below you can see two Hainanese rice dumplings. They're made with a mixture of rice, meat, sesame, and savory spices, pressed into a banana leaf and steamed--which is a preparation technique borrowed from Thai cooking.
They may not look too appetising--but they're delicious, and super-filling, too!Malaysian
Malaysian food is the closest thing Singapore has to a native cuisine, though since the island was largely uninhabited before the wave of migration during the British Imperial era, that's anyone's title to claim.
The various Malaysian and Indonesian flavors are, however, the native cuisine of the region at large, and there are few better places to taste them than Singapore, though as would be expected, some of the dishes are heavily Indian- and Chinese-infused.
You can see both influences below: the bottom left is a traditional Balinese dish of beef stewed in red chili sauce, but the upper-left is effective Cantonese shrimp, while that white lump in the middle is Basmati-style long-grain rice with soy sauce.
Below is a slightly more traditional meal--purchased at a swanky new hawker center on Orchard Road, Singapore's main drag for retail therapy. On the left is Malaysian-style rendang, which is beef stewed in heavily spiced coconut milk, and on the right is mee siam soup, which is Malaysia's interpretation of a Thai noodle dish. This one is in a light, hot broth, sweeted by half a kaffir lime. And yes, that's a whole egg, just for good measure.
And the rest
Of course, if for some utterly inexplicable reason you run out of local food to eat (though how that would be possible is beyond me), you could always stop at this Austrian-owned snack stand in Chinatown.
Schnitzel, anyone? Though I imagine, with so many cheap and delicious local options on hand, you'd most likely take a pass. The truth is, five days isn't even enough time to scrape the surface of all the great things there are to eat in Singapore, and I'm already wondering if I can find an excuse to go back.
If you're interested in learning more about food in Singapore, you can find more information here.
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