Singapore Cuisine

About Singapore Cuisine

By the ULTIMATE Singapore Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Singapore’s food is a fusion of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian and Peranakan traditions, and its heart is the hawker centre. This is our guide to the national dishes, the cooking styles behind them and where to taste them.

Singapore cuisine

Singaporean cuisine is a vivid, multi-ethnic fusion, shaped by centuries of mixing between Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian and Peranakan (Straits Chinese) traditions. It is celebrated for its rich flavours and aromatic spices, and above all for its hawker culture, inscribed on UNESCO’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.

Essential national dishes

Hainanese chicken rice: widely considered the national dish. Tender poached chicken over rice cooked in chicken stock with ginger and pandan, with chilli sauce and dark soy.

A city that eats together: dozens of stalls, each devoted to one dish, perfected over generations.

Chilli crab: mud crab stir-fried in a sweet, savoury and gently spicy tomato and chilli gravy, eaten with your hands and mopped up with fried or steamed mantou buns.

Katong laksa: a comforting noodle soup with a rich, spicy coconut broth flavoured with dried shrimp, topped with cockles, prawns and fishcake.

Char kway teow: flat rice noodles stir-fried over high heat with dark soy, chilli, belacan, prawns, cockles, bean sprouts, chives and Chinese sausage.

Nasi lemak: the Malay classic of rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan, with fiery sambal, crisp ikan bilis (anchovies), peanuts, a fried egg and fried chicken or fish.

Roti prata: a flaky South Indian flatbread, stretched, folded and cooked on a griddle, served with mutton, chicken or fish curry.

The cooking styles

Hokkien and Teochew cooking, from southern China, is savoury and broth-led, with soy and seafood: try Hokkien mee and bak kut teh, the peppery pork-rib soup. Malay cooking is rich in coconut, lemongrass, turmeric and sambal: satay, beef rendang and mee rebus. South Indian cooking, from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, uses mustard seed, curry leaf and lentils, and gives the city fish head curry and murtabak. Peranakan, or Nonya, cooking marries Chinese ingredients with Malay spices; it is complex, aromatic and famously laborious, from ayam buah keluak to the jewel-coloured nonya kueh.

The hawker centre

Food in Singapore is democratic. The city has many MICHELIN-starred restaurants, but its culinary heart is the hawker centre: clean, strictly regulated food halls with dozens of stalls, many of which have perfected a single dish over generations. Find a seat, mark it with a packet of tissues as the locals do, then order from as many stalls as you like.

Where to taste it

Maxwell Food Centre in Chinatown is home to Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice; Lau Pa Sat, in a Victorian cast-iron market hall on Raffles Quay, is the place for satay in the evening; and for chilli crab by the river, JUMBO Seafood Riverside Point. All are in this guide, as is our story of the Singapore table, from the hawker stall to three MICHELIN stars.

Our advice: eat chicken rice for lunch at a hawker centre, chilli crab for dinner with plenty of buns, and come hungry; the portions are small, so you can try more.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Singapore Cuisine before you go.