Hawker Centers – Singapore

The term hawker center may be unfamiliar to people who haven’t visited Singapore, but the basic concept is easy enough to understand: imagine a food court with 50 to 100 different choices, either all on one floor together, or spread across two or three floors of a building. Then imagine the government subsidizing the cost of everything sold inside so that anyone can afford to eat there. Finally, imagine that every vendor specializes in a specific concept rather than trying to duplicate everyone else around them.

That, in a nutshell, is a Singaporean hawker center. The biggest of them are tourist destinations in and of themselves, while the smaller ones are merely there to service neighborhoods. We’ve seen a lot of them over the years, and prefer the big ones just for the insanity and overwhelming nature of the choices.

Hawker centers were incredible enough that Anthony Bourdain planned a NYC version before his death – a torch picked up by Urban Hawker – and Zouk Group was inspired to attempt a Las Vegas version called Famous Foods Street Eats, each including several booths run by actual vendors from Singapore. Neither comes close to the Singaporean experience, except at its least impressive level. They can’t, for reasons both cultural and economic, not the least of which are the lack of either customers or the government subsidies that might attract them en masse.