"Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."

For New Yorkers, going to Chinatown must feel like a surreal experience. Block upon block of signage in a foreign hand, streets teeming with Asians and their quick-fire bursts in a foreign language – it must feel somewhat like setting foot in another country. Strangely enough, in Singapore – which is predominantly Chinese – going to Chinatown has a somewhat similar effect.

Chinatown in Singapore refers to the Telok Ayer / Kreta Ayer district, just off the Central Business district (CBD), and in some loose definitions stretches up to the Bukit Pasoh and Duxton areas nearer Cantonment and Tanjong Pagar. Architecturally there is a lot of history here, since it was one of the first few urban areas to be built up in Singapore. There are traces of Singapore’s pre-war colonialism still reflected in the baroque, almost Italianate, shophouses, but the use of slit windows and the preference for pastels may be uniquely local.

But it is the thronging masses of people here that make Chinatown unique. The demographic tends to skew largely older, and many senior citizens over 60 keep making their regular pilgrimage to their favourite restaurant or market stall week-in, week-out. Conversations are conducted largely in dialects, with Cantonese being predominant, giving the younger, cosmopolitan Singaporean the same feeling that the New Yorker gets in his Chinatown – one of foreign-ness. It also doesn’t help that streets are narrow and there are typically large crowds of people willing to fight through other people to get where they are going.

Yet there is a lot of good food in Chinatown, and most of it is cheap. (Just like how the people there are stuck in the 60s or 70s, so are the prices.) Many household names like Ka-Soh originated in this area before moving away, and others like Da Dong are still going strong. These are the restaurants with tradition in Singapore, serving Cantonese cuisine the way it should be done and the way they have been doing it for decades now. I was in Chinatown for brunch one day and hit up some of not all of my favourites.

Smith St Market / Food Centre

My mother gets her fresh fish here, and we usually stop by the cooked food centre, which has several hidden gems. One of the things we always get is XO 鱼片米粉 (yupianmifen – Vermicelli with Fish Slices), which they do a very good job of here. I have no idea what the name of the stall is, but I could find my way there from the elevator blindfolded. They add a lot of ginger, and use XO in the cooking process in addition to just topping the finished product off with it, so you get a very hearty, savoury soup.

One of the Cantonese classics that I have a particularly soft spot for is soya sauce chicken, and there is a stall here called Ming Kee that is worth the long lines for. Tender, roasted chicken parts marinated in a house-secret soy sauce, served over noodles or rice – Ming Kee does the basics and does them well enough to attract a constant line of folks desperate for their fix. It is a shade inferior to the soya sauce chicken at 126 Beer Garden in Joo Chiat, but the noodles are particularly good, and the chef cooks them to perfect al dente doneness (or in Hong Kong lingo: QQ). They also make soup from scratch, with lots of red dates and black wood fungus, and both the skin and the filling of their handmade dumplings are top-notch.

Liang Chen Mei Dian

One of the areas in which Singapore is miles behind Hong Kong is the standard of their baked goods and pastries. Hong Kong has their custard buns and their egg tarts and bo luo baos, and nothing we have here even come close. Even our imitations of the Hong Kong classics come nowhere near either. But there is a shop in Chinatown, on Sago St, which has absolutely fantastic egg tarts; and the rest of the pastries they have aren’t too shabby either. It is hard to talk up an egg tart because the finished product is so simple, but the good ones have a sweet but not overly cloying taste, a smooth, rich and creamy textured filling, and flaky butter-filled pastry. The kind of butter you use also is critically important in making egg tarts (and really, in all pastry) – you need one with a high butterfat content.

Words are not enough, so here are a couple of pictures.



Lim Chee Guan

I remember craving bak gua during my first year abroad at college, and my mother – in her infinite graciousness – sent me a care package with some bak gua vacuum-packed and hidden under a scarf. I did not know how to describe this to my friends at school, so I told them it was a pork jerky. Simon in particular went crazy over it, and with good reason. Bak gua is so sinfully delicious that it needs no description, and Lim Chee Guan is – in my opinion – the best version around in Singapore. No trip to Chinatown would be complete without a trip here.

I felt a little out of place in Chinatown the first time I went there after moving back, but I am glad to say that that is slowly fading. The bustle, the noise, elbows in your face, and the terrible service at restaurants – these are now more likely to put a smile on my face than irritate me. If only it weren’t so hard to find parking.