If you’ve read Renjie’s piece on rempah you know you need his super fun list on the best spots to get some proper local flavour in Singapore. Don’t fret, we got him to give it to us.
Various locations
My go-to curry puff today is this mini-chain’s version, which swaps out the regular crust for a flaky, layered pastry dough, and which somehow manages to encase within it a dangerously liquid filling. Little chunks of chicken and potato, suspended in a melty matrix of Chinese-style curry, makes it feel like its creators once ate a xiaolongbao and got inspired. Word for the wise, from someone who has learnt many messy lessons along the way: do not attempt this wearing white trousers.
One of my favourite outlets to get this from is in the magnificent basement food hall of Takashimaya Department Store, on Orchard Road. Pick up the curry puff, yes, but also the top-notch kouign amann from DONQ Boulangerie, the peanut-tossed muah chee from Yi Kou Wei, and the hojicha gelato from Azabu Sabo (and then some).
11 Jalan Pisang
It’s not often that you get to eat at the high temple of Malay gastronomy, so when you arrive at this historic establishment in the heart of the Kampong Gelam precinct, you’d better be hungry. Snag a table upstairs, then head back down to order from the sprawling display case, overflowing with different regional curries and accompaniments to steamed jasmine rice: this point-and-choose exercise is a curry-drenched pick-n-mix for grownups.
You’ll very likely order the rendang, a dry, almost sukkha-style meat curry, but don’t miss the sotong masak hitam – a galangal-and makrut-forward squid curried in its own ink – and the ayam lemak cili padi – a deceptively spicy chicken curry, tamed by first-press coconut milk and a lot of lemongrass. And I always order the soto ayam, a coriander-spiced broth that comes with glass noodles, and that cleanses the palate. They have a wide selection of drinks, but I much prefer to amble around the corner for a frothy teh halia at the nearby sarabat stall.
269 Beach Road
A traditional Malay plate with thoroughly artisanal sensibilities: this delightfully buzzy hotspot sources single-origin coconut milk for its fluffy nasi lemak, or coconut-scented rice, but it is the ayam berempah – fried chicken encrusted with rempah aromatics – that you will think about on cold lonely nights. Here, you have the option of chicken or quail, and in the latter the spices really shine, collecting in all the little nooks and crannies and crisping up in the fryer into a truly transformative mouthful.
Save some room for the excellent kueh – delicate little confectionaries scented with the essential triumvirate of coconut, pandan, and gula melaka, a nutty palm jaggery foundational to Archipelago desserts. And if you still have stomach space, next door is the immaculate Birds of Paradise, purveyors of a particularly robust pandan gelato that is all sorts of grassy and aromatic.
1 Kadayanallur Street
Chinese food isn’t typically associated with rempah, but then again, how could Singapore’s national dish not? Chicken rice is cooked down with the holy trinity of garlic, ginger, and shallots, and the oil of choice is here rendered schmaltz, for further flavour. The rice plays intensely flavourful vehicle foil to the decidedly minimalist poached chicken, and is best punched up with the accompanying ginger-inflected chilli sauce.
Maxwell Market, a hulking hawker centre on the fringes of Chinatown, has over the years turned into a bit of a chicken rice hall of fame. Do not get distracted: head straight for Michelin-nodded Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, and take the snaking queue not as a deterrent, but as a sign that their plate is extraordinary enough to lure even the most time-starved of Singaporean office workers. Part of our national lore is that Gordon Ramsay once tried – and failed – to beat this stall at their own chicken rice game in blind taste tests.
30 Seng Poh Road
Michelin-rated purveyors par excellence of chwee kueh, a classic Teochew breakfast dish comprising little more than wobbly little steamed rice flour puddings, topped with a salty, punchy fermented radish relish.
The heart and soul of this dish, though – the reason I make a beeline to the Tiong Bahru Hawker Centre every single time I step off the Bombay-Singapore red-eye flight, bleary and ravenous – is the accompanying sambal, a spice paste of dried chilli, dried shrimp, and god knows what other mind-altering substances, that reminds you why one eats breakfast to begin with. And if you like living life on the wild side, you can even buy a jar of this sambal home – just good luck restraining yourself from eating it with fridge-cold chapati in your dark kitchen at midnight.
300 Joo Chiat Road
If you took Malabar paratha to its shatteringly crispy logical extreme, you’d get this cult roti prata spot. (It takes a lot of crunchy confidence to put that on your signboard.) The folds and layers of this breakfast flatbread are specifically engineered for maximum surface area and, consequently, maximum crispage as it fries up in ghee, as does the diminutive size of the coin prata variant, which comes five to a plate and which is the order to get here.
Paired with a little saucer of bright curry redolent with tamarind, it’s the sort of rib-sticking fuel you’ll want for exploring the painfully hip Joo Chiat precinct afterwards, with third-wave coffee roasters in Chinese Baroque shophouses and vinyl stores that somehow also are natural wine bars.
Oh, and – go before 10am, because no amount of pleading puppy eyes can score you these golden coins once they run out.
54 Race Course Road
I think a lot about the lost generations of Indian visitors who have happily traipsed through Little India without ever eating at this legendary joint.
The banana leaf thali is gold standard, but you’d be remiss not to order the quintessential Singaporean Tamil dish – the curry fish head, a marvellously massive red grouper head bubbling away in an intoxicating South Indian curry.
At that size, there’s plenty of white meat to go around, including the firm, flaky fish cheeks that in many a Singaporean household would be offered (in ultimate filial sacrifice, it should be said) to the elders at the table. I once had an American friend eye the fish head suspiciously, but by the end of the meal she was happily sucking the collagen-y lips off the fish.