- Yellow Productions presents...
A guide to the best hawker centers in Singapore.
I'm Chris, this is my channel Yellow Productions,
my series on Singapore, and in this video
I'll be telling you where some of the best
hawker centers are in Singapore.
Singapore has over 100 hawker centers,
over 6000 stalls, and if you're coming as a tourist,
there's no way you can eat at all of them,
so I'll tell you some of the best ones to visit.
The first one, and the one I'm at right here is
the Lau Pa Sat Festival Market.
This market is in the central business district.
It is in this building right here
that's about 150 years old.
It's been operating as a hawker center
since about 1976, and the reason why I'm here,
and why I say this is the best one.
One, the location, and two, the neat
old roof Victorian building, but three,
the reason you should come here,
not to eat at the Singaporian food inside,
but for what they do outside.
Back here is satay street, and just outside are
about 10 satay vendors that are cooking up
grilled meats on a stick, one of my favorite things
to eat in Singapore is satay, and this is
really one of the best places to get satay.
They offer table service, you can get it outside, enjoy.
For the best satay here, visit stalls seven and eight
that actually got the signs that say Best Satay.
That's usually a reason for me not to eat at a place,
but in this case, for $26 you can get
their small satay set and it comes with, right here,
you get 10 lamb beef, and you get 10 chicken,
comes with some cucumbers and some onions.
You get these dipping sauces to dip the satay in,
and one of their specialties here seems to be
these prawn satay, these are very large shrimp.
I would tell you how these are,
except I'm going to wait until I eat them,
because as soon as I touch these I have to use my hands,
then I can't touch my camera any more.
But the chicken, right here...
Dip it in the little sauce.
It's tender, it's juicy, it's hot.
It's pretty good meat on a stick, I have to say.
The sauce is a combination of peanuty plus spicy.
It's a really good complement to the chicken.
The beef one, and they give you two sauces,
sharing for two people, or one if you want to dip
your beef in and the other you want to dip your chicken in.
Lamb beef, tender, not too overcooked.
Great with the sauce.
They give you a little box of napkins, which is nice.
You can wipe yourself, because you're
going to need it with these things.
And to drink, I always like to get lime juice.
If you've seen my videos before...
And actually there was a group of Australian fans
I took a few selfies with, they said whenever they see
lime juice they use the line from one
of my previous videos which is,
"Mmm, lime juice makes you pucker."
So let's see how they like the food here.
- We're just at Lau Pa Sat.
I'm enjoying the satay here tonight,
and the prawns are beautiful, the chicken is beautiful.
Eat on the street in Singapore, can't go wrong.
It's fantastic, so come and enjoy some,
nice and cheap and good food,
excellent food, what do you think?
- It's amazing.
- You like it?
- It's incredible, the food here is
insane, and the atmosphere is great.
- It's fantastic.
- And it's good to see a YouTube sensation.
- [Chris Raney] Thanks guys, it was great seeing
you too, and thanks for being in the video.
Lau Pa Sat is best visited at night,
because satay street only opens at night,
because that's when they can close off the street to cars
and fill it up with tables.
Also, one of the cool things about
this particular hawker center, they've got
this clock tower on the top that you can
see up here, and that dings every 15 minutes.
Be at that beverage stall in the middle
when it strikes on an hour, it's pretty loud.
To get to Lau Pa Sat take the MRT to Raffles Place,
go out exit I, and then walk two blocks down
Raffles Quay Street, and you'll be at the market.
The next best hawker center is the Tiong Bahru market.
This one's a little bit off the beaten path.
The closest MRT is Outram Park.
It's about a 15 minute walk from there.
You can certainly take a taxi here.
One of the great things about this market,
it's a two story market; on the ground level
it's a traditional wet market, so that's
where people go buy their fruits, their vegetables,
their meats, flowers right by the entrance, clothing.
If you want to see the wet market,
make sure to get here in the morning before lunch,
because a lot of those vendors go away after lunch.
But there's also two stalls in this market
that recently got the Michelin Bib Gourmand award.
And that's the award that they give
that's just below one Michelin star.
One of those stalls is the Tiong Bahru
Boneless Hainanese Chicken Rice; and chicken rice,
and I have a plate of it right here,
is basically a Singaporian delicacy.
It was not invented in Hainan.
It was actually invented by Malaysian cooks
that were working for the British,
but this is as Singaporian as apple pie is American.
The chicken, what I love about it, it's boneless
that was the name of the restaurant;
but the chicken, it's really tender, it's really flavorful.
The rice...
You might just think it's steamed rice,
but it's been cooked in the chicken broth,
and so it has this wonderful flavor to it.
It also comes with a little bowl of broth
that you can drink on a hot day.
And then you get three different
kinds of sauces to dip it in.
I'm also drinking a sugarcane juice.
Sugarcane Juice, at these hawker centers,
they freshly squeeze it in these machines.
This one was $1.20 from the Tsin Shu drink stall.
I'm looking that way, because that's where the stall is,
and the Singaporian chicken rice, $2.50 for this.
I mean this is amazing; it is amazing to eat this
for $2.50, that's Singaporian dollars,
which works out to like less than two U.S. dollars.
It is truly amazing; if I ever lived here,
I could probably eat this all of the time.
Some of these hawkers have been in business since the 1800s.
This hawker center was recently remodeled.
It used to be only one story,
but all the hawkers, they chipped in together,
to build it as this two-story complex.
Now there are 138 hawker stalls
with seating for 4,000 people, impressive.
Truly adventuresome eaters can find
lots of adventuresome food here including pig organ soup,
though the specialty here is shui kueh.
It's a dish of steamed rice cakes,
topped with casserole-style sauce
made of radish, turnips, dried shrimp,
chili, garlic and shallots.
One of the interesting things about ordering
the shui kueh is it doesn't come with a plate or a tray.
Actually they fold it up like this,
and this is how you take it away from their store.
Then they point out, you will want a stick to eat it with.
And like almost everything in Singapore,
they ask if you want it spicy, and if you do,
then you get some chili sauce on the side.
So kind of spread this topping out,
and we'll pick this up with our stick.
Maybe I should have got two sticks.
The rice cake along with the sauce is tasty.
I could think there might actually be meat in here,
but I don't think there is.
It's a very interesting, definitely Singaporian,
spicy taste; it's not just chili, and it's
not just spicy, spicy, but it's
a very pleasant, complex, spicy.
Now sugarcane juice, perfect to wash it all down.
This, it's only two Singaporian dollars, so cheap.
Another drink that's pretty good at the hawker centers is
soybean milk, especially on a hot day,
some cold soybean milk really helps
to cool you down, pretty good too.
I also really like the hawker center has
rules against touting; what's touting you say?
Well, if you go to the hawker centers
that allow touting, like the Newton Food Center,
food circus, you will know.
Those are when everybody comes up
to you with their menus and says,
"Hey, eat this, eat this, eat this."
And because they don't let people do that here,
it makes for a much more peaceful eating area.
With the remodel at this hawker center,
it is definitely one of the more
pleasant hawker centers I've eaten at.
It's big, it's airy, lots of fans.
And so even though Singapore is hot,
it's not too hot to eat here.
Our next three hawker centers are
all going to be in Chinatown, so the nearest MRT
to get to these is the Chinatown MRT,
which goes out right there.
The first one the three hawker centers in Chinatown
we're going to talk about is the Chinatown Complex.
This is the mother of all hawker centers
in Singapore; this is the largest.
The map I saw said there were 226 stalls.
I've read online there's over 260,
maybe there's a little more around here.
This hawker center is truly, amazingly large.
There are so many stalls here.
It keeps the prices competitive,
because there's so many vendors selling the same thing.
Also, this is home to one of Singapore's
two Michelin star hawker stalls.
The Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken has
just received a Michelin star.
The lines to it are quite impressive.
I didn't sample their chicken, but it looks quite delicious.
And the chef who works there, he's dressed in white,
looks like a top-notch chef, except he's in a hawker center.
Now, I will say the particular eating
surroundings here are not fabulous.
It is cramped, it's busy, it's kind of hot,
it's kind of dark; so this isn't really a place
you're going to hang out for a long time,
but you certainly can find some delicious food here.
What did I get from this hawker center?
I got a mango milk chivas, $1.80.
And let's give this a taste here.
Cool, refreshing, delicious.
The Chinatown Complex is three stories.
The hawker center is on the second floor.
The first floor is what they call the sundries floor,
or I'd call it the floor selling random stuff,
clothes, underwear, gifts, you name it.
And then in the basement, that's where the market is.
The traditional market, so just like we saw in Tiong Bahru,
they would have chicken, meat, produce, vegetables,
all sorts of things like that down there.
They have bathrooms up on the second floor,
but they're going to cost you 10 cents.
The next hawker center we're going to cover is
just outside the Chinatown Food Complex
on Smith Street, it is Chinatown Food Street.
This section of Smith Street has been closed
off to cars; they put a fancy glass roof on top of it,
and call it about a three block hawker center.
If the Chinatown Complex was a little too dark,
dingy and dirty for you, then Chinatown Food Street
will probably be what you're looking at.
Things here, a lot cleaner and brighter,
though expect to pay a few dollars more.
This is another one of those hawker centers
they've tried to make look old school and authentic.
Even though these are fairly semi-permanent structures,
they've put little fake wheels on them
to make it look like they could roll them away.
They don't roll them away though; they don't roll.
The coolest stall on Chinatown Food Street
definitely has to be the Chinatown Crab Master.
Why, because it has a big crab on top.
Another example of the price difference.
Inside the hawker center, Hainanese
chicken rice, $2.50, outside $5.50.
But probably my choice for hawker center
in Chinatown is the Maxwell Food Center.
It's right across the street
from the Buddha Tooth Relic Museum,
about three blocks at the end
of the Chinatown Food Street on Maxwell Road.
This one, not quite as big as the Chinatown Complex,
they have about 100 stalls here.
The prices here are a little bit more
than the Chinatown Complex, but just
in the orders of tens of cents.
I also like that this hawker center has tables that are
really close and open to the outside.
And they have a lot of good fans,
keeps it fairly cool in here.
The Maxwell Food Center is organized
into three distinct rows of hawker stalls,
so it's pretty easy to walk through
all 103 of them, and make sure you've seen them.
Chinatown Complex, I had no idea where I was
or where I was going most of the time.
The most notable stall here is
the Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice stall.
This also got the Michelin Bib Gourmand award.
It was also made famous by Anthony Boudain's visit.
They've been serving delicious
chicken rice for a long time;
and you know it's popular when
they have not one, but a second hawker stall.
You order your food and pay at the first stall,
and then you line up at the second stall
to get your delicious chicken.
The Amoy Street Food Center is a hawker center that's
located kind of between Chinatown
and the central business district.
This one's mentioned because four stalls in here
received the Michelin Bib Gourmand award.
Note, it's not open on Sundays in the evening,
which is when I was here, which is
why it looks really, really dead.
This one's got two stories; it's nice,
open, airy, bright, and not to crowded
when all the stalls are closed.
The next hawker center on the list
is the Singapore Food Trail.
So now you might be wondering why am I showing
you the Singapore Flyer Observation Wheel,
well it's because the Singapore Food Trail hawker center is
directly beneath the Singapore Flyer.
It's not the biggest or the best hawker center
in Singapore, but it has a really neat location,
under the ferris wheel, and it has
a really unique, old timey kind of feel.
This is another one of those hawker centers
where they've made to look like a period ambience
back in the old days of Singapore.
If you prefer to eat your hawker center food
with a view, do like some of these people do.
Get you hawker center food to go,
and eat it as a picnic here on the waterfront.
Just about a 10 minute walk down
the harbor is Makasutra Glutton's Bay.
This hawker center has one of the best locations
of any hawker center, because it's
right in front of the bay.
The seating, all outside; it is not covered.
They do have some umbrellas, so when it rains
you can hide up under there, but they've
got about 15 food stalls.
The stalls have really good signs,
really good menus that have pictures,
and a little description that tells
you what each stall is about.
So the final hawker center that I'll mention,
it's called Satay by the Bay,
and it's right next to Gardens by the Bay.
Everything over at the Marina Bay Sands
and that way is really expensive,
but this is a pretty good hawker center.
And there's a satay place here called City Satay,
where you can get a selection of 15 pieces of satay
with seven different types of satay.
Over here, and I'm looking at the sign,
there's pork, chicken, mutton,
beef and otah, which is fish.
And of course, there's the big prawn
ones too, those are pretty cool.
So if you're by Gardens by the Bay,
definitely check out Satay by the Bay.
And it's cool, you can get this selection of satays too.
The other thing that makes this hawker center,
you know when it's really legit, the whole air smells
like charcoal smoke from the satay vendors.
There are a couple of hawker centers
that I couldn't visit in this video,
or in the time I had in Singapore making this video,
so I just wanted to mention them
in here for a completeness sake.
Chomp Chomp hawker center is a hawker center that's
famous for satay, and the Old Changi Road hawker center,
there's one over by Changi airport,
and that's a famous hawker center as well.
So if you're heading out in the direction of either
of those two, you can check those out as well.
I hope you enjoyed this video,
if you'd like to see more like it,
I publish new videos every Sunday.
Please subscribe, or you could follow
me on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus,
links in the description below.
Or you might enjoy watching one of these other videos.
Click any of them to watch,
or find links in the description below.
In the upper left you'll find
my travel guide on Singapore in general.
In the upper right you'll find
a video on Singapore's best air conditioned food courts.
In the lower left you'll find a video on Gardens by the Bay.
In the lower right you'll find
my video on Singapore's Sentosa Island.
(soothing melody)