Where to stay

Capella Singapore Contemporary chic in a harmoniously restored colonial building with lush gardens on tranquil Sentosa Island. Doubles from £400. 1 The Knolls, Sentosa Island, Singapore, 098297, 00 65 6377 8888, capellasingapore.com

Perak Hotel Popular budget gem in Little India. Doubles from £90. 2 Perak Road, Singapore 208133, 00 65 6299 7733, peraklodge.net

The Fullerton Bay Hotel Glamorous boutique hotel in the business district with views over Marina Bay. Doubles from £234. 280 Collyer Quay, Singapore 049326, 00 65 6333 8388, fullertonbayhotel.com

Naumi Hotel Boutique gem in the business district. The infinity pool on the roof, overlooking Raffles Hotel, is an inspired piece of feng shui one-upmanship. Doubles from £160. 41 Seah Street, Singapore 188396, 00 65 6403 6000, naumihotel.com

New Majestic Hotel Designer boutique hotel, close to Chinatown. Doubles from £130. 41 Bukit Pasoh Road, Singapore 089855, 00 65 6511 4718, newmajestichotel.com

Wanderlust Hotel Almost frivolous but entertaining boutique hotel in Little India. Doubles from £90. 2 Dickson Road, Singapore 209494, 00 65 6396 3322, wanderlusthotel.com

Travel Information

Currency is the Singapore dollar (£1= SGD2.05). Singapore is eight hours ahead of GMT and only 1 degree north of the equator. Its climate varies with high humidity and abundant rainfall. In the summer months, daytime temperatures can reach 32°C, the hottest months being May to August. The rainy season falls between December and January.

GETTING THERE - Singapore Airlines ( 0844 800 2380, singaporeair.com) flies up to four times a day from London Heathrow to Singapore direct.
British Airways (08444 930 787, ba.com) flies daily to Singapore.

RESOURCES - Singapore Tourist Office (yoursingapore.com) provides extensive resources to help plan your visit.

FURTHER READING - Classic Peranakan Cooking (Marshall Cavendish, £14.99) provides an insight into Peranakan culinary traditions and features useful tips and advice.

There is No Carrot in Carrot Cake Dr Leslie Tay (Epigram). Illustrated explanations of all the main hawker foods plus addresses for their locations.
ieatishootipost.sg, Dr Leslie Tay’s blog, is a unique, up-to-the minute account of the best Singapore food. It’s laced with videos and photos; 90,000 Singaporeans a month follow its recommendations and many hawkers stick ‘Recommended by’ signs outside their stalls.

Where to eat

2am:dessertbar Open at night for puddings that stand comparison with anything in the world. About £7 per dessert. 21A Lorong Liput, Holland Village, 00 65 6291 9727, 2amdessertbar.com

Wild Rocket at Mount Emily Chinese fusion and fashion in a relaxed atmosphere. About £60 per person, including wine. 10A Upper Wilkie Road, 00 65 6339 9448, wildrocket.com.sg

Restaurant André Halfway up the world’s Top 50 and climbing, it’s exquisite, artistic and the prices match its aspirations. About £145 per head with wine. 41 Bukit Pasoh Road, 00 65 6534 8880 restaurantandre.com

Blue Ginger Traditional Peranakan dishes perfectly cooked. From £30 per head. 97 Tanjong Pagar Road, 00 65 6222 3928,theblueginger.com

Candlenut Kitchen Peranakan with a twist. About £30 per head, but there’s a great value lunch for £10. 25 Neil Road, 00 65 6226 2506, candlenutkitchen.com

Food Glossary

Bak kut teh

peppery pork rib soup, accompanied by a mini Gong Fu tea ceremony.

Bee hoon

fried rice vermicelli, but with lots of different garnishes from cabbage to crab meat.

Blachan

fermented shrimp paste.

Buah keluak

aromatic black nut from Indonesia.

Char kway teow

flat noodles with sticky sausage, lard and cockles in a sweet soy sauce.

Chin cha lok

dip made with fermented shrimp.

Cendol

coconut milk drink with jellied pandan ‘worms’ in it, with red beans or brown sugar as extras.

Chilli crab

mud crabs cooked with a ketchup, chilli and lime sauce.

Daun kesom

Coriander-like herb, known as hot mint

Gado-gado

spicy Indonesian mixed vegetables with tempeh, tofu and rice-cake.

Hokkien mee

Fried egg noodles (mixed with vermicelli) plus pork, shrimp, squid and beansprouts.

Kaya

coconut jam made with eggs, milk and pandan.

Kopi

coffee, made in more ways than Starbucks could ever dream of.

Kueh pie tee

mini-fried cakes with savoury fillings, a nyonya hors d’oeuvre.

Laksa

fragrant noodle soup, ‘asam’ is sour, ‘lemak’ contains coconut, ‘Katong’ contains chopped noodles.

Murtabak

Indonesian fried pancake stuffed with minced mutton, egg and vegetables.

Nasi pedang

Indonesian dish of steamed white rice with various meat and vegetable dishes.

Pandan

Bright green leaf used for flavouring desserts.

Roti prata

Rich and puffy tamil flatbread.

Thosai

similar to Indian dhosa, served on a banana leaf; the server spoons dahl and curry onto it.

Food and Travel Review

Singaporeans say they are crazy for three things: food, shopping and their lottery. Cash rich, time poor, they shuttle between high-rise apartment blocks, hawker markets, malls and their jobs. Never still on their crowded handkerchief of an island, they chew, slurp, nibble and suck their way around the clock.

The 4am cabbie pulls in by an eatery at a corner of Dickson Road. It’s famous for its bee hoon – rice vermicelli, chicken and egg. What he fancies is a plate of hokkien mee, noodles stir-fried with shrimp, bean sprouts and a splash of prawn stock. Any cook will make that for him, even if it’s not on the menu. If it had been nearer, he’d probably have stopped by Nam Sing on Old Airport Road. It’s the current taxi drivers’ favourite. They vote for their favourite hawker treats and the Singapore public takes note.

The public also trusts the diagnoses of Dr Leslie Tay, a GP and food junkie. His blog, ieatishootipost.sg, is a Good Food Guide for the 21st century. He flits between Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures like an industrious bee, from fish-head curry and ‘economic rice’ (with meat and two veg) to wild prawns the size of adolescent lobsters.

Pulling one apart over a snack at Cambridge Road Hawker Centre, he explains why he likes the prawn noodle soup from Wah Kee best: ‘Some cooks use pork as well as shellfish bones to make the broth. These are simmered in six kinds of seafood. It makes them sweeter.’ As an afterthought, he adds that the ‘Uncle’ doing the cooking is related to a fishmonger at Tekka wet market in Little India across town, and receives preferential treatment.

Blanketing Singapore with the generic ‘multi-racial society’ label smothers the subtleties of its communities, some mixed, some overlapping and some distinct. According to Dr Tay, bak kut teh started life as a bone soup for coolies carrying rice sacks on the docks at Clarke Quay. The Teochew clan, with access to white pepper, made it one way, whereas Hokkien brewed a darker, less fiery, soy-flavoured version. The distinction has lasted.

The social group that has influenced local cuisine more than any other is the Peranakan. Five centuries ago, Melaka was the only established port on the north-west coast of Malaya. Southern Chinese men settling there married local brides. Over time, their descendants spread south through the peninsula.

Males, the baba, retained traditional Chinese values. Women, the nyonya, developed a unique hybrid cuisine. They mix the indigenous taste for coconut, chilli, calamansi limes, tamarind and blachan (fermented shrimp paste) with stir frying and steaming. They use pork denied to Muslim cooks. Their skill with spices rivals that of the Tamil immigrants. Culinary magpies, they’ve borrowed tomato ketchup for the chilli crab that’s almost a national dish.

Recipes pass down through families. Nyonya cooks don’t rely on a Delia to show them the way. At Blue Ginger, beef rendang simmered with coconut milk, lemongrass and ginger melts in the mouth. Chef Malcolm Lee at The Candlenut Kitchen produces a kind of fragrant boeuf bourguignon with the same ingredients. His cendol cream – panna cotta, topped with jellied pandan leaf shreds and Melaka palm sugar – looks as chic as a Raffles martini. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, ‘that it’s not the same as your grandmother’s so long as it’s almost as good.’

Inter-restaurant rivalry is mostly good-humoured, although it can degenerate from bickering to war. Laksa lemak is simple nyonya fare: coconut soup with rice noodles. Chop them up and they turn into Katong laksa, named after a Peranakan enclave on East Coast Road. For over a decade, two eating houses here have fought over who invented the dish. Pictures of 328 Katong Laksa’s owner, a former beauty queen, are regularly defaced, allegedly by fans of 49 Katong Laksa across the street.

According to Dr Tay, neither place invented it. The original noodle scissor-man, he says, was a 1950s pedlar called Janggut. They would do better to focus on the laksa itself: how to make the essential curry paste, whether it should contain ridged blood cockles or how finely chopped the daun kesom (a herb with hints of coriander, basil and mint) that adds a special tang should be.

Though there’s no such thing as a ghetto, some areas retain vestiges of their colonial identities. In Little India, the smells of burning incense mingle with biryani and murtabak. Crisp thosai fly off the griddles. Coconuts on sale outside Hindu temple on Serangoon Road aren’t for eating but for offering to its patron, Vishnu.

Fascinated by the skill with which bakers flattened and flipped the unleavened dough until it was paper thin, Dr Tay trained himself to make Tamil prata: ‘I approached it like a medical practitioner. It took me about three months before I learnt how to stretch the dough. I practised the gesture with a cloth to get a feel and then worked with the real thing.’ Flaky, enriched with ghee and scrunched up while still hot, it appeals to Chinese who dip it in sugar as well as curry.

At Geylang Serai Market in the predominantly Malay Kampong Glam the scents of dried fish, Halal meat and tropical fruits vie with each other. It’s both more exotic and earthy. Nasi padang is shorthand for Malaysian food that ranges from sweet, smoky satays broiled over charcoal dipped in peanut sauce to Indonesian gadogado, a freestyle dolly-mix of chilli-hot raw and cooked vegetables with tempeh, tofu and rice cake.

Niu Che Shui is the place where buffalo carts once brought water to the city. Today it’s the urban sprawl of Chinatown. As an outsider, mooching through its streets is a lucky dip of hit-and-miss experiences. The sweet and salty pastries filled with red bean paste or the salty five-spice century egg at Tong Heng on South Bridge Road are works of art, but an acquired taste to ang moh (literally ‘red hair’, the nickname for Westerners). Sticky-sweet slivers of barbecued bacon have a more ready appeal. Peanut paste sounds disturbing, but has a scrumptious, creamy custard texture. Glutinous rice balls bobble in a tangy ginger consommé. If you expect carrot cake to be orange, think again. It’s steamed white radish, savoury and served with scrambled egg.

Singapore plays ironic tricks on its past. Dempsey Hill, an ex-army barracks, has morphed into a complex of chic bars, restaurants, lifestyle shops and a spa. You go there to dance to a Philippino band in a Thai restaurant with its own German micro-brewery. At Culina, diners pick their own steaks for grilling. Disgruntled Chef offers up fusion tapas. The fashionistas’ favourite, Tippling Club, boasts a cocktail called ‘smokey old bastard’ – whisky, sweet tobacco and orange smoke – as one of its liquid molecular specialities.

The Rich & Good Cake Shop near the Sultan Mosque in the old Arab quarter has transformed colonial tea party Swiss rolls into vivid green pandan cream and durian-flavoured concoctions. Kaya (coconut jam) toast belongs to a breakfast ritual that would have Somerset Maugham turning in his grave. Alongside it come two watery, shelled soft-boiled eggs that are stirred with soy sauce. Washed down with kopi (coffee) filtered through a sock, they provide the high-energy, high-cholesterol fix that will help Singaporeans last out till their mid-morning snack.

Chef Willin Low studied law at Nottingham, returned and practised for eight years before ditching his wig and gown for chefs’ whites. At Wild Rocket, he coined the Singlish acronym Mod-Sin to describe his brand of cross-cultural cooking. He stuffs frilly, fried nyonya kueh pie tee shells made out of rice flour with Thai basil pesto and tiger prawn. He produces a cream sauce from century-egg yolk. Chin cha lok, a fermented shrimp dip, heightens the taste of sea bass on a cushion of Mexican salsa. It’s fun-but-posh food and the glitterati fill his restaurant in the almost rural setting of Mount Emily.

Before opening 2am:dessertbar, Janice Wong worked in Grant Achatz’s brigade at Alinea in Chicago. Her Holland Village dessert bar could be Manhattan or Barcelona. She concocts her feminine puds in full view of her customers with the aplomb of a barista. A signature ‘Purple’ arrives on a Perspex sheet. Under it is a print of an abstract painting and on top, blackberry parfait, purple potato purée, fruit leather, a purple berry sorbet and spikes of lavender marshmallow.

Tubes filled with pear, kiwi and vodka gel might be designed for snorting. Sucking one is a noisy, decadent, post-modern act that shouldn’t be so much fun. It almost equals sticking one’s tongue into a black buah keluak nut that tastes of bitter chocolate, lurking in a nyonya stew, and licking out its gooey contents.

According to Dr Tay, the incoming tide of wealth doesn’t threaten the island’s culinary diversity. It can absorb a ‘63° sous vide egg with mousseline potatoes and Australian black truffles’ at Iggy’s or André Chiang’s ‘Octophilosophic’, £225-prix fixe menu. He doesn’t mind his kids eating McDonald’s fries.

Some individual dishes – the bedrock of hawker food – are, he believes, at risk. ‘Char kway teow is pure Singapore. People come from all over to try it, but if it’s going to survive it will probably have to evolve.’

A flat-noodle stir fry, it depends on three ingredients for its special taste: nuggets of fried pork fat, sweet black soy and cockles from Malaysia. So what if the salt can give you high blood pressure and the lard raises cholesterol – it’s not this that endangers its future.

Trawl through the food centres and you’ll see elderly ‘Uncles’ and ‘Aunties’ slaving over a wok or a pot 12 hours a day or longer. They make money – the good ones, enough to send their sons and daughters to university overseas. A few go into property and end up millionaires. The trouble is their educated children don’t want careers as hawkers. There isn’t a generation to replace them. It’s the skills that may fade away.

The solution might rest with the enduring popularity of Peranakan cuisine. Its specialities set a benchmark for rival communities. A headline story from the daily Straits Times noted that ‘Nyonya chicken wings’ are a top-selling menu item in a Beijing KFC. It might not be high-end, but the benefits are obvious – with that kind of endorsement from mainland China, who can doubt that the future will be rosy.