Soul Food

Growing up in the hawker centres of Singapore, Founder and Chairman Tan Kim Siong gained an appreciation for two things: fishball noodles, and how much hawker culture means to the people of the nation. Today, his fei siong group is a multimillion dollar street food empire intrinsically linked to the soul of Singapore.

- Michael Wayne

There exists, far out in the wide gulf between fast food and restaurant cuisine, a culinary option that’s as ancient as civilisation itself. For more than 2,000 years, humanity has demanded quick, easy and inexpensive access to freshly cooked food on the go. From Ancient Greek and Roman thermopolia – hot food counters – to today’s drive-through fast-food restaurants, that need has been satisfied, albeit often to the detriment of our health.Throughout human history, our lust for what we know today as street food has been sated by entrepreneurial – and speedy – gastronomical artists. Recent excavations at the ancient city of Pompeii, which was buried after a volcanic eruption in AD 79, revealed a distant ancestor of today’s food courts. The thermopolium allowed a hungry public to grab and go long before Happy Meals and heart disease became mainstays of our highways and byways. It’s a style of dining baked into our DNA, impossible to ignore and increasingly hard to avoid.

“ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES IN SETTING UP SO MANY OUTLETS ACROSS SINGAPORE IS HOW YOU CONTROL THE QUALITY AND PORTIONS OF THE FOOD.”

But where even the giant American chains fear to tread, there is street food. Modern incarnations, such as Tahiti’s famous food trucks and the pop-up restaurants so ubiquitous in big cities, are beginning to reclaim territory stolen by fast food in the latter half of the 20th century. In the wake of the dire health implications of a fastfood nation, the cheap, cheerful and often surprisingly healthy option of street food has made a comeback.