Taking To The Streets

To get a real sense of a country’s culture, head straight to the streets where each piping hot takeaway fix speaks of the people who’ve come through before.

- Priyanka Elhence

Think of street food in Southeast Asia, and immediately the image that comes to mind is countries like Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia where famous streets are laden with vendors preparing delicious but affordable food for their customers. Each hawker usually specialises in just one dish, making it easy for the customer to know where to head to satisfy their street food craving. Asia’s food culture with its unassuming hawker centres or street vendors offering hearty but more importantly, inexpensive meals, is one of the important elements of the region’s heritage, where eating is undoubtedly an obsession. Street food is so central to national pride, it’s no surprise that countries like Singapore and Thailand each have their own Michelin Plate Hawker Stalls Guides to boast some of the most iconic street foods the country has to offer.

“Asia’s food culture with its unassuming hawker centres or street vendors offering hearty but more importantly, inexpensive meals, is one of the important elements of the region’s heritage, where eating is undoubtedly an obsession. ”

In fact, street food is so deeply woven into our national fabric here, that last year Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced plans to nominate the city-state’s unique hawker culture for inscription into UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. “A successful nomination will demonstrate to the world how proud we are of hawker culture in Singapore, encourage greater appreciation for our hawkers, and show our commitment as a nation to safeguard hawker culture for generations to come,” he said.

The great migration