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An Unforgettable Meal Can Cost $5 at Singapore’s Hawker Centres. Can the Next Generation Save Them?

No trip to Singapore is complete without a meal (or 12) at its hawker centres, where stalls sell multicultural dishes from generations-old recipes. But rising costs and demographic change are threatening the beloved tradition.

By SEBASTIAN MODAK
Fri, Oct 18, 2024 10:39amGrey Clock 6 min

In Singapore, it’s not unusual for total strangers to ask, “Have you eaten yet?” A greeting akin to “Good morning,” it invariably leads to follow-up questions. What did you eat? Where did you eat it? Was it good? Greeters reserve the right to judge your responses and offer advice, solicited or otherwise, on where you should eat next.

Locals will often joke that gastronomic opinions can make (and break) relationships and that eating is a national pastime. And why wouldn’t it be? In a nexus of colliding cultures—a place where Malays, Indians, Chinese and Europeans have brushed shoulders and shared meals for centuries—the mix of flavours coming out of kitchens in this country is enough to make you believe in world peace.

While Michelin stars spangle Singapore’s restaurant scene , to truly understand the city’s relationship with food, you have to venture to the hawker centres. A core aspect of daily life, hawker centres sprang up in numbers during the 1970s, built by authorities looking to sanitise and formalise the city’s street-food scene. Today, 121 government-run hawker centres feature food stalls that specialise in dishes from the country’s various ethnic groups. In one of the world’s most expensive cities, hawker dishes are shockingly cheap: A full meal can cost as little as $3.

Over the course of many visits to Singapore, I’ve fallen in love with these places—and with the scavenger hunts to find meals I’ll never forget: delicate bowls of laksa noodle soup, where brisk lashes of heat interrupt addictive swirls of umami; impossibly flaky roti prata dipped in curry; the beautiful simplicity of an immaculately roasted duck leg. In a futuristic and at times sterile city, hawker centres throw back to the past and offer a rare glimpse of something human in scale. To an outsider like me, sitting at a table amid the din of the lunch-hour rush can feel like glimpsing the city’s soul through all the concrete and glitz.

So I’ve been alarmed in recent years to hear about the supposed demise of hawker centres. Would-be hawkers have to bid for stalls from the government, and rents are climbing . An upwardly mobile generation doesn’t want to take over from their parents. On a recent trip to Singapore, I enlisted my brother, who lives there, and as we ate our way across the city, we searched for signs of life—and hopefully a peek into what the future holds.

At Amoy Street Food Centre, near the central business district, 32-year-old Kai Jin Thng has done the math. To turn a profit at his stall, Jin’s Noodle , he says, he has to churn out at least 150 $4 bowls of kolo mee , a Malaysian dish featuring savoury pork over a bed of springy noodles, in 120 minutes of lunch service. With his sister as sous-chef, he slings the bowls with frenetic focus.

Thng dropped out of school as a teenager to work in his father’s stall selling wonton mee , a staple noodle dish, and is quick to say no when I ask if he wants his daughter to take over the stall one day.

“The tradition is fading and I believe that in the next 10 or 15 years, it’s only going to get worse,” Thng said. “The new generation prefers to put on their tie and their white collar—nobody really wants to get their hands dirty.”

In 2020, the National Environment Agency , which oversees hawker centres, put the median age of hawkers at 60. When I did encounter younger people like Thng in the trade, I found they persevered out of stubbornness, a desire to innovate on a deep-seated tradition—or some combination of both.

Later that afternoon, looking for a momentary reprieve from Singapore’s crushing humidity, we ducked into Market Street Hawker Centre and bought juice made from fresh calamansi, a small citrus fruit.

Jamilah Beevi, 29, was working the shop with her father, who, at 64, has been a hawker since he was 12. “I originally stepped in out of filial duty,” she said. “But I find it to be really fulfilling work…I see it as a generational shop, so I don’t want to let that die.” When I asked her father when he’d retire, he confidently said he’d hang up his apron next year. “He’s been saying that for many years,” Beevi said, laughing.

More than one Singaporean told me that to truly appreciate what’s at stake in the hawker tradition’s threatened collapse, I’d need to leave the neighbourhoods where most tourists spend their time, and venture to the Heartland, the residential communities outside the central business district. There, hawker centres, often combined with markets, are strategically located near dense housing developments, where they cater to the 77% of Singaporeans who live in government-subsidised apartments.

We ate laksa from a stall at Ghim Moh Market and Food Centre, where families enjoyed their Sunday. At Redhill Food Centre, a similar chorus of chattering voices and clattering cutlery filled the space, as diners lined up for prawn noodles and chicken rice. Near our table, a couple hungrily unwrapped a package of durian, a coveted fruit banned from public transportation and some hotels for its strong aroma. It all seemed like business as usual.

Then we went to Blackgoat . Tucked in a corner of the Jalan Batu housing development, Blackgoat doesn’t look like an average hawker operation. An unusually large staff of six swirled around a stall where Fikri Amin Bin Rohaimi, 24, presided over a fiery grill and a seriously ambitious menu. A veteran of the three-Michelin-star Zén , Rohaimi started selling burgers from his apartment kitchen in 2019, before opening a hawker stall last year. We ordered everything on the menu and enjoyed a feast that would astound had it come out of a fully equipped restaurant kitchen; that it was all made in a 130-square-foot space seemed miraculous.

Mussels swam in a mushroom broth, spiked with Thai basil and chives. Huge, tender tiger prawns were grilled to perfection and smothered in toasted garlic and olive oil. Lamb was coated in a whisper of Sichuan peppercorns; Wagyu beef, in a homemade makrut-lime sauce. Then Ethel Yam, Blackgoat’s pastry chef prepared a date pudding with a mushroom semifreddo and a panna cotta drizzled in chamomile syrup. A group of elderly residents from the nearby towers watched, while sipping tiny glasses of Tiger beer.

Since opening his stall, Rohaimi told me, he’s seen his food referred to as “restaurant-level hawker food,” a categorisation he rejects, feeling it discounts what’s possible at a hawker centre. “If you eat hawker food, you know that it can often be much better than anything at a restaurant.”

He wants to open a restaurant eventually—or, leveraging his in-progress biomedical engineering degree, a food lab. But he sees the modern hawker centre not just as a steppingstone, but a place to experiment. “Because you only have to manage so many things, unlike at a restaurant, a hawker stall right now gives us a kind of limitlessness to try new things,” he said.

Using high-grade Australian beef and employing a whole staff, Rohaimi must charge more than typical hawker stalls, though his food, around $12 per 100 grams of steak, still costs far less than high-end restaurant fare. He’s found that people will pay for quality, he says, even if he first has to convince them to try the food.

At Yishun Park Hawker Centre (now temporarily closed for renovations), Nurl Asyraffie, 33, has encountered a similar dynamic since he started Kerabu by Arang , a stall specialising in “modern Malay food.” The day we came, he was selling ayam percik , a grilled chicken leg smothered in a bewitching turmeric-based marinade. As we ate, a hawker from another stall came over to inquire how much we’d paid. When we said around $10 a plate, she looked skeptical: “At least it’s a lot of food.”

Asyraffie, who opened the stall after a spell in private dining and at big-name restaurants in the region, says he’s used to dubious reactions. “I think the way you get people’s trust is you need to deliver,” he said. “Singapore is a melting pot; we’re used to trying new things, and we will pay for food we think is worth it.” He says a lot of the same older “uncles” who gawked at his prices, are now regulars. “New hawkers like me can fill a gap in the market, slightly higher than your chicken rice, but lower than a restaurant.”

But economics is only half the battle for a new generation of hawkers, says Seng Wun Song, a 64-year-old, semiretired economist who delves into the inner workings of Singapore’s food-and-beverage industry as a hobby. He thinks locals and tourists who come to hawker centers to look for “authentic” Singaporean food need to rethink what that amorphous catchall word really means. What people consider “heritage food,” he explains, is a mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian and European dishes that emerged from the country’s founding. “But Singapore is a trading hub where people come and go, and heritage moves and changes. Hawker food isn’t dying; it’s evolving so that it doesn’t die.”



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Charles Forte on Carving His Own Path in the Family Hotel Business
By GEOFF NUDELMAN
Fri, Nov 8, 2024 3 min

There’s a tradition in the Forte family of starting on the lowest rungs of the hospitality ladder and working their way up.

In 1911, Rocco Forte emigrated from Italy to Scotland to open a cafe that would mark the first hospitality establishment in the namesake family business. He would go on to open several more restaurants in the U.K., which his son would continue to grow.

Although the hotel group has ebbed and flowed through the decades, it finds itself in a new era with all three adult members of the current generation working for the company.

Charles Forte, 32, is one of those three and followed in the steps of his grandfather by starting in hospitality service. At age 15, he was a waiter at London’s Brown’s Hotel—owned by Rocco Forte Hotels since 2003—and has worked in almost every area of the hotel and restaurant industry since.

Today, he is the group’s director of development, responsible for steering external partnerships and capital investments.

“My role is to find new opportunities and develop ourselves on a much smaller scale,” he says.

In January, Saudi Arabia’s PIF sovereign wealth fund took a 49% investment stake in Rocco Forte Hotels—a deal Charles helped complete. He says that the investment will help guide the group’s next growth phase, which includes a target of three hotels per year and expansion in the Middle East, among other regions. Through 2027, the group is opening four new properties in Italy and working on a project in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The family’s roots are Italian and that’s where many of the group’s most notable properties reside, although according to Charles, more than 40% of the company’s business is within the U.S.

Alongside his two sisters Lydia and Irene, Charles is connecting the Forte name to a new generation of luxury travellers through partnership deals with brands like the Macallan and smaller, longer-term property builds in Italy and elsewhere.

Penta caught up with Forte by phone from his office in London.

PENTA: Do you think working in a family business brings more challenges or opportunities?

Charles Forte: Being in a family business like this affords opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise. My sisters and I worked in all the different departments of the hotels, and I realistically always wanted to join the business. At other times, I did want to be a filmmaker, but I wanted to be a part of the family legacy. My dad is a good mentor and I’ve never really looked back.

How do you differentiate yourself in an extremely competitive luxury hotel market?

It’s very challenging to differentiate ourselves. Sometimes I struggle to differentiate between us and other luxury brands because a lot of the products are very similar. There’s an international luxury aesthetic that’s very copy and paste, and a lot of the bigger guys are trying to create new brands within their own stable of brands. Our hotels are very design-oriented and not so traditional, for example.

What differentiates us is the family aspect. There’s a real family behind this, and it creates value in our brand. We have this “quiet luxury” aesthetic.

MORE: U.S. Renews Program to Root out Money Laundering in Real Estate Ahead of Larger Crackdown

What is your philosophy on hotel partnerships? Do you find yourself chasing partnerships with big-name brands to stay on par with your competitors?

Partnerships have value if they have relevance and the partner is relevant to the destination. We don’t chase partnerships because if we did, it would mean that something is missing from the hotel. These partnerships should be organic. I’m excited because we recently brought in a new director of marketing who worked at Six Senses, and that will help us do more meaningful and special collaborations and partnerships.

Do you think that’s creating more appeal for Rocco Forte Hotels among the younger generation of luxury travellers?

There’s a broad range of pace in this space, considering how competitive the operator landscape has become. We’re finding that younger travellers aren’t geared towards any specific trend. I think we’re slightly more classic in appeal. We’re not ostentatious. There’s no substitute for beautiful design and great service—we’re not looking to reinvent the world. Depending on which hotel they visit, some people know us as a brand, others as a specific independent hotel, and we’d like consumers to know which brand is behind the property.

In August, we opened Rocco Forte House Milan, which features more longer-stay keys, where stays can be two weeks, a month or a year. We’re finding that’s something more travellers want and we can build a nice client base for those who want longer stays.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

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This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan

35 North Street Windsor

Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.

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