The Unesco Class Singapore Hawker Food Culture They are up at the stall by 3am each workday cutting, washing, slicing, boiling, marinating, blending, frying (and all those attendant prep work), just so the line of patient customers can get their curry chicken noodles by 10am. Those seven hours of elbow grease work before the first bowl is served, is exactly what the customers expect, and precisely what the hawker will do. These stories of daily toil is just one chapter of the Hawker Food Culture in Singapore. Street food hawkers have come a long way from their itinerant street food cart days of yore and are installed in efficient little 10x10 ft stalls today, replete with clean water supply, electricity, grey water drainage, exhaust hoods and ventilation. The government of Singapore relocated over 10,000 itinerant street stalls back in the day and systematically built and settled them into custom-made hawker centres. Ironically, it was about the environment – these street hawkers were polluting the drains and air about them and heaven knows how and where they obtained their supplies nor how it was handled. Today, no one questions these practices. Everyone prefers to know who, where, how good it is and why plus how much. It’s about the culture and the crazy food love. Waiting an hour for an award-winning bowl of bak chor mee is not even a conversation topic. Corporate raiders who gave it all up and hawked nasi lemak now sounds like a boring story. We even have a Johns Hopkins masters graduate, who ditched academia and followed his heart, offering progressive Chindian fare in a hawker centre in town. There are also those who know just one recipe all their life and little else and put it up on their food stall menu and charted their route to success. Some have garnered international recognition and World Street Food Awards (Click Here) for their delectable food and are now expanding their humble business locally and in the region. These are the one- dish entrepreneurs we celebrate in our midst. It’s another layer of the food culture here. Another fact is, prices at the hawkers are largely very affordable, sometimes bordering on cheap. A platter or bowl on average will set you back anything from S$3 to S$6.
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