Foodie City Trip to Singapore: The Best of Southeast Asia
From humble street food to world-class fine dining: the modern and affluent Southeast Asian city-state is celebrated for its cleanliness, cosmopolitan culture, and as one of the most diverse and exciting culinary scenes in Asia—if not the world.
January 20, 2025
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From an ethnological perspective, the majority of Singapore’s population is Chinese. However, the city-state is also home to long-established communities of Malays, Indonesians, Indians, and Arabs. This diversity has led to a rich variety of culinary styles and an extensive selection of restaurants in this food-obsessed city.
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This cultural mix has also given rise to a unique fusion cuisine known as Peranakan or Nyonya Cuisine. Additionally, in recent years, thanks to the ever-increasing prosperity of this trade and financial hub, many Europeans, Americans, and Australians have moved to Singapore, opening bars and restaurants. So it’s really no wonder that it has become one of the world’s top culinary and gastronomic destinations.
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In Singapore, you can find excellent food almost everywhere. Street food stalls, mostly relocated to hygienic Hawker Centers (food halls with various vendors), are a highlight. There are also expansive and popular Indian restaurants with simmering aromatic curries, Chinese dim sum eateries, Japanese sushi bars, French bistros, Spanish tapas bars, Italian pizzerias, cool burger joints, open-fire grill restaurants, and even establishments offering classic haute cuisine.
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“It’s not that different from New York here,” says Ryan Clift, an English-born chef and owner of the Tippling Club, one of the city’s hottest dining spots. “As a chef, you can get pretty much any high-quality and luxurious ingredients from anywhere in the world.” This aligns with the notion that Singapore, with its rapidly growing population, hardly produces anything itself. “That’s not entirely true,” Clift counters. “Singapore likes to present itself as a ‘garden city,’ and there are many projects based on the idea that a valuable garden shouldn’t just look good but also serve a purpose.” Increasingly, lushly planted parks, backyards, and even rooftops and terraces of skyscrapers are being converted into vegetable and fruit gardens.
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Seafood from the South China Sea is already abundant, so Singapore now not only has restaurants offering Asian cuisine and international fare for every budget but also an increasing number of establishments focused on using locally sourced ingredients in line with global trends. To sum up, it’s safe to say there are few places in the world where the unifying power of sharing a meal is more evident than in Singapore.
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This article appeared in the Falstaff TRAVEL issue Winter 2024/25.