What makes street food clutter in Thailand, heritage in Singapore?
As street food vendors across most of Asia face an unappetising future, Singapore’s hawkers are winning Michelin stars and being put forward for Unesco recognition. That must be one super secret ingredient ...
We’re waiting for the arrival of “Hawker Chan”, as he’s known in the game, and his operations manager Daniel Wee rattles off the number of food stalls they’ve opened in the past two years. “We’ve now three in Singapore, 11 outlets worldwide including the Philippines, Melbourne, Taiwan, Bangkok, and we’re opening soon in Kazakhstan.”
A Chinese veteran hawker in the old Soviet Union? Really? “From the media interest and our investigation, there’s a market for what we do, it’s special,” adds Wee.
The Singapore government agrees. Its famous hawker industry has been thrust into the spotlight since Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced recently it would be nominated for Unesco’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
This effectively means hawker stalls will be enshrined as World Heritage Sites, a development that has brought derision from other countries on the continent, especially in Malaysia, who question the cuisine’s historical credentials, given the country itself is only 53 years old.
But the hawker trade has never been as trendy as it is now. Chan Hon Meng became the celebrity “Hawker Chan” when his soy sauce chicken rice and noodle stall, buried away in Singapore’s Chinatown Complex, caught the eye of Michelin tasters, who awarded their first-ever star to a budget food vendor.
Tourists and locals flocked, queues snaked a quarter-mile round the block, until the food centre’s management told Chan to sort out his new-found fame; it was becoming a fire hazard. Chan thought outside the box of his one stall and brought in outside investors, Singaporean brand agency Hersing, and expanded to become the world’s most famous hawker. All his stores now go under the umbrella “Hawker Chan” chain.
