First visit to a hawker centre: Newton Circus

First, a preamble to this post as it is the first of many about hawker centres in Singapore. Hawker centres are essentially sanitized outdoor food markets, with a bunch of 2m x 2m food stalls arranged into rows (or, occasionally, a circle) that sell their wares to those that come up. Sometimes they bring the food to your table (which has a helpful number etched into it) or sometimes you wait and get it from them straightaway. They are really economical, with most dishes costing S$3 to S$6. They are all outdoors, but often have fans and are usually covered, which relieves the heat a bit. They are often co-located with particular housing developments (Singapore has an incredibly high rate of both subsidized housing and home ownership). And they are, by and large, pretty delicious, offering many standards created by the unique convergence of Malay, Indian, Chinese, and Peranakan (mixed Chinese and Malay) cultures.

Given that there are hawker centres everywhere and each one contains 50 to 200 stalls, I'm using a couple of tools to guide me in my eating. The first is the 2009 edition of Makansutra (makan = eating, sutra = love of). It is a meticulous guide that rates the best of each kind of dish and tells me which stand to go to at which hawker centre.

Second, I am using a handful of Singapore-based blogs that add to this mix their own (often photographed) reviews of food. Jenika has been a superb sleuth in finding some of the these. There are many, but the best to date is http://ieatishootipost.sg/.

With that, on to the first meal! We chose Newton Circus, largely because of proximity. It is also the most tourist-heavy hawker centre, and with tourists come touts (who are theoretically illegal). But these guys are selling bad food! Better to trust the sources we have.

One recommended dish was the fishball noodles. We got this "dry", which means the noodles on the right were separated from the soup on the left. The soup itself had a nice light seafood broth, with fishballs that were pretty good. Jenika surprised herself with how much she liked them. There were also tasty seafood dumplings in the soup. The noodles were good and SO spicy. They were essentially bathing in chilli, which I found out when I moved the top layer and saw an inch of chilli sauce in the bottom of the bowl. Clean out those sinuses!

The other recommended dish here was the or luak (oyster omelette). This was back to basics: lots of egg, lots of oyster, and lots of oil. For oyster lovers, I think this would have been a pretty good rendition. Eventually, the oysters just overwhelmed, and it was hard to make it more than halfway through this dish. The chilli dip helped a bit, as it spiced up the proceedings. It is a good deal though, at S$4 for one omelette that must have at least a dozen shucked oysters in it.

We also attempted some fried rice. This was the worst of the bunch, very bland and with so much oil. Utterly forgettable.

A good start to our hawker centre explorations. Hopefully we'll have a few more homeruns in the trips to come!