Travel solutions: Singapore

An island city-state that blends together all the best bits of Asia, not least the food. Time Out tucks in

Orient express: sensational fast food being prepared at one of the city's 11,500 hawker stalls

It’s another busy lunchtime at Samy’s Curry Restaurant, an airy old colonial mess hall out on the greener slopes at the western edge of Singapore City. Every shutter and window is wide open, and overhead a batallion of ceiling fans campaigns against the perennially hot and cloying tropical air – with debatable success. The temperature is about 30 degrees Centigrade, as always; we’re only 85 miles from the equator. On neighbouring tables, six or seven different groups of predominantly Chinese businessmen are all tucking in, with near-religious fervour, to an Indian fish-head curry, a colossal head of snapper – beady eyes, scowling chops and all – in a rich and piquant red curry, a local speciality.

Everyone is eating off huge, rectangular slices of banana leaf; there are no plates in this establishment. Waiters weave around industriously, wielding buckets of rice, potatoes and dahl, which they slop unceremoniously on to vacant patches of banana leaf when instructed. We’ve ordered the fish head too. It’s terrific.

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Singapore, the tiny, ex-colonial island outpost, is routinely stereotyped as a super-clean, high-tech, hyperactive capital of Asian business and retail. But the scene at Samy’s – one of the city’s 40,000 eateries – epitomises life in Singapore better than any vista of vertiginous
skyscrapers or neon advertising hoards, capturing its harmonious multiculturalism and, perhaps even more important than that, its obsession with food.

Singaporeans are always eating with the same gusto. But the country’s champion pastime is generally not conducted in a restaurant, nor indoors in the domestic dining room – but in the public food courts. Nothing in Europe resembles these temples of nutrition. They are Singapore’s version of the street stalls you see elsewhere in Asia: complexes housing often hundreds of individual, privately owned stalls. ‘Makansutra’, the indispensable local ‘food bible’ (pick up a copy as soon as you arrive), which publishes annual reviews of the best food stalls, lists 115 public food courts containing some 11,500 separate stalls.

This incredible concentration of culinary options means there’s literally months’ worth of adventure here for anyone with even the slightest culinary curiosity. After a couple of weeks of determined exploration you’ll scarcely have scratched the surface, but a good way to start is by ticking boxes, trying the famous local dishes at the stalls which reputedly do them best.

The dish most mythologised by Singaporeans is curry laksa: a rich red soup made from chilli paste and coconut milk, then crammed with noodles, tofu, prawns and, if you’re lucky, cockles. The place to have it is along the East Coast Road in Katong, an eastern suburb of the city and site of the so-called ‘laksa wars’. Four different establishments, at numbers 47, 49, 57 and 328, all zealously claim authorship of this Peranakan (hybrid Sino-Malay) recipe, and maintain that they alone do it best. But despite the differences, they all do a cracking rendition.