A Singaporean Hawker Center Is Coming to the Bay — For One Day, Anyway

For the street food lover, Singapore’s hawker centers are one of the great wonders of the world. Visit any one of these sprawling, semi-outdoor pavilions, and you might find 100 of the most delicious food stalls you’ve ever encountered, all lined up in a row — curry puff specialist next to bak kut teh vendor next to fourth-generation laksa maker next to Michelin-recommended chicken rice stand. Even splurging wildly, you can feed a family of four for less than $20.

Sadly, the Bay Area has never had anything remotely close to a true Singaporean-style hawker center. But for one day this weekend, a group of homesick Singaporeans will aim to create the next best thing — a hawker center–style food court that brings several of the Bay Area’s top Singaporean chefs together for a day-long bonanza of laksa, char kway teow and kaya toast.

That’s the vision, anyway, for the first ever Singapore Festival, which will be held this Sunday, Sept. 21, at the San Mateo County Event Center, in celebration of Singapore’s 60th year of independence.

The brainchild of Singapore Connect, a social club for Bay Area Singaporeans, the festival will feature a slate of performances by Singaporean musicians (including Linying, Cheryl K and the rapper Yung Raja) and stand-up comics, a crafts marketplace, and large-scale models of Singaporean landmarks like the Merlion and the Supertrees.

Of course, for many visitors the biggest attraction will be the food.

“I think we all grew up eating at hawker centers,” says Emily Lim, the chef-owner of San Francisco’s Dabao Singapore, one of the featured vendors. “It’s Singapore’s pastime, basically, to go eat.”

Nora Haron, chef-owner of Kopi Bar & Bakery, explains that Singapore Connect’s members always hold a big feast for Singapore’s National Day. This year, however, they decided to open up that celebration to the general public — not just Singaporeans. And so the group asked Haron to co-chair a food committee, along with Jai Kandayah of Pleasanton’s Curry Leaves Bistro, with the idea of curating a hawker center–like experience.

It wasn’t an easy task. The reality is that most cities in the Bay Area are lucky if they have one solid, or even middling, Singaporean restaurant. In that sense, a big part of Singapore Festival’s appeal is one of sheer, unprecedented abundance: 10 of the Bay Area’s best Singaporean (and Malaysian and Indonesian) food businesses gathered under one roof.

One of Haron’s top priorities from the very beginning was for the festival’s food offerings to showcase the incredible breadth of Singapore’s food culture — a culture, she says, that’s “built on diversity and shared traditions.” In addition to the country’s Chinese Singaporean majority, she wanted to also include Indonesians, Malaysians and Indians — all ethnicities well represented in Singapore’s cultural landscape and, of course, at its hawker centers.

To that end, the ad hoc hawker center will feature seafood laksa and Hainanese chicken rice from Dabao, and kaya toast and curry puffs from San Jose’s MYSelera Bistro. Kopi Bar will pour hot and iced kopi (coffee with condensed milk) and kopi-O (black coffee), like you’d find at a traditional Singaporean coffee shop, or kopitiem. Curry Leaves Bistro will serve Malaysian-style nasi lemak and roti prata with curry. Other vendors will sell South Indian biriyani, Indonesian shaved ice and nasi padang, and mochi donuts with Southeast Asian flavors.

Kandayah, who owns both Curry Leaves Bistro and MYSelera, says he’s a prime example of the festival’s multicultural approach: He’s co-chairing the food committee as a Malaysian immigrant of Chinese-Indian descent. Kandayah explains that Malaysian cuisine and Singaporean cuisine share a lot of dishes in common anyway. As he puts it, “We always say, ‘Same-same but different.’”

Kandayah says his hope is that the festival will be a chance for second-generation kids to have something close to an authentic experience of their parents’ food culture — how they’d sometimes eat hawker center fried noodles for breakfast and kaya toast at 10 p.m. “It’s like the tag line for my restaurant,” he says. “‘Any time is makan time.’ Any time is eating time.”

For Lim, a James Beard Award–nominated chef who started Dabao after getting furloughed from her restaurant job during the pandemic, the festival is an expression of Singaporean pride.

“We’re just trying to make ourselves more known,” she says. “In Singapore, folks tend to think that Western cuisine — Italian, French, whatever it may be — is of more value than the local cuisine. So I felt like I needed to represent [our local food] a little more.”

Here in the Bay Area, the demand only seems to be growing. Dabao recently opened its first brick-and-mortar location at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco, and Lim says, “I’ve had folks who drive from an hour away to the freaking Metreon just to eat my food court laksa, because they miss those flavors.”

On Sunday, Singapore Festival’s organizers are expecting a turnout of upwards of 3,000 people, Lim says. Some will enjoy their first bowl of coconut curry laksa, dunk their first slice of kaya toast into the yolk of a soft-boiled egg (heaven!). And for Singaporeans?

“The event is a little taste of home,” Lim says.

Singapore Fest will take place on Sunday, September 21, from 10 a.m.–8 p.m.. at the San Mateo County Event Center (1346 Saratoga Dr., San Mateo). Tickets start at $21 (the code “SGKQED10” provides a 10% discount), $11 for children. Food and drinks will be sold a la carte; visitors can pre-order specific dishes ahead of time if they want to be sure they don’t sell out.