The flexible lunch plan: four food centres with a past

The food centre settles every lunch argument. These four come with a past: a polling station, a burial ground, a market in storage.

For breakfast, Tiong Bahru Market; for a first-timer or a quick central lunch, Maxwell; for an evening in the CBD, Lau Pa Sat; for the biggest appetite in the group, Tekka. That is the short version. The compromise is that the building and the stall you came for keep different hours: stalls set their own rest days, so a famous centre can be open while your stall is having a well-earned day off. Have a second dish in mind before you set off.

The food centre is also the only lunch that settles a group argument. Everyone does a lap, orders their own thing and meets back at the table. Ask about price and portion before paying for mixed plates or seafood, read a queue as demand at that moment rather than a ranking, and return your tray. These four add a history lesson: between them they have been a polling station, a burial ground and a Victorian hall that was taken apart for the MRT and put back together.

Tiong Bahru Market: the breakfast one

It started in 1950 as the Seng Poh Road Market, “a simple wooden structure with zinc pitched roof,” in the words of the heritage portal Roots.sg, and doubled as a town hall: it was a polling centre in the 1951 and 1953 elections and hosted rallies in the 1960s. The current two-storey building, rebuilt between 2004 and 2006 with Art Deco touches to match the 1930s estate around it, has 85 food stalls and seats for about 1,050. By the 1980s it was feeding nurses from SGH and office workers. Come in the morning for the traditional Chinese breakfasts – chee cheong fun, wu thow kou – then walk it off around the estate, one of the Singapore Improvement Trust’s first public housing schemes.

Tekka Centre: come hungry

The name goes back to bamboo: Roots.sg traces it to a Hokkien term for the clumps that once grew along the Rochor Canal. The original Tekka Market opened in 1915 on Serangoon Road and was nicknamed the “people’s market”. When it was demolished in 1982, most stallholders moved across the street to what was then called Zhujiao Market, and after the public said the name sounded nothing like the original, it became Tekka Centre in November 2000 (eighteen years under the wrong name, fixed by popular demand). Pair it with a walk around Little India, and plan it for an empty stomach rather than a quick bite.

Maxwell Food Centre: the central default

Maxwell opened in 1928, on what had been a Chinese burial ground, and was reborn in 2001 after a major renovation with about 100 stalls. It is the easiest pick for a Chinatown or Tanjong Pagar outing, a short walk from Maxwell MRT, and the one to take a visitor to first. Its best-known tenant, Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, became the centre’s first Bib Gourmand stall in 2016. Treat that as a reason to do a lap, not the end of the decision: with about 100 stalls, the chicken rice is one option, not the whole centre.

Lau Pa Sat: the evening one

The name means “old market”, and it has earned it. The cast-iron structure, designed by municipal engineer James MacRitchie and made in Glasgow, was completed in 1894 and gazetted a national monument in 1973. It was dismantled in 1986 for MRT works, its parts stored in Jurong, then rebuilt and reopened in 1991. Before it, a timber-and-atap fish market stood here from 1824, then an octagonal brick building by George Drumgoole Coleman in 1838, until land reclamation moved things along. It bills itself as the only hawker centre housed in a national monument, with over 80 stalls and a 10-metre heritage mural by Yip Yew Chong. Skip the office lunch hour and come in the evening, when the satay setting outside gives the CBD a different personality.

Pick the one that fits the rest of your day, keep a second choice ready, and leave the table tidy for whoever’s regular lunch spot you have just borrowed.

Good to know Individual stalls set their own hours and rest days, so have a back-up dish in mind. Lau Pa Sat is a short walk from Raffles Place, Telok Ayer and Downtown MRT stations, and Maxwell from Maxwell MRT.

More food centres, chosen for the food rather than the history…