Chye Seng Huat Hardware

The hardware store is long gone. The gates, the name and the noise stayed.

Chye Seng Huat Hardware is still the café the rest of Jalan Besar gets measured against, and the one to go to if you want to sit at the bar and talk beans with the people who roast them. Go on a weekday morning for the coffee, or after 5pm with friends for the courtyard. The compromise is noise: a hard-surfaced room this popular gets loud when it is full, so it is not the place for a quiet conversation or a laptop. It is closed on the first Monday of every month.

Why it still matters

It opened in 2012 under Papa Palheta, an early force in Singapore's coffee-bar boom, in a former hardware store in an Art Deco shophouse on Tyrwhitt Road. The shopfront and the large covered metal gates were left as they were, and the name honours the businesses that once lined this stretch of the old industrial zone. More than a decade on it is no longer the new thing, which is exactly why it is worth going: plenty of cafés copied the formula, and this is still the one doing the roasting.

Sit at the bar

The coffee bar runs all the way round the room, and the move is to sit at it and watch the baristas work, with records playing. Espresso is pulled on house blends including Nuts and Bolts and Terra Firma, with single origins alongside, and the beans are roasted on site. Order a single origin rather than your usual flat white; this is the place to try the thing you would not buy beans of. If you want to see how it is done, the café runs guided roastery tours; book a slot through its site.

The food

The food is better than a coffee bar strictly needs. Pancakes, sticky fig pudding and a wagyu burger have been fixtures, and later menus brought scrambled eggs on croissant, Korean spam fries and bread pudding with pulut hitam ice cream. Menus rotate, so treat those as the flavour of the place rather than a list to order from; the pulut hitam pudding is the one we would hope to find.

After five

The café says its side courtyard becomes a beer garden after 5pm, with craft beers and bites, which makes it one of the few speciality coffee places that hands over naturally into the evening. It stays open later on Saturdays, so that is the night to do it.

It sits between Bendemeer and Lavender MRT, so either works. Look up at the shopfront on the way in. It has earned its keep.

Good to know Between Bendemeer and Lavender MRT. Closed on the first Monday of every month; check the official site for roastery tour slots.

Chye Seng Huat Hardware | 150 Tyrwhitt Road, Singapore 207563 | Nearest MRT: Bendemeer, Lavender