Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant

The stools are plastic, the Bib Gourmand is real and the crab bee hoon is cooked one portion at a time.

Sin Huat is worth it for one dish and one kind of evening: crab bee hoon, cooked one portion at a time, eaten with friends who don't mind waiting on plastic stools in a Geylang coffee shop. It holds a Bib Gourmand in the 2026 Michelin Guide. The compromise is time and money – this is not a quick bite, and crab is not cheap – so go for dinner, order the crab first and settle in.

The dish is the reason the place is famous. The eating house was established in 1979, and Danny Lee, the chef who later took it over, came to cooking after his pig farm closed in the early 1990s. He started with zi char, moved into seafood and is credited with inventing crab bee hoon after a customer asked for crab with hor fun; he entered it in a competition in 1997, and the food writer KF Seetoh also credits Sin Huat with the dish. Lee cooked it with Sri Lankan crab, one portion at a time, and the vermicelli takes up the juices along with scallion, ginger and chilli. That is the whole idea: the noodles are what the table ends up fighting over.

Then came television. Anthony Bourdain ate here with Seetoh for the Singapore episode of A Cook's Tour, first broadcast in 2003, working through scallops, gong gong, frog legs and the crab, and he later named it among his places to eat before you die. Decades on, that episode is still why plenty of people know the name.

The Bib Gourmand run goes back to 2016, and it sits in the mid-price band, a notch above most street food, because the crab is the point and crabs are priced accordingly. For a coffee shop with plastic stools it is quite a record, and nobody has upgraded the stools.

How to do it well: go for dinner, order the crab bee hoon the moment you sit down, then fill the wait with Chinese escargots with a chilli dip and prawns steamed with garlic and chilli. Ask the crab price before you order, since it goes by weight. Bring a few friends, so the crab is shared and the wait is sociable, and pick a weeknight if you are short on patience. It is on the corner of Lorong 35 and Geylang Road.

Good to know 659/661 Geylang Road, at the junction with Lorong 35. The crab bee hoon is a dinner dish, so plan an evening visit, allow time for the wait and check current hours before you go.

Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant | 659/661 Geylang Road (junction with Lorong 35), Singapore 389589