Smith Street Taps

The best beer garden in Chinatown is a hawker stall with a blackboard and whichever table you can chope.

Smith Street Taps is the most Singaporean pint in town: a dozen or more rotating craft lines poured from a hawker stall on the second floor of Chinatown Complex, drunk at whichever table you can chope, with dinner from the stalls around you. It suits an after-work beer, a cheap date that doubles as a food crawl, or a visiting beer nerd. The compromise is comfort, and the hours: it keeps hawker-ish times and takes Sundays and Mondays off.

It opened in 2013, when craft beer here mostly meant expensive bottles in expat bars, after Daniel Goh of The Good Beer Company teamed up with Meng Chao of the Clementi bottle shop Brewers' Craft to go draught-only. It was the first of that year's wave of taprooms, and it still bills itself as Singapore's original all-draft craft beer hawker stall. More than a decade on, it is still pouring, which in hawker-centre years is a long and respectable career.

Find it at #02-62, among the cooked-food stalls. The set-up is pure hawker: a stall front, blackboards above the taps listing what's on, and whichever table you can claim. The tap list has grown from five lines at launch to a dozen or more, depending on the day.

The rotation is the reason to come back. Expect Singapore brewers alongside international ones, such as Turning Point Brew Co's Sentient Glow pale ale and Alive Brewing's fruity Yuzu Relax IPA, plus tap takeovers and commemorative beers brewed with friends of the stall, including Japan's Sekinoichi Shuzo. The list changes every few weeks, so read the blackboard and ask what has just gone on rather than ordering what you had last time.

The pairing is the point. You are sitting in one of Singapore's biggest hawker centres, so dinner is whatever you fancy from the stalls around you; the satay and chicken cutlet from the Malay stall next door are the obvious start. A cold pale ale with something smoky off a grill makes a better argument than most gastropub menus, at a fraction of the bill.

How to do it well: come straight from work on a weeknight, chope a table near the stall before you queue for beer, then send someone off for satay. Saturday is the one day it opens in the afternoon, which makes it a good last stop on a Chinatown wander. Chinatown MRT is a few minutes' walk.

Good to know Chinatown Complex, 335 Smith Street, #02-62; closed Sundays and Mondays, and open from the afternoon on Saturdays. Check the stall's social accounts before a special trip. Chinatown MRT is a few minutes' walk.

Smith Street Taps | #02-62 Chinatown Complex, 335 Smith Street, Singapore 050335 | Nearest MRT: Chinatown