Frannywanny

When you mention Singapore to a traveling foodie, I can probably bet a million dollars that the word hawker  will surely come up. Not quite convinced? Okay then, think about your favourite Singaporean dish. Ready? Well, whatever it is, I can confidently say that you can get all  of them from a hawker center. You see, hawkers and hawker centers play a very important part in Singapore's heritage. I can still remember my first hawker meal was back in the late 90s, I was about 8 years old then and my parents brought me to Newton Circus for dinner. Back then, there weren't a lot of hawker centers, I can still remember visiting the ones in Newton as well as People's Park in Chinatown. Sanitation was still a big problem then as we would watch in horror whenever the "uncle" would just "wipe" our table with a piece of chopsticks, pushing all morsels of food down to the floor. The tables would be sticky, sometimes oily, the floor extremely dirty. I have a number...

One thing I love about Singapore is that the government gives a BIG importance to food safety and sanitation. Wherever we go, be it a high-end restaurant or a hole-in-a-wall eatery, you'd see laminated colored letter signages on the wall of these food places. These are the sanitation grading that they have received and so far I've been seeing a lot of As and Bs and haven't came across a C yet. If Manila has fast food joints and Jolly jeeps in the Central Business District (CBD), here we have hawker centres which is not only limited to CBDs but can be found in residential areas too. I'm so lucky that there's one that's just a few steps away from my office and this is where I would buy lunch almost everyday. I love the variety yet at times, this can be quite challenging as I couldn't make up my mind whether I'd like to get chicken rice or duck noodles, or perhaps go healthy with some salad or to keep it light with a piece of curry puff with a fruit ju...