no. 65: amusement parks

At this point, I no longer know how many people have asked me what I think about Urban Hawker, the “Singaporean hawker experience” in New York. Helpfully, the New York Times and the New Yorker both reviewed it recently, thereby saving me a great deal of writing. If you read restaurant reviews for the food porn, or at least food titillation, I suggest you read those first. 

Instead of writing about what you’ll find in the supposedly biodegradable plastic takeout containers there, I’ll start where those reviews end: with the idea that Urban Hawker “[expresses] the essence of Singaporean food.” This is a lot of significance to attach to a food court, but the Urban Hawker team, especially frontman KF Seetoh, have been more than happy to cast themselves in the role of Singaporean food ambassadors to the globe. 

I wish they’d stop already.

Hawker food is as central to Singapore’s identity and appeal as the subway is to New York’s, and it plays this role because it’s not a single thing, but a system. To try to capture hawker culture in a food hall is like trying to explain the glory of the subway to someone by showing them one station. The riptide of humanity, the mosaics on the walls, the roaring of the trains – none of this actually demonstrates why the subway is NYC’s animating force. To understand that, you have to experience how the city unfurls before you when you can get anywhere, anytime, for $2.75. If you just stand in a station, you’re just getting (as my friend Nina likes to say), the words but not the music, and this is exactly what you get at Urban Hawker.

It has the words. 

The menu at Urban Hawker is pretty close to what you’ll find if you walk around an actual hawker centre in Singapore. There are plenty of dishes that my grandma would have recognized. There are also plenty that she wouldn’t, like a stall devoted to Malay-style burgers, or a prawn noodle stall where the flagship dish is a tsukemen-prawn noodle hybrid. These stalls exist in Singapore too, serving what their owners think street food should look like, hawker food for this century rather than the one gone by. It might not taste like the food made by the oldest hawkers, the holdout solo practitioners who’ve been using the same wok for the last 20 years – but  they aren’t meant to. 

The food itself is moderately awful but not utterly and hopelessly so. The noodles have wok hei. The kopi tastes like kopi. The classics are recognizable, and given that they’ve been transplanted half a world away, I think that’s a win (my grandma might have been less forgiving). Uneven execution is part and parcel of hawker culture. It’s why some stalls have long queues, and others don’t. It’s entirely representative for a hawker centre to be filled with slightly crap stalls, and Urban Hawker doesn’t have to worry about competition.

It’s worth noting that the idea that hawker dishes should taste the same in different places is itself an invention of the current century. It came into being with the creation of the hawker franchise, and the idea that hawkers could be brands, not artisans. A decade ago, if you said that the food at two stalls tasted the same, you were lamenting the increased use of manufactured ingredients. Today, you might be praising a chain for its quality control. 

The reviewers also marvel at the layout, at the way you have to go to different stalls to get different dishes, before settling back down at the table you and your companions scrambled to get. You’ll almost certainly do a good deal of waiting – for a table, for your friends to order, for your food. This really is eating like you’re in Singapore, participating in a ritual Singaporeans repeat millions of times a day, a prayer wheel for patience. 

But not the music.

To begin with, nearly every one of the stalls you visit on this pilgrimage is actually a chain. Given this, I’d think the “hawkers” at Urban Hawker are not hawkers in the sense that gave hawker centres their name – they’re not self-employed owner-operators. The cooks you see are probably mostly employees. They’re being told how to work, under the threat of having their livelihoods removed by parties with considerably greater economic power than themselves. Does this make a difference? The hawkers of the 80s and 90s chose to remain hawkers even in an economy with an unemployment rate of under 3%. Today, a trickle of Singaporeans still quit corporate jobs to take over their parents’ hawker stalls. There’s clearly something meaningful about running your own hawker stall that a salary, health insurance, and a pension plan cannot offer. 

Then there’s the price. Food at Urban Hawker costs 3-5 times what a hawker stall in Singapore would charge. A small slice of the population – the office workers and tourists of midtown – can afford to treat this as an everyday meal, but not the population of New York as a whole (the math is in the footnote below).¹ There are three reasons this is a problem.

The first is that the real value of hawker culture in Singapore lies in its accessibility – nearly everyone can eat this well, nearly every day (whether or not your doctor thinks you should). Most Singaporeans would agree that the affordability of hawker food is a major contributor to quality of life there. It isn’t just that cheap hawker food helps the household bottom line (I’ve argued elsewhere that this is essentially a subsidy hawkers pay to the better off). Its infinite variations, its ubiquity, and its convenience all improve quality of life in Singapore immeasurably. What’s joie de vivre worth? Or that elusive quality of “livability,” that some cities have and others don’t and no one can quite define?

Secondly, hawker food in Singapore is cheap partly as a result of progressive government policy. Their construction of the hawker centres was essentially a government-funded capital injection for tens of thousands of micro-businesses and working class families. Rents were controlled by the government and kept deliberately low. Hawker food was treated,  if not quite as an instrument, then as a necessity of nation building. Hawker culture in Singapore was, in a very real sense, built for the people.

So the third and last problem is that we’re paying for all the wrong things when we pay this rich multiple for char kway teow. You can argue whether it’s worth paying to sit in an airconditioned room while you eat your lontong, whether contemporary graphic design makes kopi taste any better, or whether hawker food belongs in New York at all. You cannot argue that paying rent to the shareholders of a large corporation that generates $18/hour, healthcare-not-included jobs is in any way progressive or humane. I realize this is just a condition of late-capitalist existence, but it feels especially grotesque to see these structures imposed upon a culture that was genuinely of the people, and an economy that’s both employed and subsidized many of Singapore’s poorer households. 

Ultimately, Urban Hawker asserts that hawker food is a collection of dishes, rather than the result of a collection of working practices, locations, and relationships. It says that as long as you cook chicken rice, you’re making hawker food whether or not the cooks own the operation, no matter how much you’re buying frozen from a factory, whether or not you’re working in a hawker centre or kopitiam. This is not “a refreshingly humane view of street food,” but a view of its likely future, in which hawker food is just another engine of regressive redistribution, and hawker centres just another theme park. 

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This post was updated at 1915H on 25-02-2023 to reflect that I’m only inferring that most of the staff at Urban Hawker are employees.

1. Even after the overdue price increases of recent years, you can reliably get a meal in a hawker centre for SGD$6 or less, approximately 0.005% of the median household income. Put another way, a family of four could eat literally every meal at a hawker centre and spend 22% of their income on food. A meal at the hawker experience is reliably over US$15 – in both absolute and relative terms (relative to the median household income in Manhattan), it’s three times the price.