A Hawker Center in Singapore

The last few years have been tough on independent restaurants. It seems there are fewer every year. In a way, I can understand it. To work at running a full-service restaurant means surrendering to a life of drudgery. Managing a staff of cooks, waiters, busboys, cashiers, and maintenance personnel requires the skills of a military leader plus that of a chief executive officer, or CEO.

This last week, I have been studying a Lonely Planet guide to Singapore, which gave me some ideas. There are, of course, full service restaurants on the island; but they are mostly for the well-to-do who are likely to order a variety of dishes accompanied by wine or liquor. A certain number of these will continue to exist.

But for most people in Singapore, all the excitement is in the various “hawker centers” scattered throughout the city-state. These are largish dining halls with booths specializing in one or more dishes. An effort is made to have a variety of dishes represented. It wouldn’t work if everyone were selling pizza or hamburgers. To see how this might work, check out this influencer video on YouTube:

In it, you will visit a number of hawker centers to find the best purveyors of typical Singaporean dishes. The video is about an hour long, but you’ll get the idea in the first fifteen minutes.

Imagine an American hawker centers where you might have the following food stalls: hamburgers, pizza, tacos, desserts, sub sandwiches, soups, salads, pasta, chicken, hot dogs, barbecue, deli sandwiches, omelets, pancakes, souvlaki, Indian curries, hummus and moutabal, Greek mezze, gyro sandwiches, vegetarian and vegan foods, Korean foods, teriyaki, and so on ad infinitum.

In a space the size of a shopping mall food court, you could have a larger variety of foods. No longer would friends and families dining out have to sacrifice their tastes because the the loudest, most insistent member of the party insisted on having his/her way.