Chinatown & Maxwell

The Cantonese and Hokkien who landed at the river mouth in the 1820s were fed by street cooks before they were housed by anyone, and the streets south of the river have never stopped feeding people since. Kreta Ayer — "water cart" in Malay, 牛车水 in Chinese, after the bullock carts that hauled the district's water — is the oldest continuously eating neighbourhood on the island.

This is rice territory. Chicken rice at its most exacting, claypots ticking over charcoal, soya sauce chicken lacquered to mahogany, congee that takes rice past softness into silk. The ingredient logic is Cantonese thrift: one bird used entirely, one pot doing everything, nothing wasted and nothing hurried.

Dinner here is a queue and a shared table. Maxwell Food Centre — a wet market converted in 1986 — is the district's dining room, and the queue discipline is real: locals judge a stall by its line at 12:40 on a weekday. Eat what the line eats.