🇸🇬 Singapore · 🇮🇹 Italy
By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office
Singapore is a city of roughly six million people crammed into 733 square kilometres, governed with an efficiency that makes Swiss watches look unreliable, and yet its most important cultural institution is a collection of open-air canteens where plastic stools sell out by noon and the recommended strategy for finding a table involves leaving your packet of tissues as a placeholder. Italy, meanwhile, is a country where lunch is constitutionally protected, where a barista will correct your coffee order not unkindly but firmly, and where the concept of eating dinner before eight in the evening is treated as evidence of either tourism or illness.
Both countries are, independently and non-cooperatively, correct about food in a way that makes most of the world look like it is not really trying. The difference is methodology. Singapore has democratised excellence — the hawker stall with three items on the menu and a Michelin star is not irony, it is policy. Italy has preserved it — the nonna who makes the same pasta she made in 1987 is not resistant to change, she is the change. Both approaches produce extraordinary results and both will make you feel quietly inadequate about wherever you came from.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Chope your table with a packet of tissues or an umbrella before queuing — this is the accepted Singaporean reservation system and it is taken seriously | Skip the hawker centres because you assume air-conditioned restaurants are better. Singapore's greatest food exists in places with plastic furniture and fluorescent lighting, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not been paying attention |
| Try everything at least once: laksa, char kway teow, Hainanese chicken rice, rojak, chilli crab — the local food culture rewards the curious and punishes the timid | Order Singaporean food from the "Western" stall at a hawker centre. This is the hawker equivalent of ordering a salad at a steakhouse |
| Eat at multiple stalls in the same sitting — a hawker centre is not a restaurant, it is a curated collection of specialists, and limiting yourself to one is a category error | Complain about the queue. If fifteen people are waiting for that char kway teow, you should be the sixteenth |
| Ask the stall owner for their recommendation — many hawkers make two or three things and one of them is transcendent | Leave food on your tray. Hawker centres have tray return stations and not using them will earn you a look of profound disappointment |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Order a cappuccino before noon. After noon, order an espresso. This is not a suggestion — it is how the digestive system works in Italy and ordering milk-heavy coffee after lunch marks you as someone who cannot be trusted | Ask for a substitution. The menu is a document of intention, not a negotiation. Asking for the pasta without garlic because you don't like garlic is, in culinary terms, asking for Beethoven without the piano |
| Book well in advance for dinner at any restaurant worth eating at — walk-ins work at lunch, but dinner reservations in good Italian restaurants are treated as legally binding | Put parmesan on seafood pasta. This is not a preference. This is wrong. The cheese disrupts the sea, and Italians will physically stop you if they see it coming |
| Linger. The average Italian spends over an hour on a meal, and a restaurant that rushes you is a restaurant that knows its food doesn't deserve your attention | Eat anywhere that has photographs of the food on a laminated menu outside the door. This is universal wisdom but it is especially urgent in Italy, where the gap between tourist trap and actual food is enormous |
| Drink the house wine. Italian house wines are chosen by people who care about what they're serving with the food — they are almost always correct and almost always cheap | Ask for the bill before you're ready to leave. In Italy, the bill arrives when you request it, not before — the table is yours for as long as you sit in it |
Singapore's hawker culture was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2020, which is a remarkable thing to have happened to a collection of outdoor food courts. It happened because the Singaporean government, the Singaporean people, and eventually UNESCO agreed on something that sounds simple but is apparently very hard to implement: food that is excellent does not need to be expensive, and food that is cheap does not need to be bad.
The hawker centre system emerged from a 1960s public health initiative to move street vendors off the streets and into licensed, regulated centres. The vendors brought their recipes, their techniques, and their customers. What resulted was not a compromise between street food and hygiene but something that made both irrelevant: a form of organised culinary democracy where the egg noodle specialist at stall twelve has had the same recipe since 1974 and sees no reason to change it, because the queue at 11:30am every day is all the feedback he requires.
The Michelin Guide awarded stars to Liao Fan Hawker Chan's chicken rice stall — a stall with twelve plastic chairs, a menu of three items, and a price of two Singapore dollars a plate — in 2016. Singapore was not surprised. The rest of the world found this confusing, which is the rest of the world's problem.
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Italy's relationship with food is one of the few areas of Italian life where the stereotype is accurate and the reality is even more so. Italians spend, on average, over an hour on their main meal of the day — the longest in the OECD — and this is not considered indulgent. It is considered the minimum necessary to eat correctly. The coffee rules, the pasta rules, the sequencing of antipasto through secondo through dolce, the specific regional cheeses that go with specific regional wines: these are not affectations. They are the accumulated result of a civilisation that has been thinking about this particular problem for two thousand years.
The regional specificity of Italian food is its most misunderstood feature for newcomers. Italian food is not a cuisine — it is a collection of dozens of distinct regional traditions that happen to share a language and a flag. A carbonara made with cream is not a variation of carbonara; it is a different dish that has borrowed the name without permission. The Bolognese served in Bologna contains no spaghetti — it is served with tagliatelle, and a Bolognesi will tell you this not because they are being pedantic but because it is true and the distinction matters.
Singapore and Italy both operate on the principle that food deserves to be taken seriously, and both will make you feel the gap between their standard and everywhere else's with quiet, consistent efficiency. Singapore does it faster, cheaper, and at more unusual hours. Italy does it with more formality, more wine, and more strongly held opinions about pasta shapes.
The practical difference for someone moving to either place is this: in Singapore, your biggest risk is missing something extraordinary because you didn't queue long enough. In Italy, your biggest risk is ordering something wrong and receiving a correction delivered with such polite certainty that you feel briefly ashamed of your entire culinary history.
Both risks are worth taking.
expat.com Singapore — "I spent my first two weeks eating at the air-conditioned mall food courts because I didn't understand hawker centres. Then a colleague took me to a kopitiam at 7am and I had kaya toast with soft-boiled eggs and a cup of kopi-C and I realised I had been doing the entire country wrong. The best food in Singapore is in the places with the worst furniture."
The Local Italy — "I ordered a flat white at a bar in Rome and the barista looked at me the way a doctor looks at a patient who has diagnosed themselves incorrectly. He made me an espresso instead, explained gently that milk after noon was 'not good for the digestion,' and charged me sixty cents. It was the best coffee I have ever had. I have not ordered a flat white in Italy since."
Reddit r/singapore — "The tissue packet reservation system works, but you have to commit to it. I put my tissues down at a table in Toa Payoh and went to queue. When I came back, a family was sitting there. I pointed at the tissues. They shrugged. There is apparently also a system for disputing tissue reservations, and I did not know it. I ate standing up."
Singapore and Italy will both feed you better than you expect and in ways you didn't anticipate. Singapore will do it at a plastic table under fluorescent lighting at a price that makes you check the receipt twice. Italy will do it at a pace that forces you to stop treating meals as something you complete rather than something you experience.
The lesson from both is the same, stated differently: food is not peripheral. In Singapore, it is the primary organising principle of social life. In Italy, it is the calendar. Ignore either country's food culture and you have not moved to Singapore or Italy — you have moved to a version of your previous life with better weather.
Do the queue. Linger at the table. Order what they tell you to order. Both countries know what they're doing.
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Danny Fisk
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.