Spam chips and salted egg yolk sauce on everything be gone! These new restaurants serve up a refined version of modern Singapore cuisine guaranteed to change the way you think about local food.
If you are tiring of every other hipster cafe serving spam chips or slathering salted egg yolk
sauce on everything from waffles to croissants in an attempt to fuse local flavours with international ingredients, you are not alone. Thankfully, Singapore’s culinary talents are more
creative than that, as the latest wave of mod-Sin restaurants prove.
Modern Singapore cuisine – best defined as hawker favourites reinvented with a contemporary
twist – first became part of a foodie’s vocabulary in the mid-noughties when chef Willin Low
launched his restaurant Wild Rocket and popularised the now ubiquitous laksa pesto pasta.
Today, more than a decade after this term was invented, mod-Sin cuisine appears to have well
and truly come into its own, with the latest slew of openings and new restaurant menus offering
a wider variety of dishes and sophisticated interpretations of classic fare. Some establishments,
like Labyrinth, have even gained international recognition with a newly awarded Michelin star.
Of course, it is always worthwhile to make a pilgrimage to le grande dame Wild Rocket for its
ever changing mod-Sin omakase menu, featuring seasonal specialties infused with familiar local flavours (bak chor mee made with squid “noodles” or chwee kueh scallops anyone?)
Otherwise, here are four of the latest mod-Sin joints where you can feast on Singapore’s unique
and ever-evolving cuisine.
