Lamenting the loss of Singapore’s hawker traditions is nothing new. You know the story: after years of generational hand-me-downs, today’s kids don’t want to take over their mom and pop’s business, don’t think running a food stand is what a uni-educated, high flyer should strive for. Perhaps their parents have higher hopes for them too. Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé had a point when he said recently that, unlike Japan, “…where there’s a growing culture of young people who are assertive about their choices [and] it’s a respectable option if you want to run a café… Singaporeans see it a little differently…such jobs are for the labor classes.”

There has been no shortage of attempts to stem the tide, from strict control of rental regulations in hawker centers (implemented in April 2012) to prevent food prices from going up, to getting social enterprises to step in to manage hawker centers. What’s never really been done, though? Making casual style hawker cuisine, rough and ready dining spots and the idea of mixing and matching your dishes seem cool.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening right now. A host of new spots and concepts, typically run by folks too young to remember the glory days of the mid-80s when there were some 150 hawker centers across the island (the number today is closer to 100) are turning expectations about what to expect from a cooked food center on their head. From craft beer stalls in Chinatown to a hybrid mee pok-yakitori concept in Tiong Bahru, everywhere you look there’s someone experimenting with something a little different. On their own, of course, they’re but a drop in the deep fat fryer. Some of the concepts scream try-hard; others obviously won’t last. But throw in smarter social media marketing around home-grown dining concepts (witness The Tuckshop’s ingenious happy hour promotion in response to the Anton Casey affair), recent calls online for the establishment of a National Food Council, last year’s Youth Hawkerprise initiative and, if only for the name, Mediacorp’s new Wok Stars TV cooking show, and it all seems indicative of a new, grass-roots appreciation for our foodie heritage that goes far beyond tiresome arguments over who serves the best chicken rice.

Can these places fill the hole left by a generation of hawkers retiring? Of course not. Will the food court of 2020 be made up mostly of cronut stands? We’d certainly hope not. But if the hawker center as we know it today may be doomed, that pop-up umami burger stall you see today may just be the first iteration of what will ultimately come to replace it.

Heating Up
Anthony Bourdain was one of the first to spot the trend. Speaking at last year’s World Street Food Congress here, Mr. Kitchen Confidential predicted these young upstarts could be the salvation of hawker centers. “It’s going to be young hipsters who do not want to be lawyers,” he said. “They’re rejecting what their parents tell them [to do] and, instead, they decide to open a bunch of hawker stands serving delicious, possibly strange food.” He was backed by the former chairman of the National Environment Council, Simon Tay, who said the future belonged to ““exciting young guys who want to try out something new in our hawker centers”.

Bourdain went on to say that we could look forward to “retro, hipster hawker centers” run by “young, hip kids who want to (do things) the old-school way.” And this is a man who loves the hawker concept so much he plans to open a huge street food market in New York, with a “dream list of chefs, operators, street food and hawker legends from around the world”. He told New York’s Eater,
“I hope to soon be able to enjoy a really good chicken rice in NYC.”

Overcooked
Lack of interest in the trade isn’t just about better jobs in other industries. A shift toward healthier food options, a failure to think ahead and the troubles of balancing the books all play their part.

Costs are an especially sensitive issue: many first-generation hawkers enjoy heavily subsidised rent; second-gen’ers often sub-let for sky high prices (a practice which will come to an end in 2015); the latest class are neither subsidized nor can they sub-let; and the net result is a lack of real parity: three generations of hawkers can exist side by side, each paying vastly different rent. And despite all this, there’s a general expectation that hawkers will somehow maintain their rock-bottom prices—according to The Straits Times, fishball noodles and chicken rice only went up by $0.50 in three years—through thick and thin (despite our eagerness to pay upwards of $5 for a flat white).

Makansutra’s KF Seetoh (a good friend of Bourdain’s, by the way, and the guy behind World Street Food Congress which returns in early 2015; wsfcongress.com) has bemoaned the lack of entrepreneurship around many of even the most successful hawkers; who do a great trade but too rarely plan for the future or even look to expand in the present. And complacency has certainly crept in; we’ve taken the hawker culture for granted and perhaps standards have slipped (how else to explain Gordon Ramsay winning one of the three rounds of last year’s Singtel Hawker Heroes?).

Says Daniel Goh, whose Good Beer Company at Chinatown Complex was one of the first of this new wave, “Hawkers don’t get enough respect for what they do. While famous hawkers are lauded, by and large people look down on them as lowly educated and servile.”

As Goh notes in some insightful essays at his blog The Beer Hawker (thebeerhawker.tumblr.com), “the biggest problem facing our hawker heritage is the fact that there is little or no renewal in the system.” 2013 saw the death of hawker legends like Ng Ba Eng of Eng’s Noodle House and Andrew Lim of Yue Lai Xiang Chng Tng at Bedok Corner and, on a larger scale, longstanding hawker centers are closing at a depressing rate, with both Golden Bridge and Commonwealth Avenue shutting up shop as recently as 2011.

Get With The Program
So what’s being done? Clearly a few smart, hip operators alone can’t reverse the decline. But by helping to recast people’s preconceptions and make the hawker trade a viable career choice, they may just spark a much needed revitalisation of the street food sector.

The Government is throwing its weight behind a new Hawker Master Trainer Pilot Program (a joint effort of the Singapore Workforce Development Agency and the National Environment Agency (NEA)), which launched last month and sees 50 aspiring “hawkerpreneurs” undergo on-the-job training with four veteran hawkers, for five to six months. “This collaboration [...] will contribute to preserving our unique hawker heritage and ensuring that traditional hawker fare will continue to thrive, even as times change and food tastes evolve in Singapore,” says Richard Tan, director of NEA’s Hawker Centres Division.

Addressing the growing demand to eat clean, the Health Promotion Board (HPB) also jumped in to salvage the hawker situation with the launch of the Healthier Hawker Programme (www.hpb.gov.sg) in 2011, encouraging hawkers to offer more wholesome food choices.

There are also plans to build an additional 10 new hawker centers by 2017 and in doing so increase the number of available stalls, especially in areas that are currently underserved. As well as hopefully driving down rents, there’s been some interesting experimentation with how these places are run; though the first hawker center run by a not-for-profit social enterprise, Kampung @ Simpang Bedok, closed in October 2013 after barely a year of operation. The group of friends behind it, with backgrounds in finance and construction, admitted they lacked the experience to make it work. And though other social enterprises and cooperatives recently bid for the soon-to-expire lease on the centers at Ghim Moh Road, Upper Changi Road, Aljunied Avenue 2 and West Coast Drive; Kiang Chou Tong, the president of Ghim Moh Market/Shop Merchants’ Association, told Today last month that their members, “hope NEA will continue to manage the hawker centers because they are a neutral party and will look after the hawkers’ interest. There has been no precedence with other groups, so they’re worried if this will succeed.”

The Dark Side
It’s not all peachy keen for every youngster that pursues the hawker dream. Recently, 28-year-old Tan Jun Yuan and his now defunct bak kut teh stall in a Toa Payoh coffee shop have been all over the news. The young hawker left his job as a product manager and started the food stall with high hopes, only to decide to shut it down in February due to foreign/local manpower issues (amongst other reasons). When I-S got in touch with Tan for an interview for this story, he apparently had so much to say that he feared his full “statement” wouldn’t be properly represented enough to do the situation justice. Speaks volumes on how the fight to keep hawker traditions alive is an eternal struggle.

The Young And Restless
Yet it’s the emergence of these impassioned young operators diving head-first into a seemingly uncool trade that might hold the most promise. While there aren’t enough of them to immediately compensate for the slow death of the hawker tradition (Daniel Goh laments that we are “losing our hawkers far faster than we can replace them”), the new generation of hawkerpreneurs could be the first light at the end of the tunnel.

For these bright sparks, it’s as much about keeping costs down as it is about the heritage-saving mission. “I had a tight budget and the initial outlay for a coffeeshop stall is relatively low… There’s no need for furnishings, renovation, etc.” says Andrew Sim, owner of gourmet burger joint De Burg in Bukit Merah.

Sebastian Ho of Sebastian Mix Fusion Cuisine, who puts out Italian-Japanese creations from a small stall in Everton Park, feels the same way: “I chose to set up a hawker space because I wasn’t ready for a full-fledged restaurant and I felt that by starting small, things would be more steady in the long run. Also, with a hawker stall, I’m able to reach out to more people by serving good food at a very reasonable price so that they can have it every day.”

And whatever the reasons behind their decision, these folks are clearly bringing something new to the table to keep the city’s foodies interested. “We are reinventing and refining local hawker fare, rather than changing traditional recipes, with modern cooking techniques” says Gwern Khoo of Amoy Street’s A Noodle Story, a ramen stall offering noodle bowls with a local twist.

Changing perceptions may take time: “Generally customers are thrilled to see something new and fresh, but there are some who require more time to accept different food concepts in a hawker,” says Gary Lim of The Soup Bar. “Business can definitely be better; people just need to ‘know’ or ‘be educated’ that they can find freshly made food at a hawker and at hawker prices.”
But while it’s still early days, there’s enough buzz around this ground-up movement to suggest it might just be the tonic the trade needs if it’s to evolve rather than go extinct.

Essentials
A Noodle Story #01-39 Amoy Street Food Centre, 7 Maxwell Rd., 9027-6289, www.anoodlestory.com | De Burg #01-40 Stall 1, 119 Bukit Merah Lane 1,
www.facebook.com/deburgsingapore | Sebastian Mix Fusion Cuisine #01-01, 7 Everton Park, 8126-0646, www.xiaodidelivery.blogspot.sg/p/sebastian-fusion-cuisine.html

Find out where to go for your hipster hawker fix!