“JUST look around,” said Malcolm Lee, a 27-year-old Singaporean chef, as he gestured toward the dozen or so street food stands surrounding our table. “I doubt that one of these hawkers is under the age of 40. When this generation is gone, their recipes will probably go with them. Their children want to be bankers or lawyers. Who wants to slog it out six days a week, morning through night, in a hot, dirty environment?”

Mr. Lee himself slogs it out all week — not behind a hawker stand, but at his restaurant, the Candlenut Kitchen, which specializes in Peranakan food, a labor-intensive traditional style of cooking that is generally considered Singapore’s true indigenous cuisine.

We were at the Singapore Food Trail at the Singapore Flyer, a huge Ferris wheel that’s a top tourist attraction. The Food Trail is a new spin on hawker centers, a Singaporean tradition in which cooks sell their signature dishes to admiring customers for low prices. Loving essays have been written about hawker centers; food enthusiasts come from around the world to sample them.

But the Food Trail is something different: a hawker food court, which, like mall food courts, is organized by a large corporation. Promoted as a tourist-friendly way to explore world-class street food, these hawker food courts are a growing phenomenon in the city. The question on our minds was: would the food live up to expectations?