All over Singapore, there are open-air pavilions with up to a hundred hawker stands. Illustration by Lorenzo Mattotti

When I think back on the conversations that took place after I told people that I was going to Singapore to eat, I’m reminded of the scene in “Little Red Riding Hood” when the title character first encounters the big bad wolf. I play the wolf:

“Singapore!” Little Red Riding Hood says, in an improbable New York accent. “But Singapore is supposed to be the least exotic place in Asia. There’s nothing to see there, unless you’re a connoisseur of skyscrapers or container ports or obsessive street-cleaning.”

“All the better for guilt-free eating, my dear. Your meals can’t be spoiled by remorse over not having conducted a thorough inspection of the second-most-important cathedral.”

“And isn’t Singapore the place where you can get fined for chewing gum?”

“But, my dear, you can’t chew gum while you’re eating anyway.”

From those conversations, I have concluded that the governmental ban on chewing gum, promulgated in 1992, remains the fact most strongly associated by Americans with Singapore. If Singapore tested a nuclear device tomorrow, the stories in American newspapers would mention the gum ban by the second paragraph. (Three years ago, the government relented a bit, in order to satisfy the requirements of a free-trade agreement: you can now buy nicotine gum by prescription.) There is a collateral awareness of the penalties that Singapore imposes for such malefactions as dropping a candy wrapper on the sidewalk. According to what’s listed on a widely sold souvenir T-shirt emblazoned “Singapore—A Fine City,” the acts that can bring you a serious fine include not only gum-chewing and littering and smoking and spitting but also carrying a durian on a public conveyance. A durian is an astonishingly odoriferous melon, much prized in Southeast Asia. Having smelled a durian, I must say that the prohibition against carrying one on a public conveyance (for which there is actually no specific fine) strikes me as a very solid piece of legislation. In American terms, it’s the equivalent of a law against carrying a cattle feedlot on a public conveyance.

I’d always thought that I wouldn’t go much further than that in supporting Singapore’s efforts to treat tidiness as the nearly Athenian ideal of government. Still, had I known that it was happening I would have backed the government’s scheme in the seventies to bring food venders, called hawkers, off the streets and into centers that have proper sanitation and refrigeration and running water—a scheme that was inspired by a desire for tidy streets, along with public-health considerations and the needs of traffic control and, presumably, the relentless modernization that seems to have a momentum of its own in Singapore. My support would have been based on enlightened self-interest, one of the cornerstones of democracy. For years, as I’ve walked past food stands in foreign lands, I’ve struggled to keep in mind that for an American visitor the operational translation for signs that ostensibly say something like “bhel puri” or “tacos de nopales” is “Delivery System for Unfamiliar Bugs That You Will Bitterly Regret Having Ingested.” The temptation to throw caution to the wind has been excruciating, since I may love street food above all other types of food. I have never figured out just why, although I’ve considered the possibility that, through some rare genetic oddity, my sense of taste is at full strength only when I’m standing up. (The fact that I particularly enjoy whatever I eat while standing in front of the refrigerator could be considered supporting evidence.) For a while, I thought about testing the standup hypothesis at some fancy Manhattan restaurant by springing to my feet halfway through the main course and trying to gauge whether that makes the roasted organic chicken with fricassée of spring vegetables and chanterelle polenta taste as good as those sausage sandwiches you get at Italian street fairs.

Gathering food venders into hawker centers, under the purview of public-health inspectors, meant that a Western visitor not only can have a safe shot at a variety of Singaporean delicacies but can do so in a setting so convenient that his energy is reserved for eating. All over Singapore, there are open-air pavilions where an island of tables and chairs is ringed by eighty or a hundred hawker stands—many of them selling only one item, like just satay or just fish-ball noodles. The government has established hawker centers in the central business district and hawker centers at the beach and hawker centers attached to the high-rise public-housing projects where the vast majority of Singaporeans live. In some of the fancy skyscrapers and department stores, private operators run air-conditioned, upmarket versions of hawker centers called food courts—a term presumably selected by someone who had never tasted what’s passed off as food at an American shopping-mall food court. In Singapore, even the establishments called coffee shops are essentially mini hawker centers. They might have started as places that served coffee and the pastries that the British Empire, for reasons of its own, inflicted on unsuspecting colonials throughout the world, but these days the proprietor is likely to operate the drink concession himself and rent out two or three stalls to specialists in, say, fish-head curry or Hainanese chicken rice. It has become possible to eat in Singapore for days at a time without ever entering a conventional restaurant. Since I have never been much taken with the concept of courses—my eating habits are more on the order of a bit of this, a bit of that, and, now that I think of it, a bit of something else—it almost seems as if the Singapore government of forty years ago had arranged its hawker policy with me in mind.

I don’t mean that I would check the flights to Heathrow if I heard that some entrepreneur in East Anglia had created a logistically flawless collection of food stands that allowed a diner to switch with ease from, say, bangers and mash to mushy peas to bubble and squeak. Convenience isn’t everything. Singapore, though, has always been noted for the quality and variety of its street food and, not coincidentally, for having a citizenry whose interest in eating borders on the obsessive. The population combines migrants from several parts of China with minorities of Indians and Malays and people who look Chinese but are known as Peranakans—a separate ethnic group, long prominent in the government and business life of Singapore, which traces its origins to early Chinese traders who absorbed some of the culture and the genes of the local Malays. The evidence indicates that every one of these groups arrived hungry.

Soon, Hainanese were cooking Peranakan specialties and Indians were frying noodles in the Chinese manner. Old dishes were transmogrified. New dishes were invented. Eventually, Singaporeans were lining up at hawker stands to eat any number of dishes available only in Singapore. Even in New York, a famously polyglot city that has, for example, three restaurants specializing in the food of the Uighur people of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a yearning for Singapore hawker food is surprisingly difficult to satisfy. (Singapore mei fun, a noodle dish often found in Chinatown restaurants, is, it almost goes without saying, unknown in Singapore.) You can find the Malaysian version of some Singaporean dishes—asam laksa, a terrific soup with an unlikely sour-fish taste, has some similarity to the Peranakan version of laksa served in hawker centers, for instance—and some dishes in Chinatown restaurants are similar to the dishes brought to Singapore from, say, Fujian or Hainan. There are, of course, some upmarket pan-Asian places in Manhattan that do versions of street food, including Singaporean hawker food. Apparently, though, a dish that is reminiscent of what’s found in Singapore serves only to make overseas Singaporeans long for the real article. Culinarily, they are among the most homesick people I have ever met.