Saw an interesting post in a local forum recently. It was talking about how the emergence of franchise food courts in Singapore is harming the authenticity of Singapore food. In recent years, we have seen many food courts sprouting all around our tiny island. The usual culprits are Food Republic, Kopitiam and Kou Fu. With all due respect, there are still decent stalls in these various food courts.

So how can the authenticity be compromised? There are many factors that I have considered:

1) Hiring of inexperienced workers
2) Poor quality control of the food sold
3) Costing measures which lead to the purchase of lower grade ingredients
4) Lack of proper franchise monitoring system
5) Overheads that are often too costly for stall owners

All of the above 5 factors can directly, or indirectly affect the end product, which is the food being served to customers. How many times have you went to a food court, bought a plate of chicken rice at $3.50, and end up feeling that you have overpaid for something which you did not really enjoyed? I believe many will feel the same way, but they will still go to these places again, mainly due to the sake of convenience.

If you ask me where can we find authentic hawker food, I would say the old school hawker centres. There are a few hawker centres which I like to visit for their wide array of local delights, namely (not an exhuastive list):

1) Bedok interchange hawker centre
2) Bedok block 85 hawker centre
3) Marine terrance hawker centre
4) Clementi central hawker centre

So how do we prevent authentic hawker food from extinction? I guess we can only hope that the franchise food courts stop their expansion (mission impossible), or hope that the government do not think of plans to convert the land the hawker centres are on onto something useless.

Long live hawker food. :)