Newton Food Centre: Hawker from Crazy Rich Asians

During my trip to Singapore in April, we visited several hawkers, which are essentially like outdoor food courts with lots of delicious food options. My favourite hawker that we visited was the Newton Food Centre, coincidentally where the movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians was also filmed.

Two of our friends moved to Singapore a year ago, and they were awesome and showed us around Singapore for a whole week, including bringing us to Newtown hawker, which is right next door the Newtown station via transit. They also helped us order everything so unfortunately I wont’ be able to include prices with everything we ordered like I usually do in my reviews because I don’t know or remember how much things cost. Just know that things were not expensive!

Newtown Food Centre: the space

So to be honest, Kelvin and I weren’t the biggest fan of eating at Singapore hawkers because they are usually all outdoors with no AC and it was so hot 🥵. Like we are literally sitting with sweat dripping down our backs, trying to eat a bowl of laksa noodles 💀. Most hawkers are only open for lunch time and the really good stalls will even run out of food after lunch and close up for the day.

We arrived at Newtown hawker for dinner, and it was actually a cooler night (it wasn’t cold… it just wasn’t as hot as usual). There was even a nice summer breeze every now and then, so that immensely helped with our heat tolerance.

The Newtown Food Centre is like a big open space with a square of food stalls. It took us a few minutes to find a table as it was quite busy, but there are workers there who will clean the table up for you. Mostly, it is self-served so you better help clean up after yourself or you will get fined.

Many of the stalls sell the same or similar items. For example, all the drink stores are basically the same since they are packaged drinks (like bottles of beer or soda), and prices are also the same so it almost doesn’t really matter where you get your beverages from. Food stalls however, do vary in quality although all of them look authentic and delicious. For example, there may be 3 stalls selling radish cake, but maybe 1 out of the 3 have a “better” one.

When you order at the stall, you can let them know your table number and they will actually deliver it to your table so you don’t need to wait by the stall and carry your own food back to your table – convenient and nice service for such a casual food court!

Food review

Here is everything we ordered and shared between 4 adults. Like I mentioned before, our friends mostly ordered everything so I will not be including prices in this review, but based on my photo above, you can get a sense of how cheap most things are (oyster omelettes $8/10/12, carrot cake $4/6, satay skewers $0.90 each, etc.).

Lemon tea and beers

I drank a lot of iced lemon tea when I was in Singapore. They were usually around $2.50 each and very refreshing.

The beers were the larger size and came with iced cups! I think they were around $10-12 each. The ones my friends liked had a tiger logo on the bottles.

Satay skewers (pork belly and beef) and chicken wings

Our friend really liked the chicken wings – they were juicy and had a nice bbq taste to them. I quite liked the satay skewers and I preferred the pork belly over the beef mostly because it is more fatty. The pork belly was also a little spicier, and they provide some spicy sauce as well for dipping.

“Carrot” cake

This is a giant plate of carrot/radish cake. It is fried with eggs and some spicy sauce. I quite liked this dish as I usually enjoy radish cake at dim sum and during new years. They mostly cut these up into little cubes, which is different from the larger pieces I am used to eating (but still good!).

Most stalls have a black version or a white version. The photo above is white. The black version would be cooked in a dark soy sauce.

Jumbo garlic shrimp

We ordered 2 of these giant garlic shrimps! These were more expensive than the other items at our table. I like that they slice it up in half like that, making it easier for you to eat the meat inside. You can also cook it in different ways, but we chose the garlic method.

Spicy squid

Here we have a grilled spicy squid dish. This was actually pretty spicy for me (I can’t eat too spicy), but it had a strangely addicting taste, so I found myself going back for more even though it was too spicy for me.

Water spinach

Lastly, our friend always makes sure there is at least one vegetable dish so here it is. This is some sort of garlic and soy sauce water spinach. You get a pretty large portion and it was actually really tasty and had a lot of flavour in it.

Final thoughts

Loewe’s rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

We had a super fun and delicious dinner at Newton Food Centre. Everything we ordered was yummy and reasonably priced, and came at a super fast speed. We really liked the vibe of Newtown hawker and there are so many choices of authentic Singapore, Chinese, Malaysian, food. This is not a 5 star because I think it depends on weather and if it was a really hot night, it wouldn’t have been as comfortable to eat as our experience.

Out of everything we tried, I recommend the carrot cake, satay skewers and actually the vegetable dish the most. Sadly, I do not have photos of which exact booth we ordered from, but hopefully if you are interested, you can find a booth that sells something similar.

Overall, I think this type of hawker experience is what most first-time-Singapore-visitors like me are craving for. We want to go to a place with cheap and authentic and delicious food, chill and drink with our friends. Of course, there are many hawkers around Singapore that can be the venue for that type of experience, but knowing that this was the hawker featured in Crazy Rich Asians makes it just a bit more fun, especially if you are a fan of the book or movie.

Sincerely, Loewe