You smell it before you see it
There is a moment, walking north out of Little India MRT, when Singapore stops behaving like Singapore.
The city that gave the world its most passive-aggressive escalator etiquette suddenly develops a pulse. The pavement narrows. A man is stringing jasmine into a garland at a speed that suggests he has done this eleven thousand times, because he has. Somewhere a shop is playing a 1978 Ilaiyaraaja song at a volume that is less a choice than a civic announcement. Two aunties are negotiating over okra with the intensity of an arms summit. And underneath all of it, working its way up your sinuses like a very polite home invasion, is the smell: curry leaves hitting hot oil, mustard seeds popping, asafoetida doing whatever unspeakable thing asafoetida does, and always, everywhere, inescapably, ghee.
This is Serangoon Road. It runs northeast out of the city centre and functionally it is a three-kilometre digestive tract.
It predates almost everything around it. One of the island's earliest roads, cut through swamp and lemongrass to reach the cattle sheds and brick kilns up north. The cattle came, the Tamil labourers who tended them came, and then, inevitably, the food came. It has never left. You can put a condo on Serangoon Road. You cannot make Serangoon Road behave.
You can put a condo on Serangoon Road. You cannot make Serangoon Road behave.
Here is a partial inventory of what you will pass on a Saturday evening.
Tekka Centre, which is what happens when a wet market and a food court have a child and refuse to discipline it. Upstairs, saris. Downstairs, a fish looking directly at you. In the middle, a man executing dosai on a griddle the size of a manhole cover with the wrist action of a blackjack dealer.
The garland shops, where marigolds are sold by weight and the arithmetic happens faster in the vendor's head than on your phone.
The goldsmiths, lit like operating theatres, in which some family is quietly deciding something enormous.
Mustafa Centre, a 24-hour retail organism where at 3am you can buy a rice cooker, a Rolex, forty kilos of basmati, a plane ticket, and a Toblerone the length of your forearm. The 24-hour operation is something else entirely. There is no closing time, no winding down, no moment when the lights go half off and someone starts stacking chairs. It simply runs, permanently, and at four in the morning it is busy.
And here is the part that surprises people. Go up to the pen counter and you will find limited edition Montblancs, the Writers Edition and Patron of the Arts pieces, sitting under glass in a shop where two aisles over a man is buying saffron and phone chargers. It is one of the strangest and most wonderful juxtapositions in retail anywhere.
A friend once asked me what Mustafa's annual revenues are. I told him to read the name backwards. A fat sum.
And at Deepavali the whole road gets strung with arches of light so aggressively festive they can probably be seen from orbit by mildly concerned aliens.
But you did not come for the marigolds. You came because you are hungry, and because somewhere on this road a man is about to put a banana leaf in front of you and walk away without explaining anything.
First, the thing everyone gets muddled about
North Indian, South Indian. What is the difference? Enormous. Roughly Sicily and Denmark, except the whole thing got flattened onto one takeaway menu around 1972 and we have all just been living with it since.
The most useful place to start is the grain.
North India is wheat country. Cold winters, big plains, and so: roti, naan, paratha, kulcha. Bread is the delivery vehicle, and the food is built for scooping. Gravies that cling, that are thick, that are frequently the colour of a sunset over an oil refinery. This is tandoor territory, a clay furnace hot enough to qualify as a workplace hazard, in which yoghurt-marinated meat gets fused to a metal skewer and cooked into something structurally perfect. Butter chicken. Rogan josh. Dal makhani that has been simmering since before you were born. The fats are dairy, butter and cream and ghee, and the spicing is warm and aromatic: cumin, coriander, garam masala, cardamom, cloves. It is food designed for a winter evening in Punjab, which is why eating a full North Indian lunch at noon in Singapore is a decision you continue to feel at 4pm.
South India is rice country. Monsoons, paddy, coconut palms, and a coastline that will not stop producing fish. So: rice, and rice's brilliant children, idli and dosai, made from rice and urad dal left to ferment overnight. Which is to say South India was doing sourdough while Europe was still working out the fork. The fat is coconut oil, or sesame oil, or ghee. And the flavour signature is not garam masala, it is the tadka: mustard seeds cracked in hot oil with curry leaves, dried chilli and asafoetida, poured over the dish at the last second like a small controlled explosion.
Then there is sourness, which I think is the real tell. North Indian food gets its tang from yoghurt and tomato. South Indian food gets it from tamarind, and from the frankly deranged genius of kokum and raw mango. A bright, puckering acidity that runs through sambar, through rasam, through every good fish curry on the Coromandel coast.
The heat is different in kind too, not just degree. Northern heat tends to be round and warming. Southern heat, especially Andhra, especially Chettinad, arrives with intent. It has a point of view. Chettinad masala, with its black pepper and star anise and stone flower, does not season the chicken so much as recruit it.
North India gives you a plate. South India gives you a banana leaf, on which a dozen small things are arranged in an order you will get wrong.
Two more things worth knowing.
Vegetarianism. South India, particularly the Tamil Brahmin and Udupi traditions, produced possibly the greatest vegetarian cooking on earth and managed it without once using the phrase plant-based. Half the restaurants on Serangoon Road are pure veg and you will not miss the meat for a second.
The plate. North India gives you a plate. South India gives you a banana leaf, on which a dozen small things are arranged in an order you will get wrong. Rice in the middle. Little heaps along the top. Sambar goes over the rice, not over the heaps. You mix with your right hand. And when you are done you fold the leaf towards you, because folding it away says you thought the food was rubbish, and the uncle will notice, and the uncle will remember.
Also, and I say this with love: South India is not one cuisine. Tamil is not Kerala is not Andhra is not Karnataka. Saying South Indian food is a bit like saying European food and meaning croissants. But we all say it, so let us keep moving before somebody in Kochi writes in.
Singapore's own invention
Here is the part I love most. Singapore did not just import South Indian food. It bred a new animal.
Fish head curry, a whole red snapper head, eyes and all, drowned in a tamarind-sour red gravy with okra and brinjal, does not exist in India. It was invented here, around 1949, by a Malayali immigrant named M.J. Gomez, who noticed that the Chinese prized fish heads and the Indians had the curry, and did the obvious arithmetic. He died in 1974, reportedly with no idea his idea had turned into a national dish.
It is the most Singaporean object I can think of. Kerala technique, Chinese ingredient preference, Tamil restaurant culture, served on a banana leaf, eaten by everybody. The cheek meat is the best part. The eye is for showing off. Fight your relatives for the collar.
The five
Ranked by a rigorous methodology of eating a great deal and then lying down.
1. Muthu's Curry, 138 Race Course Road
The fish head benchmark, and the reason visiting friends text you from a taxi at 11pm. Running since 1969, and while it has smartened up over the decades, air-con, tablecloths, an actual wine list, the gravy has not lost its nerve. Sour, hot, deeply fishy in the good way, thick enough to stand a spoon in.
Order it Assam style, get extra rice, accept that you will be there ninety minutes. Do not wear white. Nobody wears white to Muthu's twice.
2. Komala Vilas, 76 to 78 Serangoon Road
Since 1947, and the spiritual headquarters of South Indian vegetarian eating in this country. Downstairs: dosai, vadai, filter coffee pulled between two steel tumblers in an arc that ought to be an Olympic event. Upstairs: the unlimited banana leaf thali, where small steel bowls of sambar, rasam, kootu, poriyal and payasam land in front of you and get refilled by a man who has correctly assessed from across the room that you are not finished.
Fluorescent lighting. Formica. Utterly unpretentious. Sublime.
3. Podi & Poriyal, 486 Serangoon Road
The one that proves the tradition is still moving. Michelin-recognised Tamil cooking that treats podi, those spice powders you dump on idli with ghee, as the point rather than the afterthought, with a blend that changes weekly. Their mini-idli in a tangy coconut-cashew sauce is the dish to order if you want to see what a serious cook can do with the humblest thing in the repertoire.
If Komala Vilas is your grandmother, this is your cousin who went to art school and came back extremely good at something.
4. Samy's Curry, 25 Dempsey Road
Not on Serangoon Road at all. It is up at Dempsey in an old colonial mess hall with ceiling fans, open sides and a great deal of green outside, and that is precisely the charm. Going since the 1960s. Rice on a banana leaf, curries chosen by pointing, fried fish, masala chicken, and a fish head curry with its own devoted schism of believers who consider Muthu's an unfortunate detour.
Closed Tuesdays. Ask anyone who has turned up on a Tuesday. They will tell you about it at length.
5. Murugan Idli Shop, Syed Alwi Road
An outpost of the Madurai original and a pilgrimage site for people who hold opinions about idli. These are pillowy in a way that seems to violate some rule of physics, and they arrive with three or four chutneys and a sambar that does not mess about. Get the podi idli, drenched in gunpowder and ghee.
Cheap, fast, quietly ruthless.
Also worth your time: The Banana Leaf Apolo at 54 Race Course Road, for the full theatrical banana-leaf experience. Ananda Bhavan, which turned 100 in 2024 and is the oldest Indian vegetarian restaurant in the country. Anjappar, for Chettinad heat that will make you reassess several life choices. And any stall in Tekka Centre with a queue containing at least three people who are clearly on a lunch break and not enjoying themselves in a touristic way.
House rules
Right hand. The left hand holds the tumbler. This is not negotiable and everybody notices.
Rasam is the digestif, not the soup. It arrives late for a reason. Drink it.
Try not to ask for cutlery at the thali places. If you must, ask quietly, and nobody will make it weird. Much.
Filter coffee, not masala chai. Chai is a northern habit. Down here the coffee is chicory-laced, scalding, and poured between two vessels until it foams, and it is one of the great coffee preparations on earth that almost nobody outside the diaspora knows exists.
Fold the leaf towards you.
Go hungry, and go before 8pm on a Sunday unless you enjoy standing on a pavement watching other people eat.
Serangoon Road is not a food street. It is a food ecosystem, a couple of centuries of migration and homesickness and improvisation, still running, still loud, still slightly too warm, still handing you a leaf and expecting you to know what to do with it.
Go find out what to do with it.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.
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