Chinatown is where Singapore's working-class Hokkien community built the city in the nineteenth century, and the shophouses they left are among the most intact blocks in Southeast Asia. The craft bars and boutique hotels arrived in the last decade and have not entirely displaced what was here. The two versions of the neighbourhood coexist on the same street: a dried-goods wholesaler that has been operating since 1972, a cocktail bar that opened three months ago.
Maxwell Food Centre is the centre of gravity for anyone who takes the food seriously. It is one of the oldest hawker complexes in the city, with around a hundred stalls, and the concentration of genuinely good cooking per square metre is as high as anywhere in Singapore. The queue for Tian Tian chicken rice is the famous one. It is worth it. There are twenty other stalls that do not have a queue and are equally worth it.
The Tanjong Pagar end, south toward the waterfront, has become the bar and restaurant strip for the financial district crowd after dark. It is louder and more expensive than the Chinatown end, and a different kind of useful, depending on what the evening calls for.
Anyone arriving in Singapore for the first time who wants to understand what the city is made of. People who want to walk from history into a hawker stall into a cocktail bar without getting in a cab. Food-focused travellers who want to eat seriously without spending money on restaurants. People staying a few nights who need a base that is central without being Orchard Road.
Not the right place for families who need hotel pools and room service. Not the right base if nightlife density is the priority. Chinatown quiets down after dinner in a way the Marina Bay and Clarke Quay areas do not.
Maxwell Food Centre on a weekday lunchtime, before the office crowd arrives. Tian Tian chicken rice is the famous queue but the char kway teow two stalls along is the one the regulars eat. The Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road, the oldest Hindu temple in Singapore, sitting in the middle of a Chinese neighbourhood, which tells you something about how the city was built. Keong Saik Road in the evening for the bar stretch that is still manageable in a way Clarke Quay is not. The shophouse blocks on Teck Chye Terrace and Ann Siang Hill for architecture that most visitors walk past on the way to something else.