Maxwell Food Centre

Maxwell Food Centre is a hawker centre at 1 Kadayanallur Street on the edge of Chinatown, managed by the National Environment Agency and home to more than 100 food stalls under one roof. The site began as Maxwell Market, which opened on 17 November 1928 on land that had been a Chinese burial ground. Hawker centres like this one are at the heart of Singapore's hawker culture, inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020, which describes them as community dining rooms where people from all backgrounds eat together.

Visitors walk the aisles, choose from stalls selling dishes such as Hainanese chicken rice, Teochew porridge, dim sum and fried fritters, and carry their food to the shared tables. Each stall keeps its own hours and rest days, so a few shutters may be down on any visit, and it is worth checking a particular stall before making a special trip. Maxwell MRT station on the Thomson-East Coast Line sits beside the centre, and Chinatown and Telok Ayer stations are also within walking distance. Sri Mariamman Temple and the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple are a few minutes' walk away along South Bridge Road, so the centre fits easily into a walk through Chinatown.