Which Hawker Centre Was Featured in Crazy Rich Asians?
The scene where Nick Young marches Colin, Araminta and a wary Rachel Chu through plate after plate of street food was not shot on a studio set. It was filmed at a real, working hawker centre that is still open for lunch today.
Fans who land in Singapore after watching Crazy Rich Asians tend to ask the same question within their first day: where was that hawker food scene actually filmed? The answer is specific, verifiable, and still fully operational, which means you can walk the same stalls the cast walked rather than settling for a location that only looks similar.
Which hawker centre is in Crazy Rich Asians?
The eating-spree scene with Nick, Rachel, Colin and Araminta was filmed at Newton Food Centre, also known as Newton Circus, an open-air hawker centre near Newton MRT station. It is one of Singapore's oldest hawker sites, and according to reporting on the film's Singapore and Malaysia filming locations, the production took over the centre for the scene rather than building a set. Newton sits in a different part of town from the more commonly photographed hawker centres, tucked just off Scotts Road on the northern edge of the Orchard Road shopping belt, which made it a convenient, atmospheric backdrop for a night shoot.
What do they actually eat in the scene?
The group works through Hokkien mee, satay, and sambal stingray, three dishes that between them cover Singapore's Chinese, Malay and Peranakan hawker traditions in one sitting. Hokkien mee at Newton is typically a dark, savoury noodle dish fried with prawns and pork, sambal stingray is a grilled fish slathered in chilli paste and served on a banana leaf, and satay is skewered grilled meat with peanut sauce, a Newton specialty for decades. Behind the scenes, the shoot reportedly used around a thousand extras and burned through thousands of satay sticks to fill the frame with the kind of crowded, smoky energy a real hawker centre has on any given evening, per Time Out's account of the shoot.
Is Newton Food Centre really author Kevin Kwan's favourite?
Newton Food Centre is reportedly the personal favourite hawker centre of Kevin Kwan, who wrote the Crazy Rich Asians novel the film is based on, which is part of why the location carries more weight than a random backdrop choice. Kwan grew up partly in Singapore before his family moved abroad, and Newton's satay-heavy, open-air layout has been a fixture of the neighbourhood since long before the book existed. That personal connection is a detail worth knowing if you visit expecting a generic movie set rather than a place with its own history that simply happened to get cast in a hit film.
Recommended hawker and street-food tours
Singapore Small-Group Food Tour: Michelin Bibs & Iconic Hawker Dishes
Small-group, three hours, focused on Michelin Bib and iconic hawker dishes.
Singapore Street Food Night Walk – Small-Group 9 Tastings Experience
Small-group night walk with nine tastings over three hours.
Singapore UNESCO Hawker Heritage Tour – Street Food & Stories
Five hours of street food and the stories behind Singapore’s hawker stalls.
Singapore Guided Foodie Walk – 5 Tastings of Local Favorites
Three hours and five tastings of local favourites.
Should you actually eat at Newton Food Centre because of the movie?
Yes, with one honest caveat: Newton sits close enough to the tourist and expat belt around Orchard Road that some stalls price toward visitors, so it pays to compare a few menu boards before sitting down. The food itself is real and generally good, satay and seafood are the strong suits, and the open-air layout still looks close to what appears on screen. It is not a recreated set piece kept frozen in 2018, it is a functioning hawker centre that happened to host a film crew for one memorable night, and locals still eat there on ordinary Tuesdays. A practical habit that saves money at Newton and most other hawker centres: prices are usually posted per stick, per plate size or per weight rather than as a flat rate, so ask before an order is grilled rather than after, especially for stingray and other seafood sold by weight.
How does one film scene fit into Singapore's wider hawker culture?
Newton's cameo is a small, recent chapter in a much older story: Singapore's hawker culture as a whole was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2020, the country's first item on that list. That recognition, per UNESCO's own listing, covers the communal dining and multicultural culinary practices found across hawker centres islandwide, not just one site. A film crew choosing Newton for a single scene is a nice bit of pop-culture trivia, but the deeper reason hawker food photographs and tastes the way it does on screen is decades of an actual, living tradition that predates the movie by generations.
Newton Food Centre gets a full write-up, alongside two other hawker centres most first-time visitors never hear about, in our Newton, Old Airport Road and Tekka guide.
Where else should you go for the real hawker-culture experience?
Newton is one entry point, not the whole story. If the film sparked an interest in hawker culture generally rather than just this one location, our roundup of the best hawker centres covers the full spread, from Maxwell to Chinatown Complex to Lau Pa Sat's evening satay street. And Newton is not the only hawker centre with a celebrity moment attached to it either: Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga both visited a different one entirely, which says something about how deep hawker culture runs beyond any single film. If you only have time for one, our piece on Singapore's single most famous hawker centre lays out the case for the one that actually tops most lists, and our first-timer's overview of the best hawker food in Singapore is a useful next stop if you want dish-by-dish recommendations rather than centre-by-centre ones.
A guided food tour through the city's hawker districts is also a fast way to taste your way through several of these traditions in one outing rather than trying to plan a Newton pilgrimage on your own.
