Newton, Old Airport Road & Tekka: 3 More Hawker Centres Worth a Detour

Maxwell, Lau Pa Sat and Chinatown Complex get most of the attention when Singapore's hawker centres come up, and fairly so. Three others are worth a detour for very different reasons. One was the filming location for a scene in a global blockbuster, and has gotten pricier and busier with tourists ever since. One is the centre locals quietly rate above most of the famous names, without the queues to match. And one is not really a hawker centre in the usual sense at all, it is a working wet market with a hawker centre built into it, in the middle of Little India.

This guide covers Newton Food Centre, Old Airport Road Food Centre and Tekka Centre: what each is actually known for, what they cost compared to the big names, and how to fit more than one into a single day if you want to.

None of these three appear on quite as many "top ten Singapore hawker centres" lists as Maxwell or Lau Pa Sat, and that is exactly the point. They reward visitors who have already ticked off the obvious names, or who came to Singapore specifically chasing one of these three for its own story: a film scene, a run of Michelin stalls, or a working market that has barely changed its character in a century.

Newton Food Centre: The Crazy Rich Asians Hawker Centre

Newton Food Centre earned its fame from a single scene in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), where Nick, Rachel, Colin and Araminta work through a hawker spread of Hokkien mee, satay and sambal stingray, and the attention has made it both more crowded and more expensive than most Singapore hawker centres since. The production reportedly used around a thousand extras and worked through thousands of satay sticks to shoot the sequence, according to trade coverage of the film's Asia-Pacific locations, and Newton Circus has been a stop on the Singapore food-tourism trail ever since the film's release.

Author Kevin Kwan, whose novel the film was based on, has named Newton among his own favourite hawker centres, which only added to its profile. The food itself leans into seafood, satay and Chinese-style barbecue: chilli or butter crab, grilled stingray in sambal, char kway teow, and skewered satay grilled to order over charcoal are the centre's calling cards. That said, the hawker centre that made it into Crazy Rich Asians has picked up a genuine tourist-trap reputation among reviewers in the years since, with recurring complaints about inflated prices at some stalls, particularly for seafood sold by weight, where a bill can run noticeably higher than the same dish would cost at Chinatown Complex or Maxwell. It is not a universal complaint, plenty of visitors have good experiences, but it is common enough to be worth knowing before you order.

Newton also turns up on lists of hawker centres where visiting celebrities have eaten in Singapore, alongside a handful of others around the city. Its central location near Newton MRT and its late hours, many stalls run past midnight, make it a natural stop for a post-dinner or late-night crowd rather than strictly a lunch destination.

The centre's roots go back further than the film. Newton Food Centre opened in 1971, according to Singapore's National Heritage Board, as one of the country's first hawker centres built specifically without an attached wet market, meant to move 56 street hawkers off Bukit Timah Road into a proper venue. It grew in stages: a 1977 expansion brought in dozens more hawkers displaced from Orchard Road, Marine Parade, Joo Chiat and East Coast, and in 1978 a further 32 push-cart hawkers moved over from the old open-air Glutton's Square on Orchard Road when that site was redeveloped. That history of absorbing hawkers from several closed sites is part of why Newton's stall mix is broader than a typical neighbourhood hawker centre, seafood and satay from one wave of arrivals, other Chinese and Malay dishes from another.

Old Airport Road Food Centre: The One Locals Actually Rave About

Old Airport Road Food Centre, tucked into a residential estate near Dakota MRT, carries several Michelin Bib Gourmand stalls and a reputation among Singaporeans as one of the country's best hawker centres, with far less tourist traffic than its fame among locals might suggest. It does not have a single movie scene or celebrity visit driving its reputation the way Newton does; it built its name the slower way, through decades of regulars and, more recently, a run of Michelin recognitions for individual stalls.

Several stalls here currently hold, or have held, a Michelin Bib Gourmand: Nam Sing Hokkien Fried Mee, which has served a single dish, prawn-topped Hokkien fried mee, since 1960; To-Ricos Kway Chap, known for its herbal broth and braised pork offal over broad rice noodle sheets; and Lao Fu Zi Fried Kway Teow, one of the centre's recognised char kway teow stalls, the smoky wok-fried noodle dish that shows up across the island's best hawker centres. The Michelin Guide's own Bib Gourmand list for Singapore is worth checking before a visit, since which stalls hold the 2026 Bib Gourmand selection can shift from one year's guide to the next.

Because it sits inside a residential neighbourhood rather than a tourist district, Old Airport Road does not have the queue-management infrastructure or tour-group traffic that Chinatown Complex or Lau Pa Sat see. That is part of its appeal: it feels closer to how Singaporeans actually eat day to day, at the cost of being a little less convenient to reach if you are staying in the city centre.

The food centre dates back to the early 1970s, built to house hawkers who had been trading around the old Kallang Airport estate before it was redeveloped for housing, and it sits beside Dakota Crescent, one of Singapore's oldest public housing estates, built by the pre-independence Singapore Improvement Trust in 1958. Locals sometimes treat a visit to Old Airport Road as a two-part trip: a meal at the food centre, then a short walk through Dakota Crescent's distinctive dove-shaped playground and low-rise blocks, a piece of mid-century Singapore that has mostly disappeared elsewhere.

Tekka Centre: Little India's Wet Market and Hawker Hybrid

Tekka Centre on Buffalo Road is a working wet market and hawker centre combined, open daily from around 6:30am to 9pm in the heart of Little India, known for Indian, Malay and Muslim food: biryani, murtabak, roti prata, thosai and fish head curry among the regulars' orders. The ground floor splits roughly in two: a wet market on one side, where fishmongers and butchers have operated since before dawn selling everything from live seafood to cuts you will not find in a supermarket, and a hawker food section on the other, with the breakfast crowd arriving before 7am most days. Above the market level, Tekka also houses textile and spice traders, part of why it functions as much as a piece of Little India's daily life as a place to eat.

Roti prata, flaky flatbread griddle-fried and served with curry for dipping, is close to the default breakfast order here. Biryani and fish head curry both turn up at multiple stalls, with real quality differences between them that regulars will happily debate. For visitors looking specifically for halal-certified hawker food in Singapore, Tekka is one of the more reliable single stops, since a large share of its stalls serve Malay and Muslim Indian cuisine that is halal by default, though it is still worth checking certification signage at each individual stall rather than assuming.

Because it doubles as a wet market, Tekka is also one of the more interesting centres to simply walk through even if you are not hungry yet, live seafood tanks, mounds of fresh spices and stacks of banana leaves sold for cooking make it feel closer to a working piece of the neighbourhood than a curated food destination.

Tekka's name has more history behind it than most hawker centres get. The original market, then called Kandang Kerbau Market after the district's old cattle and meat trade, was built in 1915 at a different site nearby, according to the National Heritage Board, and moved to its current Buffalo Road location in 1982. As part of a national push to standardise place names into Mandarin pinyin, it was renamed Zhujiao Centre in 1981, a name that never quite stuck with the public, and the market officially reverted to Tekka Centre in November 2000 after feedback that the older name better reflected the area's identity.

What's on the Plate: Signature Dishes at Each Centre

Each of the three centres has a dish or two that best explains why people go out of their way to visit: grilled stingray and satay at Newton, Michelin-recognised char kway teow and Hokkien mee at Old Airport Road, and roti prata with curry at Tekka. None of these are exclusive to one centre, char kway teow and satay both turn up island-wide, but the combination of setting and specific stall reputation is what makes each worth the trip.

Ordering a single signature dish rather than trying to sample everything is usually the smarter approach at any one of these, especially if you are also planning to hit Chinatown Complex or another centre the same day and want to arrive hungry rather than full.

How the Three Compare

Newton is the priciest and most tourist-facing of the three, Old Airport Road is the one locals point to first, and Tekka is the only one built around a working wet market and a specific ethnic food identity rather than a general hawker mix. None of that makes one objectively better than another, they serve different purposes, but knowing the differences upfront helps decide which one fits your trip.

Which One Should You Visit First?

If you only have time for one, choose based on what you are actually optimising for: Old Airport Road for the best food-per-dollar and the most authentic experience, Tekka for halal options and a working-market atmosphere, and Newton only if the film connection or a late-night seafood craving matters more to you than value. First-timers who have already covered Chinatown Complex and want a genuinely different flavour of hawker centre, rather than a second version of the same experience, tend to get the most out of Old Airport Road or Tekka.

If budget and food quality matter more than novelty, Old Airport Road wins on both counts most of the time. If you are building a broader Singapore hawker itinerary from scratch, a first-timer's guide to hawker food and a look at Singapore's best-known hawker centres overall are worth reading alongside this one, since Newton, Old Airport Road and Tekka are deliberately the second tier of recommendations, not the first stops most guides send you to.

Travelling with kids changes the calculus a little too. Old Airport Road's residential setting and lower prices make it forgiving for a family meal where not every dish gets finished, while Newton's higher seafood prices and later-evening energy suit an adults-only dinner better. Tekka's wet market side is not to every child's taste, live seafood and whole fish on ice can be a lot for younger visitors, but the food side, especially the milder thosai and prata options, tends to go over well regardless of age.

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Getting Between Them

All three are reachable by MRT but on different lines, so visiting more than one in a day means factoring in transfer time: Newton and Tekka are both close to central hotels, while Old Airport Road via Dakota station on the Circle Line takes a bit more planning to combine with the other two. Newton sits on the Downtown Line and North South Line interchange; Tekka is served directly by Little India station, itself an interchange between the North East Line and Downtown Line; Dakota, for Old Airport Road, is on the Circle Line only, which usually means a transfer from most other lines.

A realistic day plan pairs Tekka with a Little India walk in the morning, then either Newton or Old Airport Road for a later meal, rather than trying to fit all three cooked-food stops into one day. Doing so is possible but risks the classic hawker-touring mistake: filling up too early and not having room left for the best dish at the last stop.

Each centre also sits close to something worth seeing beyond the food, which makes a single stop feel less like a detour and more like a full outing. Tekka is a five-minute walk from Little India's Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple and the shophouses along Serangoon Road, easy to combine with a broader Little India Heritage Trail walk. Old Airport Road is a short stroll from Dakota Crescent's conserved blocks and its heritage playground, worth twenty minutes even for visitors who are not usually drawn to housing estates. Newton sits close to the Botanic Gardens and Orchard Road, useful if a hawker stop is bridging a shopping afternoon and a dinner reservation elsewhere.

What These Three Cost Compared to Maxwell or Chinatown Complex

Old Airport Road and Tekka both sit in the normal Singapore hawker price range, roughly the same as Maxwell or Chinatown Complex for most dishes, while Newton runs noticeably higher, especially for seafood sold by weight, where prices are not always posted clearly and a bill can come as a surprise. A plate of noodles or rice at Old Airport Road or Tekka generally costs about what the same dish costs at Chinatown Complex, around $4 to $6 for most hawker mains, check the current stall for an exact price. Newton is the outlier: reviewers have reported paying considerably more for a mixed rice or noodle plate there than the same order would cost elsewhere, and seafood specifically, chilli crab, butter crab, grilled stingray, is priced by weight in a way that first-time visitors sometimes find hard to estimate before the bill arrives.

The practical takeaway is simple: ask the price before ordering anything priced by weight at Newton, and treat the other two centres like any other hawker centre in terms of what to expect to pay. A useful habit at any unfamiliar stall, not just at Newton, is to check whether a price is listed per plate, per portion size, or per weight before the food is cooked, since that is the point where a surprising bill can still be avoided.

Practical Tips for Visiting Multiple Hawker Centres in One Day

Pace yourself by ordering half portions or sharing dishes across stalls rather than a full plate at every stop, carry cash even where card payment exists, and expect to clear your own tray, tray return has been a legal requirement at Singapore hawker centres since 2021. If you are pairing Tekka with a Little India walk, go early: the wet market side is busiest, and most photogenic, before 9am, and stalls selling breakfast items like roti prata sell out of their best-selling versions earlier than you might expect.

For Newton specifically, agree on a rough budget before ordering seafood, and do not be shy about asking a stall's price per hundred grams if it is not posted. None of these three centres require advance booking or reservations, hawker culture in Singapore does not really work that way, but arriving outside the 12 to 1:30pm weekday lunch peak makes a real difference at all three. A quick read of general hawker centre etiquette covers the chope and tray-return rules that apply everywhere in this guide, not just at these three centres specifically.

Weather is worth planning around too. All three are open-air or semi-open-air hawker centres rather than fully air-conditioned food courts, so a sudden tropical downpour, common in Singapore even outside the official monsoon months, can mean a wait under cover before you can walk back to the MRT. Tekka has the most indoor-feeling layout of the three since it shares a roof with the wet market and shophouses, while Newton's open circus-style seating is the most exposed. None of that should put anyone off visiting, it is just worth keeping a light rain jacket or umbrella in the bag during a hawker-hopping day.