Las Vegas is making a fake Singaporean hawker food center inside a resort

Originally published at: Las Vegas is making a fake Singaporean hawker food center inside a resort | Boing Boing

2 Likes

A food court’s a food court. You can get amazing food in a Singaporean one, and you can also get crap food. Las Vegas has some pretty great restaurants. I bet there’ll be a couple of winners in this food court, at least.

11 Likes

Tbh it just looks like a different way of labeling a food court, the food might be at the very least interesting but i can’t pass judgement until more is known. If anyone in Vegas wants good Asian food please check out their Chinatown. Though there is actually a fair number of excellent Asian cuisine scattered throughout the city away from the strip. For Japanese i loved eating at Ichiza (tiny restaurant that is hyper authentic and generally has more expat Japanese folk there than not) and for Thai my faves were Ping Pang Pong and also Pin Kaow, hope they’re still going strong. looks like they are :smiley:

8 Likes

A veritable cornucopia of culinary delights awaits you…

4 Likes

It certainly won’t be at Singaporean prices.

11 Likes

You mean the place with the fake New York and the fake Paris and the fake Egyptian pyramid and the fake Venice? That’s a shock.

14 Likes

Is there anything that a Vegas casino can’t crapify?

7 Likes

It will probably be an accurate reproduction of a modern Singapore hawker centre.

Thanks to the gentrification of Singapore, more hawker centres are getting a face lift to reach out to younger Singaporeans. These new, modern hawker centres[10] are not only decked up in stylish furnishings, they also sell food commonly found in restaurants and cafes like ramen and poke bowls.

2 Likes

That seems unfortunate. I guess making things newer, cleaner, safer and more modern isn’t inherently bad but i do have a love for places with a history, and i’m sure these updated places might price out merchants that have less means to work with

3 Likes

Well Vegas casinos have been making a strong effort the last few years to market to wealthy folks from asian countries who are looking to launde… oops, I meant gamble money in the us.

5 Likes

Yeah the last few major casinos that they built were exclusively made to cater to super wealthy folks from Asian countries, nothing inherently wrong with it. The casinos are really pretty and i love walking through them :slight_smile:

5 Likes

14 Likes

The hawker centers were created by the government to make things ‘newer, cleaner, safer and more modern’ (which sounds like it could be the official motto of Singapore govt., well done) and to get food hawkers off of the streets, which were seen as dirty and disorderly by the government. There was always great food to be had on the streets, and the centers were lamented by some for the same reasons you are stating, and not everyone (e.g., most) could afford the costs of building a kitchen and rent. I still have nostalgia for the days when Raffles was a run-down relic, and long afternoons sipping gin drinks at the Long Bar was an affordable luxury. But life in Singapore has been a forced march into ‘progress’ for quite a while now. Not all bad, but a strong bias toward sterile, as opposed to organic.

3 Likes

“That’s never been recreated in the US” except by thousands of food truck pods nationwide every single day for the past twenty years.

7 Likes

From William Gibson’s famous 1993 essay in Wired about Singapore, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” (which incidentally got Wired banned in Singapore for a number of years).

Singapore’s other primal passion is eating, and it really is fairly difficult to find any food in Singapore about which to complain. About the closest you could come would be the observation that it’s all very traditional fare of one kind or another, but that hardly seems fair. If there’s one thing you can live without in Singapore, it’s a Wolfgang Puck pizza. The food in Singapore, particularly the endless variety of street snacks in the hawker centers, is something to write home about. If you hit the right three stalls in a row, you might decide these places are a wonder of the modern world. And all of it quite safe to eat, thanks to the thorough, not to say nitpickingly Singaporean auspices of the local hygiene inspectors, and who could fault that? (Credit, please, where credit is due.)

4 Likes

Meh. I lived in S’pore for four years, and like Mark says, compare with the photos he took. Too fancy/schmancy and/or themed out is NOT the experience… Even if they get the food right!

1 Like

I’m quite sure there are cases of food being prepared in bad conditions but i can’t imagine it’d be any different from street vendors in Latin America. People in the neighborhood find out pretty quickly if a vendor is making people sick, their pride and reputation is on the line and often times that’s all they got because that’s what brings business in. Ask a local what their favorite stalls are and its difficult to be disappointed.

Really a shame that the government is making it harder for these folk to earn a living, it has the unfortunate effect of homogenizing what businesses succeed and you end up with a bunch of chain restaurants. Give me a hole in the wall place, those are the best.

2 Likes

Despite craft beer being overpriced there, found this spot a few years back in one of the hawker centres:

Pepper crab at another place was outstanding, and I regret not having time to go back and try this one - wonder if the Vegas spot will have one like this? :thinking::

4 Likes

But will it sell fish-head curry?

Does the Vegas version come with explosive diarrhea like the original?