When I first moved into this neighbourhood years ago, there were at least 4 Muslim stalls in the hawker centre. I distinctly remember this, because there was one Chinese New Year (when all the Chinese stalls were closed) when I had 4 stalls to choose from while trying to get some food.

Then about 4 or 5 years ago, I noticed that there were only 2 stalls left. One of the former Muslim stalls had been taken over by a Chinese owner selling "western food"; the other was left vacant. Just a week before I finished this article, I looked again, and there was only 1 stall left.

What happened was that a coffeeshop just one block away had remade itself into a kind of Muslim coffeeshop. I hadn't much noticed what it was before, except that it was mostly deserted, but overnight, it became noticeably popular with Muslim families.

However, all the 4 or 5 subsidiary stalls in the coffeeshop had become Muslim food stalls.

It was also the time when Muslim dining separatism was reaching its peak before the government started to warn of the dangers of the trend.

What is this thing called 'dining separatism'? It was a trend among many Muslims towards not wanting to share a table or common dining space with non-Muslims eating non-halal food. Perhaps there was a sense that it would be an unacceptable compromise of their religious adherence.

Given such a desire, when the coffeeshop took the decision to sublet all its stalls to Muslim stallholders, thereby making it an exclusively halal-food place, it gained in attractiveness to the Muslims in the neighbourhood. The losers would have been the 4 stalls in the hawker centre, who had to share space with Chinese stalls, and who were soon reduced to 1.

And so it remained for a few years, with Muslims slowly abandoning the hawker centre for the coffeeshop 50 metres away. The Chinese continued to patronise the (Chinese) stalls in the hawker centre, and were rarely seen in the coffeeshop except late at night when they needed a beer.

Then a year ago, another change occurred. One evening, as I walked past the coffeeshop, I noticed that it was full of Chinese patrons, feasting on expensive dishes, such as steamed garoupa, chili crabs and herbal soup. The largest stall was now run by a Chinese concessionaire, selling "live seafood". There were still 2 Malay stalls and 1 Indian-Muslim stall, but their customers were hardly more than 20% of the people in the coffeeshop.

What had happened? I spoke to the assistant at the drinks stall, and according to her – I don't know how reliable her information is – the HDB had increased rents with the end of the recession. The coffeeshop owner tried to pass on the increase, but 2 Muslim subtenants just couldn't afford the higher rates. When their stalls became vacant, the best bid for both spaces came from a Chinese "seafood" entrepreneur, and that was that.

It's quite clear his turnover is many times that of the Muslim stalls. The typical family ordering from the "live seafood" stall might have a bill of $60 - $100, whereas the typical family ordering from the Muslim stall might only be paying $20 - $30.

This is surely due to the difference in average income levels of Chinese and Malay families in Singapore.

Thus, economic factors now have deprived the Muslims of their Muslim-only coffeeshop.

Here I have spoken as if there is a watertight divide between the Chinese ordering only from Chinese stalls and the Muslims (mostly Malays) ordering only from the Muslim stalls. It is not watertight, but the reality is that boundary-crossing is not common.

It is difficult to expand the market for Muslim food to include the Chinese population, and so with a finite number of Muslims in the neighbourhood, there probably wasn't enough patronage to support an entire coffeeshop of Muslim stalls. 
 

Related to the same problem of limited market, in the downtown foodcourts which typically feature 12 – 20 stalls, usually only one of them sells Muslim food. Almost always, it advertises itself as nasi padang.

To test my gutfeel that there isn't a lot of cross-over, that is, that the Chinese don't often buy from the Muslim stalls, I observed a number of nasi padang stalls downtown in the past few weeks.

True enough, I saw that Malays and Indians were their main patrons, and of the Chinese who did order from them, they seemed to me to be generally older than the average Chinese customer in the foodcourt. The younger generation seems to be giving nasi padang a miss.

Increasingly, they go for Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean, and they've long acquired a taste for Western cuisines.

The separatism in food habits is happening equally on the non-Muslim side, though it is driven by food fashion rather than by religion.

As the range of Chinese and foreign food options have increased over the years, the range of Malay and Indian options decreased. (Here, by "Indian", I'm referring to the working-class South Indian food that came with the early immigrants, not the North Indian cuisine that has increasing chic).

No Indian food stall can make it anymore in an airconditioned foodcourt. They won't get enough turnover to justify the rent when upwardly mobile Chinese Singaporeans turn their noses up on roti prata, dosa and their shockingly red mee goreng.

As mentioned above, Malay food is now reduced to just nasi padang. Frankly, I'm not even sure if what is sold at "nasi padang" stalls is really nasi padang. Logic tells me that since it is the only Muslim stall in most foodcourts, it probably sells whatever dishes the Malays are comfortable with.

'Nasi padang' was originally a specific term meaning the style of cooking from Western Sumatra, and I think it still has this meaning in Malaysia. There, one sees other kinds of Muslim food such as nasi campur, nasi kandar and nasi dagang. If you search the web, you will find commentary by Malaysian food enthusiasts explaining the differences among these terms. But except perhaps in Geylang Serai, our Malay quarter, I don't think you'll encounter these specific types of food in Singapore. Here everything, I think, has been subsumed into 'nasi padang'.

Unlike Malaysia, 'nasi padang' doesn't even automatically connote halal food here, just as 'satay' isn't always Muslim. Singapore has pork satay.

One detail about nasi padang should alert us to this possibility:  Rendezvous Restaurant, a mid-market place in Raffles City, has a reputation stretching back generations as 'the' place for nasi padang, and it claims that its founder was the one who first introduced the cuisine to Singapore. That founder's name was Seah Soo Khoon – a Chinese.

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I believe the story of Malay-Muslim food in our local foodscape tells us something about the story of the Malay-Muslim community.

The small market and the inroads of Chinese entrepreneurs has led to erasure of other streams of Malay-Indonesian cooking in economy eating places, leaving a generic nasi padang that is the sole representative of Malay-Muslim food in our foodcourts. This mirrors the trend whereby smaller populations and the pressure of the Chinese majority have led to the erasure of finer ethnic identities among the Malay-Muslims. Today, they are seen as generic Malays where once they were Boyanese, Bugis, Sundanese, Kelantanese and so on.

Likewise, the inability to hold on to an exclusive geographic space as in my neighbourhood coffeeshop mirrors the way even the generic Malay community finds itself competing for attention with more and more migrants coming into Singapore – the Burmese, the Filipinos, the mainland Indians, and above all, the mainland Chinese. At the same time, to compete with more and more cultural influences - Australian, Italian, Japanese, Korean - coming from further beyond.

Those are my thoughts tonight - the Singapore narrative through food.

© Yawning Bread