Restaurants are temporary tenants of permanent places, and ours has cooked in the same quarter of Singapore under two addresses, Amoy Street from 1999, Pickering Street since, inside the shophouse rows around China Square Central. The neighbourhood was old before any of it, and the buildings we serve ramen in were built for a port city's first generation of arrivals. This is the story of the streets, because a menu tastes better with an address attached.
The street that was the shore
Start with the fact that rearranges everything: Telok Ayer Street, one block south of us, was the waterline. The name is Malay, telok ayer, water bay, and through the first half of the 1800s the sea stopped where the street now runs. Every immigrant who arrived by sea from southern China and India landed there, stepped off the boat onto the beach, and walked into the town. The shophouse rows that followed, the narrow deep-fronted shops of the Chinese quarter, grew along that first street of arrival, and the lanes behind them, Amoy Street among them, took their names from the places the arrivals had left, Amoy for the port of Xiamen, Nankin Row for Nanjing, a map of homesickness laid out in street signs.
Three faiths on one street
The landing street kept the record of who arrived. Thian Hock Keng, the Hokkien temple, stands on Telok Ayer as the oldest of its kind in Singapore, built in the early 1840s and dedicated to Mazu, the goddess of the sea, and its first worshippers were immigrants giving thanks for the crossing, the temple was the thank-you the voyage ended with. Up the same street stand the Al-Abrar Mosque, raised by the Indian Muslim traders of the quarter, and the Nagore Dargah, the shrine that carries the same community's memory of a saint from Tamil shores. Three faiths, one short street, all of them national monuments now, all of them built within a few decades of each other by people who had just stepped off the water. Walk it before lunch and you have walked the neighbourhood's first fifty years.
The sea moves away
From the late 1800s the reclamation began, landfill pushed the shoreline street by street south, and the bay the streets were named for became land, then roads, then the offices of Shenton Way, the water that once lapped Telok Ayer now a fifteen-minute walk and a century away. The quarter the temple guarded turned from port to town to the edge of a financial district, and the shophouses, built dense and deep for a trading street, found themselves small and low amid towers, which is the tension the neighbourhood still wears, shrine scale against bank scale, shophouse against skyscraper.
The rows come back
The twentieth century was hard on the rows, and the rescue, when it came, was conservation. Far East Square restored its block of Amoy Street shophouses into the development our first Singapore kitchen opened into in 1999, and China Square Central, with its Nankin Row frontage, brought the old rows back as the dining and heritage heart of the quarter. The shophouse we cook in on Pickering Street is one of that rescued stock, three metres of frontage and a century of stories, the kind of building that could never be built again and no longer needs to be, only kept. Pickering Street itself carries the name of William Pickering, the colonial official appointed in 1877 as the first Protector of Chinese, an office that tried, with mixed success, to stand between the immigrant community and the exploitation that met it.
The eating street it became
A street of arrivals was always going to be a street of food, and the modern quarter keeps the habit, Maxwell Food Centre a few minutes south, the Amoy Street and Telok Ayer rows now among the city's densest lunch territories, Club Street and Ann Siang Hill carrying the evenings, and the CBD crowd arriving every noon in the same numbers the port once sent. We have held a table in this arrangement since the Far East Square days, pork bone soup in a shophouse built for a trading street, one of the oldest dining addresses in one of the oldest quarters of a young city. The menu is Japanese and the story is Singaporean, and the street signs around us, Amoy, Nankin, Telok Ayer, are the reason both sentences are true.