Guides to Jalan Besar, Lavender and Farrer Park – the neighbourhood around our Hamilton Road flagship.
Walk out of our door at 29 Hamilton Road in any direction and you are walking past shophouses. Jalan Besar is, in the words of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, “largely lined with two-storey shophouses”, and most people walk past them…
Every few years someone calls Jalan Besar “the new Tiong Bahru”. We cook on Hamilton Road, a few minutes off Jalan Besar, so we have a stake in the answer and we will declare it up front. But the comparison…
Since October 2025 our kitchen has been at 29 Hamilton Road, a short street of shophouses off Jalan Besar that most people only find because they are looking for us. We moved here for the room — the full story…
Kick-off is 7.30pm. Last orders on this street start at 9pm. Nobody has written down how to eat around a match at Jalan Besar Stadium, so we did — from five minutes' walk away.
Ten minutes north of our kitchen, Farrer Park is where Singapore's most argued-about bak kut teh sits. We checked every address on the venue's own website on 21 August 2026 — and one famous entry did not survive.
The walking is easy — the whole neighbourhood is ten minutes end to end. The timing is what ruins crawls here. Four routes built around verified last-order times, from a kitchen on the street.
Every café on this list was checked on its own website on 21 August 2026 — which is why the list is shorter than most. Coffee, bread and tea between Tyrwhitt Road and Hamilton Road, from the restaurant at the end of the street.
Let us get the disappointing part out of the way first, because every other guide to this neighbourhood buries it. Jalan Besar is not a late-night drinking district. It has a reputation as one — it gets called a nightlife…
Lavender is a station people pass through. It sits on the East–West Line between Bugis and Kallang, both of which have louder reputations, and most of the city treats it as somewhere to change trains rather than somewhere to get…
We should start with the obvious disclosure: we are on this street. Habibi-san is at 29 Hamilton Road, which runs off Tyrwhitt Road, which is the spine of everything below. So yes, this is us writing about our own neighbourhood,…