Tekka Centre

Tekka Centre is Little India's beating heart — a wet market and hawker centre under one roof that is the most multicultural eating destination in a city that invented multicultural eating destinations. The ground floor is a wet market where Indian, Chinese, and Malay vendors sell produce, meat, fish, and spices in a sensory overload of colour and aroma that makes supermarkets feel like sensory deprivation chambers.

The hawker centre upstairs is where the eating happens, and the range is extraordinary. Indian stalls serve the best roti prata (flaky flatbread with curry dipping sauce) and biryani in the city. Chinese stalls do roast duck and noodles. Malay stalls offer nasi padang (rice with an array of pre-cooked curries and condiments) and mee goreng. A single trip to Tekka Centre can cover three cuisines, four cultures, and about S$10 total, which makes it the most efficient cultural education available in Singapore.

The building — a brutalist concrete structure from 1982 that replaced the original Tekka Market — is ugly in the way that functional buildings in tropical cities tend to be, but the interior life more than compensates. The wet market is best visited in the morning, when the vendors are stocking fresh fish and the flower sellers are assembling jasmine garlands for the Hindu temples nearby. The hawker centre operates through lunch and into early evening, and the late-morning window between market peak and lunch rush is the sweet spot for a leisurely breakfast of prata and teh tarik (pulled milk tea) at a plastic table while Little India wakes up around you.