Visiting guests – Boat Quay, Clarke Quay

What to do on the weekends in Singapore? There’s always eating, right?

Picking our friends up from Changi airport on a Friday night we dropped the bags and went out to eat at Sin Hoi Sai Eating House on East Coast Road. For a pretty reasonable $60 for the four of us, we enjoyed excellent food from the extensive menu and large bottles of Tiger beer. To be honest, the beers were the majority of that, but Sin Hoi is just the slightest bit higher in price than other ‘street’ based restaurants for a couple of reasons; 1) it has the BEST reputation, having served food here for a couple of decades. Even though it’s on the wide pavement between Joo Chiat Road and Still Road there are enough tables around you and enough buzzing chat that it feels like you’re inside, all be it a warm restaurant. And 2) that large restaurant has a large floor plan to pay rent on. It’s not cheap to own a large establishment on East Coast Road and to have to pay the expensive business licenses that are at a premium. As the jet lag crept up on our guests we left the crew at Sin Hoi to continue until gone 4am.


On Saturday after the mandatory tour of Orchard Road, we stopped into Brewerkz on Clarke Quay for lunch, escaping the mid-afternoon heat of a muggy day. Brewerkz is one of Singapore’s fermenting brew-houses and makes its golden nectar on site. With the standard beer accompaniments of burgers, ribs and steaks, it’s very western and pretty stodgy stuff. The aussie rules footy on the television was a suitably masculine accompaniment to the red meat and a welcome diversion from the heat outside.


The brews are pretty varied though, definitely the reason to go there with a group of friends, and they’re strong. Starting at 4.9% golden ale, they move on to 7% head-thumpers! There are tasting menus available which allows you to sample whatever you’ve not tried before, before diving into a pint of new beer. Bottled beers are on the menu too and they have chosen interestingly boutique and global varieties; my favourites coming from the small UK breweries of Wychwood and Brakspears.


As one of our friends is a vet, we were obliged to visit the Night Safari, which you can see my blog entry about earlier. After meeting the animals we took a late-night taxi to Boat Quay, arriving about 00:30. We thought it would still be busy, seeing that it’s a long drag of restaurants and bars and Singapore likes to party on the weekend, but to our surprise a lot of the restaurants had already packed up their tables and chairs. We managed to find an indian/chinese crossover that was willing to serve us and we did get some very good curry and rice before they chivied us along and asked us to finish up and leave.

Shovel