We’ve occasionally featured heritage food that has been made by the same person, or passed down from family member to family member, but these stories usually span decades. This time, we have a recipe that’s celebrating its centenary!


The Hock Lam Street Beef Noodles recently celebrated its 100th year, and while Hock Lam Street is no longer around, the recipe and store has been a family business for a century. Jerome was there to witness the celebrations:

I first came to know of Hock Lam Street’s famous beef noodles back in heady days of the late 1960s. I must have been about three then when I willingly accompanied my mother on her regular shopping forays to the area around, an area that was the 1960s equivalent of today’s Orchard Road, only because of the promise of a reward of what had become my favourite bowl of beef balls floating in the piping hot rich brown broth of beef soup. The memory that I have is not of the stall in particular, which to be frank I don’t have a recollection of, but of sitting at a table laid out on a five-foot way on the outside of a coffee shop at the corner of North Bridge Road and Hock Lam Street, eargerly awaiting my reward which my mother would have placed an order for and the taste of the broth and bouncy beef balls which I somehow could never have enough of.

At 100 year old, this recipe and family business is more than half the age of modern Singapore, and an testament to the enduring quality of some of our local businesses. Read the full story here.