Redhill Market: Singapore Travel Guide (4.2★)

A market built for the flats around it

Redhill Market serves the blocks that surround it. It sits at 79 Redhill Lane, among the HDB estates of Bukit Merah. It’s a wet market in the Singapore sense. That means concrete floors hosed down through the day, raw meat and whole fish laid out on counters, and heaps of greens and fruit priced for regular household shopping.

Cooked-food stalls share the site. That makes it as much a place to eat as a place to shop. Plenty of people know it, so don’t expect it to be a secret. What you get is a neighbourhood market doing ordinary daily business, without the tourist polish of the bigger food centres downtown.

Reaching Redhill Lane

Take the MRT to Redhill station (EW18) on the East-West Line. From there it’s a short walk on foot through the estate to Redhill Lane.

• From the city: Redhill is a few stops west of Outram Park on the same line, so you don’t need to change trains.
• From Tiong Bahru: Tiong Bahru station is the next stop east. The Tiong Bahru estate, with its Art Deco flats and its own well-known market, makes an easy pairing for a half-day.
• Time needed: about 30 minutes to walk the wet market, and an hour if you also eat.

When the stalls are actually running

The building is listed as open 24 hours, every day of the week. The trade inside keeps its own clock. Wet markets in Singapore do their real business early, when shoppers come for the freshest fish and meat. Many produce stalls start packing up by around midday.

Cooked-food stalls keep different hours. Some focus on breakfast and lunch, and others open for dinner. Each stall sets its own rest days, so a shuttered shutter doesn’t mean the whole market is closed. If you have a particular stall in mind, check it before you make the trip.

Eating and shopping the hawker way

Hawker centres run on a few unwritten rules, and Redhill follows them.

• Reserving a seat: a packet of tissues on a table means someone has “choped” (claimed) it. Leave it alone and find another seat.
• Ordering: order and pay at the stall, then carry your food to the table. Some stalls bring dishes out if you tell them your table number.
• Coffee shorthand: kopi comes with condensed milk, kopi-o is black with sugar, kopi-c uses evaporated milk, and adding peng gets it iced. Swap in teh for tea.
• Paying: have small notes and coins ready. Many stalls also show an SGQR or PayNow code for mobile payment, but don’t count on every stall having one.
• Trays: return your tray and crockery to the marked return points. Singapore enforces tray return at hawker centres, and diners who leave them behind can be fined.

At the wet market counters, point at what you want and give the weight or number of pieces. Stallholders will scale, cut and clean fish if you ask. Plastic bags are the default, so a foldable tote saves a bundle of them.

Wear shoes that can take a wet floor. The market floors get washed down as trading goes on, and sandals with no grip slip easily near the fish counters.