Hawkers upmarket themselves to adapt to changing demands

Singapore, 15 May - Amid increasing rents, low prices, long hours and strawberry generation workers who don't want to take a 12 hour a day job paying $1200 a month when they can go to university and get a 8 hour a day job with the civil service paying $4000 a month to surf Facebook and write blogs, hawkers are reinventing themselves as the face, and the cuisine of Singapore changes and morphs together with the cosmopolitan demographic make-up of the city.

Latest ideas by hawkers are to give their food French names and charge higher prices to fit the local, connoisseur market of increasingly demanding and educated Singaporeans who want to know what is in their food. Chicken rice stall seller, Kway Peng, recently paid $10,000 to a consultant to rebrand his stall. He now calls his stall "Alley Chicks" and strategically places a one-speed classic hipster bicycle at the storefront. His main dish is the "Boiled organic chicken with natural cucumber and cous cous with braised soy sauce and sauteed kale and organic Thailand sourced rice".

"Oh my gawd," self-professed food fanatic, Jin Sua Ku, cooed as she sipped from her Starbucks cup. "the meat is succulent and tender, and the natural cucumber just adds the right touch to the sweetness of the rice - all for only $16.80!"

On the other end of the scale, some hawkers are targeting Angmoh tourists by deliberately dirtying their stalls and setting deliberately low hygiene standards to give Angmoh tourists a unique, exotic taste of Asia, serving them dishes like pork intestine soup which they think are really gross but were actually eaten by their poorer European ancestors back in the 1800s.

"I just love Asia, you know? Its an experience we'll never get back home! I love Asian culture!" Miss Jessica Tourista from the UK said. "When I get back to the UK, I'll tell everybody about how I integrated with the Asian culture because I had one mouthful of soup from a dirty roadside stall! What's this place called? Yeah, Marina Bay Sands food court."

John Bogan, from Australia, agrees. "Yeah mate, nothing's as good as tasting the original street food even though I eat at Asian restaurants in Australia all the time. Where are the Singapore noodles?"