§3.6The Regulars' List and the Endangered Dish Registry
- PHILANTHROPY-FUNDED · NATIONAL FROM YEAR 1
- CONSENT FIRST · ONLY AGGREGATES PUBLISHED
This section answers a gap that is now a matter of public record – the list the Government confirmed in Parliament this October that it does not maintain (§1.1). NHB's inventory of intangible cultural heritage names food practices worth keeping, but it does not say which stalls or dishes are at risk, or who still cooks them. NHB reviews its 106 elements once a year, a few entries at a time, and the entry for hawker culture was last revised in March 2019 (periodic report to UNESCO, Dec 2024; Roots.sg). The Registry is new research for its next revision, offered with the hawkers' consent. The answer comes in two parts: the Regulars' List, on which a centre's regulars name the dishes they want kept, and a ranked registry of dishes that takes longer to build. Beside them, and kept apart on purpose, sits a yearly count for Parliament of how many stalls are at risk, which never names a stall.
The Regulars' List: a compliment from the people who eat there. Version 1.2 called this list the Heritage Watchlist, and the name was wrong. A stall on such a list sounds as if it is being watched, and one that stays on it for years, neither rising nor falling, starts to look as if it has failed. That is the opposite of what I meant. So the list now says what it is. Being on it means one thing: the regulars of this centre have asked that this dish be kept. It is a compliment from diners, not a diagnosis of the stall.
Who counts as a regular. One named person who says he orders from the stall at least once a week, to eat there or to take away. The unit is the order, not the plate: an auntie who buys four packets of kway chap for her family every Sunday is one regular placing one order, and the list counts her once. Each person endorses a stall once, verified lightly by a mobile number, and an endorsement is never bought: no prize, no discount and no draw rides on it.
One way on, and only up. A stall is listed at Bronze when 20 of its regulars endorse it (assumption); the centre's hawkers' association may gather the names, but the names are the listing; one short listing visit, with the hawker's consent, puts it on. A stall moves up to Silver, Gold and Platinum in one of two ways, whichever comes first: it gains 50, 100 or 250 endorsements, or its regulars place 10%, 20% or 50% of its weekly orders, counting 1.5 orders a week from each regular (assumption; Follow the Plate, D.4.2). The second route means a small stall with a loyal following is not held back by its size. The listing itself always needs its 20 names; the share route applies from Silver up. The share is worked from the orders a week the hawker reports, and no stall's share is ever published. Nominations open at all 123 government hawker centres from Year 1, not only at the pilot centres. A privately run coffeeshop or food court follows the existing exception route: the board recommends it, and the Hawker Council can veto it (§3.8). Grades only go up. A stall leaves the list only if its hawker chooses to, or when it closes; the list is never withdrawn for lack of progress, and there is no yearly re-test. Most listed stalls will simply keep cooking, year after year, and that is the point: a dish the neighbourhood wants kept is being kept.
How a stall climbs. By how it treats the people who come back. Regulars are what a profitable stall runs on, and the list rewards the hawker who remembers a name and an order, and keeps the dish the way they come back for. Nothing more is measured: no one scores manners, and there is no complaint channel. The grade is the diners' answer, and it is theirs alone to give. It also happens to describe a business. The tables in Follow the Plate show what share of a stall's weekly orders its regulars place at each grade, by stall and by dish type, and why a stall with a Gold or Platinum base is a sound one (Follow the Plate, D.4.2).
Until the first count is in, the thresholds are assumptions. Version 1.3 counted plates, and that was the wrong unit. A family's takeaway is one order of several plates: it lifts a stall's plate count without adding a regular, so a share of plates makes a stall that sells by the family look less loyal than it is. Plates an order differ by dish – about 1.2 for drinks and snacks, 1.3 for noodles and rice and 2.0 for family dishes such as kway chap, zi char and roast meats (assumption) – and no one publishes them for hawker stalls; the nearest figure, from Hawkers Go Digital's e-payments, works out at about $8.33 a transaction, a ceiling, since small orders are more often paid in cash (Enterprise Singapore, 26 Oct 2023; derived; Follow the Plate, D.4.2). So the 10%, 20% and 50% shares are set so that a typical noodle or rice stall reaches each grade with about the same number of regulars as the old shares of plates would have needed. They stay assumptions until the Year 0 count of orders replaces them: in Year 0 the listening teams count two weeks of orders, plates an order, dollars an order and the share of orders from the regulars each hawker names, at every consenting stall at the pilot centres, by dish type (§6.1). Before the first listing, that count sets plates an order and the share thresholds for each dish type. The counts route – 20, 50, 100 and 250 names – does not move.
The same small things for everyone listed, whether or not they ever go further: a page in the Endangered Dish Registry, in the regulars' own words; a decal for the counter, "Regulars' List · a dish this neighbourhood wants kept", which shows the stall's grade and the year it was listed, and nothing else; a place on the centre's price board and in the Buying Circles' order book (§2.12); a line in the centre's yearly Regulars' List booklet and map; and a thank-you note to the regulars who endorsed it. No one is paid a stipend to visit, and no stall pays for its decal. The decal is recognition, not a quality mark. It says the neighbourhood wants the dish kept, not that it is the best, so it does not compete with FMAS's Hawker Heritage Award or with the Heritage Plate (§5.5).
Going further is opt-in. A Master Fellowship (§4.2) or full documentation (§3.2) is offered only when two things are true: the hawker wants to teach, and the Registry's open test says the dish is fragile (below). Grades never decide either; they are the diners' honour, not the Seed Bank's triage. A hawker who says no changes nothing about his listing, and a stall that never goes further gives up nothing at all.
The at-risk count, for Parliament and partners. The plan still owes Parliament the number §1.1 found missing, and it keeps that number apart from the list, so that no decal and no listing ever carries it. It comes from two simple signals a hawker may give, if he wishes, when his stall is listed or at any time after: that no successor is in view, and that he intends to stop within three years. A listed stall whose hawker gives both, or that a public fact flags – a closure notice, a lease ending – is counted. The count is published only as a national total and a total for each centre, never naming a stall, in line with the Personal Data Protection Act. It goes each year to NEA and MSE, to NHB and MCCY, and to the Singapore Tourism Board (§7.7); the first comes at the end of Year 1. To be sure, it is not a census: it counts only stalls that someone has listed, and only the signals their hawkers choose to give. Still, it is the number §1.1 found missing, it sits beside the Registry's list in Singapore's reports to UNESCO, and the evaluator can test it, because each year's count can be checked against what happened next (§6.4).
Why UNESCO needs the count. UNESCO's reporting form asks each State to describe "the demographics of practitioners" and "the severity and immediacy" of the threats an element faces. Singapore's first report, signed in December 2024, named the threats – how the trade is perceived, passing skills on to the young, the cost of operations – and measured the element's viability by occupancy above 95%, enrolment and patron surveys. It gave no count of practitioners or of stalls at risk. It also promised: "we will also improve efforts in monitoring not just the viability of ICH practice but the communities of bearers and practitioners" (periodic report, Dec 2024). The at-risk count is one way to keep that promise, with a method and a starting count, and we offer it to NHB and NEA for the next report, due on 30 June 2027 (§7.7). It is an offer, not a charge.
Size and cost. Assumption: about 12–15% of the more than 6,000 cooked-food stalls in government centres will be listed, about 700–900 stalls by Year 3, so the budget ramps the list to 300 stalls by the end of Year 1, 600 by Year 2 and 800 by Year 3. In our own count behind the pilot centres (the Budget Book, B.9.6), 8 of the 55 heritage-worthy stalls (the stalls that food guides and heritage records already name) showed the signs of being at risk; the stalls are not named and the count is our working, not a published figure. One official claim cuts across that count. Singapore told UNESCO that "more than half of the hawkers today are second and third generation hawkers", with no source given (periodic report, Dec 2024). If that is so, "second generation" admits most stalls, and the heritage-worthy measure leans on its other tests; the plan would ask NEA for the basis of the figure (the Budget Book, B.9.6). Our own count of 8 in 55 (about 15%) is therefore the lowest I would expect, so the plan assumes 15–25% of listed stalls, about 120–200 nationally by Year 3. The list costs $132,750, $124,900 and $121,050 in Years 1–3 before the contingency: a coordinator; for each new stall, one listing visit, a decal at print cost, its Registry page and the thank-you notes; a new decal at print cost for a stall that moves up a grade, about one in ten a year; each centre's booklet and map; and its place on the Buying Circles' open price board (§2.12), the increment only. Nothing is paid to the stall. It sits in the operating budget, not the programme budget, because it is the cost of keeping the list, not money that reaches hawkers; I would rather not flatter the share that reaches hawkers (§7.1).
The Endangered Dish Registry: the ranking. Where the Regulars' List names stalls, the Registry ranks dishes, and it gives the Government's own accepted recommendation of 2017, "food curation, including the retention of traditional hawker food" (Hawker Centre 3.0 Committee, Recommendation 9), a list to work from. It is a ranked register kept with the National Heritage Board, culinary historians and the communities who know the food: practitioner count and age, technique complexity, cultural significance. Fragility and cultural weight set rescue priority; popularity informs commercial strategy but never gates rescue. Obscure, commercially marginal dishes – Eurasian curry debal, fully hand-made Hakka yong tau foo, complex Peranakan rempah work, endangered kueh – are precisely what a seed bank is for, and they enter through the grant track (§4.5). Prevalence is judged with the communities concerned: a dish rare at stalls may still live in homes and festival kitchens, and an older version out of fashion with today's diners may still carry a technique or story worth keeping. Hawkers and their communities – not officials, and not queue length – judge what counts. Its test of fragility is published and open, and it is the test that decides when a Fellowship is offered. Every listed stall's dish has its page in it, in the regulars' own words, and diners who name what they would save add to it (§6.2.1). The Registry's first published list can go into Singapore's next periodic report to UNESCO (§3.2).