Leslie Tay Started a Hawker Blog Because the Clinic Was Quiet

The waiting room was quiet. Leslie Tay had just opened Karri Family Clinic in Tampines, a town in the east of Singapore, and the afternoons were his to fill. He spent them looking for hawker food. On August 2, 2006, he posted the first story on a new blog. It was called “Hokkien Mee Riddle Solved Finally.” Hokkien mee is a prawn noodle, and in Singapore the name has never meant only one plate.

Before the blog, he was reading Makansutra, the guidebook and forum where Singapore eaters traded stall tips, and he needed a username. It was the era of the iPhone, he has written, when everything was “i this” and “i that,” so he called himself ieat. The blog became ieatishootipost: what he ate, what he photographed, what he posted. He still meets people on the street who get it wrong. Friends on the forum were the ones who told him to move the reviews onto a blog.

He trained in medicine at the University of Sydney. Mornings and evenings he is still at the clinic. The food photographers he knew worked in studios, with lights and someone arranging the plate. He was bent over a hawker table. In 2006 he traded a film camera for a Canon PowerShot G1 and shot the food as it arrived, before it cooled. His children, James and Megan, waited. He has said that if he could sit through those meals again, he would spend less time with the camera. The food was getting cold.

The early posts became the stories older hawkers were still telling out loud. By 2010, Epigram Books wanted a collection. Edmund Wee, who ran the publisher, gave it the title The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries. Char kway teow is flat rice noodles fried hard on a wok, often with cockles and Chinese sausage. Tay already felt the dish’s best days were numbered.

The book came out in December 2010 and made the Straits Times bestseller list. The next year it placed third in the Popular Readers’ Choice Awards. Gourmand International named it the best food literature book in Singapore.

He had traced curry fish head, a whole fish head in a spiced gravy, to a man named Gomez, an Indian immigrant from Kerala who sold it at the foot of Mount Sophia. He told that story to a room of Singaporean students in the United States. An elderly man in the audience said he remembered eating at that stall. Tay has written that the moment settled why he was keeping the blog.

Chilli crab had a similar dispute. A Malaysian tourism minister had said the dish was Malaysian, and that Singaporeans had taken the credit. Tay followed it back to Madam Cher Yam Tian, who sold it from a pushcart in the 1950s.

In 2016 he sat on the Hawker Centre 3.0 Committee. Amy Khor, then Senior Minister of State for the Environment and Water Resources, chaired it. Tay suggested a way to recognize heritage hawkers, so a dish that takes a long time and pays little could get government help. Char kway teow was the one he named.

In August 2026, twenty years into the blog, he wrote that a truly good plate of char kway teow is harder to find, and that UNESCO’s 2020 listing of Singapore hawker culture has not stopped the quality from slipping. Older cooks retire, and he does not see many young hawkers taking their stalls. Prawn mee, chicken rice, and lately Hokkien mee can run eight to twenty Singapore dollars when the ingredients justify it.

His wife, Lisa, who posts as FeiEats, came on more actively in 2020. She now helps run the blog full time, and co-hosts. He jokes that the name should be weeatweshootwepost, and that changing it is too much trouble. He still ends on the same rule: never waste your calories on food you do not want. If he does not like a meal, he leaves it off the blog.

How to Hunt Singapore Hawkers Like a Local Food Blogger is there if you want the habit on a short trip. The clinic in Tampines is still open, mornings and evenings.