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Anthony Bourdain saw quite a bit of the world and must have racked up a lot of air miles. One thing he refused to do in all of that traveling was to eat on the plane. His preference was to arrive hungry, ready to find some street food and eat. Whether his hatred of brunch was equal to his hatred of airline food, we’ll never know. While a meal on an airplane wasn’t for him, a meal in the airport he could do. Especially if it was at his favorite airport to dine in: Singapore’s Changi.
“Probably Changi Airport in Singapore has the best food,” Bourdain told the New York Times in 2017. He praised it especially for its hawker center for the employees that’s also open to the public. The airport has two of these staff canteens that anyone can eat at. One is just outside of the arrivals hall in Terminal 1. The other is above a carpark outside of Terminal 2. Both offer the cheap, filling street food that made Bourdain call Singapore one of the three great food capitals of the world.
Other food to eat in Changi
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If you don’t have time to make it to one of the staff canteens during your layover in Changi Airport, there are plenty of other great food options with 200 restaurants throughout the building, as well as seven different food halls, including a food street and a 24-hour hawker center. There’s a reason SKYTRAX voted it the world’s best airport in 2025 and 2023. Name a cuisine, and you’ll likely find it if your layover is long enough. With this many food options to choose from, you’d think the airport has the most people coming in and out of it worldwide.
However, Changi Airport isn’t even in the top 10 of the world’s busiest airports, according to OAG. In reality, the airport has so many great restaurant options simply because Singapore is obsessed with food. Its street food, hawker culture, and community dining lifestyle are on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. In fact, they’re so obsessed with eating well, Singapore Airlines even tried to counter Bourdain’s advice of never eating on an airplane by testing their food in pressurized rooms to mimic the conditions of a plane.
Dining and Cooking