UNTIL recently, Singapore’s food scene was ruled by two very different eating experiences: the city’s venerated street stalls, appropriately glorified by food writers like Calvin Trillin; and upscale European-style restaurants like Iggy’s and Au Jardin.
But a small group of chefs is reinventing the city’s traditional food culture, finding a balancing point between the city’s cheap but hard to navigate street food and the expensive white-tablecloth spots.

WHEN Terence Conran, designer, restaurateur, businessman, sold off the management of his restaurant group three years ago, it seemed that the sun had set on his culinary empire. Those revolutionary temples to design and gastronomic sophistication that dominated the London dining scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Bluebird, Quaglino’s, La Pont de la Tour — were being put in other hands. And when he announced last year that he planned to sell the rest of his interest, British newspapers ran headlines like “Has the Conran Era Come to an End?” If they weren’t burying the man, they were praising him right up to his neck.