The Neighborhood the Bakery Named Itself After
Tiong Bahru combines the Hokkien word for graveyard with the Malay bahru, meaning new. The area was, in the 1850s, a burial ground established to ease overcrowding at the older cemetery nearby. By the 1920s it had grown into a kampong, a village, on reclaimed swampland. The Singapore Improvement Trust — the colonial predecessor to the Housing and Development Board — levelled 72 acres and built 784 flats, 54 tenements, and 33 shops between 1937 and 1941. Block 55, at the junction of Tiong Bahru Road and Tiong Poh Road, was the first to open; its first tenants, 11 families, moved in on 1 December 1936.
The estate's prewar blocks were designed in Streamline Moderne — a late development of Art Deco that drew on the visual language of ships, aeroplanes, and ocean liners. Curved facades, cantilevered balconies, porthole windows on stairwells, horizontal racing stripes. Locals called them puay kee chu — aeroplane houses — because the buildings reminded them of the control tower at Kallang Airport, which was under construction at the same time. The 20 prewar blocks were granted conservation status by the Urban Redevelopment Authority in 2003. The name Tiong Bahru means new cemetery. The blocks look nothing like a cemetery, which is the point.
What the French Baker Found Here
Gontran Cherrier is a fourth-generation French baker, born in Normandy, trained at the Ferrandi culinary school in Paris, who came to Singapore through a business partnership with Cynthia Chua of the Spa Esprit Group. They opened the first Tiong Bahru Bakery in May 2012, at 56 Eng Hoon Street, at the base of one of the estate's original HDB blocks — a shopunit so directly embedded in the estate's ground floor that the bakery became part of the neighborhood's daily infrastructure almost immediately.
The name they chose was the neighborhood's name. This is not a small decision. Tiong Bahru Bakery told the whole city what kind of bakery they intended to be — not a destination you travel to, but a place embedded in where people actually live. The croissants are made with 100% French butter and 100% French flour, handmade fresh each morning. There are now roughly 19 outlets across Singapore. The Eng Hoon Street flagship remains the one inside the estate, where the blocks are overhead and out the window simultaneously.
The Croissant, and Why It's Still the Right Thing to Order
The croissant has been the anchor item since 2012. French butter, French flour, laminated dough, baked each morning — the technique is not unusual at this point, but the execution here is consistent. The exterior is properly shattering; the interior is open and layered. It holds for about 20 minutes after purchase before the lamination softens, which is another reason the morning window matters.
The kouign-amann — a Breton pastry of caramelized laminated dough, harder to execute well than it sounds — is a secondary signature. The menu has expanded considerably over a decade: there are seasonal collaborations, Singapore-specific flavors, shio pan, matcha danishes. The croissant predates all of it. It is still the one to start with.
The Stool by the Window
The bar stools at the window counter face Eng Hoon Street and the HDB blocks across from it. This is not a skyline. It is not a park view. It is the daily streetscape of a neighborhood that has been inhabited continuously since 1936: curved concrete, cantilevered balconies, the occasional potted plant on a window ledge, morning light moving across pale rendered walls.
Sitting on one of these stools puts you in a different relationship to the space than standing at the counter does. The window frames the blocks the way a painting frames a subject. The bakery operates at a good noise level in the early morning — not silent, but not loud. The coffee is made well. The croissant is still hot. The view out the window is specific in the way that only old neighborhoods are specific: you are looking at a place that has been continuously repaired, occupied, and altered for nine decades, and it shows, and that is the part that is actually interesting to look at.
Before 11am on a Weekday
The Eng Hoon Street flagship opens at 7:30am Monday through Friday. Between 7:30 and 11am on a weekday, the window stools are usually available. The pastry case is at its fullest — the morning bake is out, nothing has sold down to the last piece yet. The neighborhood is running its own morning schedule: the market at the center of the estate, the regulars who have been coming since before the bakery was here.
After 11am, the dynamic shifts. Lunch traffic fills the space. Weekends bring the full Tiong Bahru visitor crowd — the bakery is well-known enough that it appears on most neighborhood guides, and on Saturday mornings the window stools are usually occupied or waiting to be. The weekday morning window is not a secret, exactly, but it requires being awake before 11am on a day that is not a Saturday, which is filter enough.
Practical notes
- Address: 56 Eng Hoon Street, #01-70, Singapore 160056 (Tiong Bahru estate)
- Hours: Monday–Friday 7:30am–8pm; Saturday–Sunday 8am–8pm
- Getting there: Tiong Bahru MRT (EW17) — 10-minute walk through the estate via Tiong Bahru Road and Kim Pong Road
- What to order: The croissant. The kouign-amann if it's fresh. A flat white. The shio pan is worth trying on a second visit.
- Best window: Monday–Friday, 7:30–11am. The window stools face the prewar blocks. Arrive before the croissants sell through.
- What to do after: Walk deeper into the estate — Yong Siak Street and Seng Poh Lane have the shophouse-flanked lanes most people photograph. Books Actually, the independent bookshop, is a five-minute walk on Yong Siak Street.
The point
The SIT flats across from the window counter at Eng Hoon Street were built for people who could not afford other housing in 1936. Calling them heritage is accurate but incomplete — they are also still functioning residential buildings. People live in them, hang laundry on the balconies, and have opinions about the bakery below that have nothing to do with the neighborhood's current reputation as a lifestyle destination.
Tiong Bahru Bakery understood this when it named itself. The stool by the window faces that understanding directly. You get a croissant, a coffee, and about 40 minutes — if you stay — in which the neighborhood on the other side of the glass is neither a backdrop nor a discovery, but simply the place the bakery is in.
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Sources consulted: tiongbahrubakery.com · biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg · roots.gov.sg · en.wikipedia.org · visittiongbahru.com
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