FOOD PAIRING
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Fortune Centre has stood on Middle Road near Bugis since around 1980, building a reputation as a home for Singapore’s vegetarian restaurants and Buddhist supply shops. In recent years, Japanese izakayas, indie cafes and bakeries have moved in alongside those original tenants, turning the building into a place with genuinely layered history rather than one single identity.
Walk along Middle Road too quickly and Fortune Centre is the kind of building you might miss entirely. It doesn’t shout for attention from the street. But spend an afternoon inside, riding the lifts up and down past four floors of shopfronts, and a different picture emerges: a building that has quietly accumulated decades of identity, one tenant at a time.
Fortune Centre sits at 190 Middle Road, in the Bugis area, and has stood there since around 1980. That’s a long run for any commercial building in Singapore, let alone one that has managed to stay relevant through several very different eras of the neighbourhood around it.
Part of what gives the building its character is its neighbour. Fortune Centre sits beside the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple on Waterloo Street, one of the more historic and well-visited temples in the area. Devotees heading to the temple would naturally pass Fortune Centre, and that foot traffic helped shape what kind of businesses made sense to open inside.
The proximity to Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple explains a lot about Fortune Centre’s early identity. For years, the building has been known for housing one of Singapore’s largest concentrations of vegetarian restaurants in a single building, alongside shops selling Buddhist supplies and amulets.
That combination makes sense when you think about who was walking through the doors. Temple visitors looking for a vegetarian meal after paying their respects, or browsing for incense, prayer items and amulets, found exactly what they needed without having to leave the building. Over time, that cluster of vegetarian eateries and religious goods shops became something of a destination in its own right, not just a convenient stop for temple-goers.
It’s this layer of history that makes Fortune Centre more than just another ageing shopping centre. Plenty of buildings in Singapore have had tenants come and go. Fewer have built a reputation specific enough that people still associate the building itself with a particular kind of food and a particular kind of shopping.
Buildings that last decades rarely stay frozen in time, and Fortune Centre is no exception. In more recent years, Japanese izakayas, indie cafes and bakeries have moved in alongside the long-standing vegetarian food tenants. Rather than replacing what came before, these newer businesses have settled in next to it.
That’s worth sitting with for a moment, because it’s not the usual story of gentrification pushing out the old to make way for the new. The vegetarian restaurants and Buddhist supply shops are still there. The temple crowd still comes through. What’s changed is that a different kind of visitor, one looking for a Japanese-style dinner or a decent coffee, now has a reason to ride the lift up too.
The folks at Craft Beer by Ki-setsu are part of that more recent chapter, operating as a craft beer bar and izakaya within the building. So is Soup Curry by Ki-setsu, its sister operation serving Hokkaido-style soup curry. Both sit at #04-19 and #04-13 respectively, on the same floor as each other, which says something about how the building’s newer tenants have clustered together even as they’ve settled in beside its older ones.
The result is a building that holds two different stories at once. On one hand, you’ve got the decades-old identity: vegetarian food, Buddhist supplies, amulet shops, all tied to the temple next door. On the other, a newer wave of izakayas, cafes and bakeries drawing in a crowd that might never have set foot in the building a decade ago.
Neither story cancels the other out. If anything, that’s what makes Fortune Centre worth visiting rather than just passing by. You can find a vegetarian meal on one floor and a Japanese-style dinner with a glass of something cold on another, all within the same lift ride. Craft Beer by Ki-setsu at Fortune Centre is one way to experience that newer layer firsthand, without losing sight of everything that came before it.
Fortune Centre isn’t trying to be a polished mall or a heritage landmark with a plaque out front. It’s something more interesting: a working building where decades of history and a newer wave of tenants exist on the same floors, often just metres apart.
Next time you’re near Bugis, take the lift up rather than walking past. Have a vegetarian meal if that’s what brought you there, browse the Buddhist supply shops if you’re curious, then head to Level 4 for an izakaya dinner and a cold drink. Better yet, drop by and see for yourself what Craft Beer by Ki-setsu is pouring that day, and order a bowl of Hokkaido soup curry from Soup Curry by Ki-setsu while you’re at it.
