Beng Thin Hoon Kee Restaurant: Menu, History & Directions

Some restaurants feed a neighbourhood; a rare few feed a generation’s memory of a cuisine. Beng Thin Hoon Kee has served Hokkien food since 1949, when it opened in a Hokkien Street shophouse, and it has called the fifth floor of OCBC Centre home since 1979, according to Yahoo Finance Singapore (business news). Menu listings disagree on prices, hours vary by source, and reservations run through a third-party booking platform. You’ll leave knowing what to order and which details to double-check.

Address: 65 Chulia St, #05-02, OCBC Centre, Singapore 049513 · Hours: 11:30am–2:45pm, 6:00pm–9:45pm daily · Reservations: Online via inline.app · Cuisine: Hokkien (Fujian)

Six details, one pattern: the building facts are stable across listings, while anything time-based — hours, prices, availability — needs a recheck.

What is the menu price at Beng Thin Hoon Kee Restaurant?

No official price list exists online, and the transcriptions that circulate don’t always agree. These figures are the most specific pricing published so far for the dishes reviewers actually order.

Signature dishes and their price range

• Beng Thin Duck Salad: the first dish most reviewers mention
• Fujian Prawn Balls: the fried Hokkien staple with a loyal following
• Hokkien Mee and oyster omelette: two wok classics that define the house style

The pricing pattern comes from the portion-size breakdown published by Her World Singapore (lifestyle magazine): duck salad at SGD 20 / 30 / 40, Fujian prawn balls at SGD 15 / 24 / 36, and Fujian-style fried noodles at SGD 12 / 24 / 36. For the category — a sit-down Hokkien kitchen inside a bank tower — those figures are moderate.

Five dishes, one pattern: prices scale by portion, and the published figures drift a little between listings.

The Ordinary Patrons (food blog), which revisited in November 2024, paid SGD 18 each for a small Hokkien mee and a small oyster omelette.

Set menu options

• Set menus are available for groups; prices are not published in the sources reviewed
• The restaurant’s booking flow is the fastest way to ask about current set-menu pricing
• Portions are sized to share, which makes the set menu the easy choice for larger tables

If you’re planning a business lunch in the Raffles Place area, a set menu removes the per-head guesswork.

A la carte vs banquet pricing

A la carte: SGD 12–40 per dish · Set menus: group pricing on request · Official online menu: none published

The conflict to watch: ThreeBestRated Singapore (local business directory) prices Fujian-style fried noodles at SGD 13, while the portion breakdown above says SGD 12 for a small order. SGFry (food blog) transcribes the duck salad at the same SGD 20 / 30 / 40 figures — proof that some listings are more current than others.

The pattern: portion-based pricing and a short list of Hokkien classics. Every online figure is somebody’s transcription — the only number that matters is the one the kitchen gives you.

What kind of cuisine does Beng Thin Hoon Kee serve?

Beng Thin is a Hokkien kitchen: the cuisine of Fujian province in southeast China, carried to Singapore by migrants like founder Lim Yew Hoon. The Hokkien identity is the whole story, and it’s why the restaurant keeps appearing in editorial roundups.

Defining Hokkien cuisine

• Roots: Fujian province, southeast China
• Techniques: braising, frying, steaming — visible across the restaurant’s signature dishes
• Flavour base: seafood, soy sauce, and pork, layered rather than used as accents

The menu behaves the way the cuisine promises. The duck salad is fried and dressed with a savoury soy-forward dressing; the prawn balls are crisp outside and juicy inside; the fish maw soup is a slow-simmered counterweight to all that wok work.

Key ingredients and flavors

• Seafood-forward: prawn balls, oyster omelette, fish maw
• Soy and pork: ngor hiang (the Hokkien five-spice roll) sits alongside the fried prawn balls
• Wheat and egg noodles appear in both dry and soup forms, a Fujian signature

Reviewers who name standouts keep returning to the same trio — duck salad, ngor hiang, and fish maw soup — whether they wrote their list in a food blog or on Tripadvisor.

How Beng Thin Hoon Kee stays authentic

The proof is in the menu logic: fried classics, braised dishes, and a few soups, all built on the same flavour base that worked on Hokkien Street in 1949.

The pattern: this is not fusion and not a tasting menu. It’s Fujian cooking that stayed itself while the city around it changed.

How to go to Beng Thin Hoon Kee restaurant from OCBC Centre?

The joke is that the question answers itself: the restaurant is inside OCBC Centre, so the route from OCBC Centre is about floors, not streets.

Step-by-step directions from OCBC Centre

1. Enter OCBC Centre at the Chulia Street entrance.
2. Take the escalator from the ground floor up.
3. Make your way to unit #05-02 on the fifth floor.

Reviews on Yelp (crowdsourced reviews) consistently place the dining room on the fifth floor of OCBC Centre, so you’re heading up, not down.

Alternative routes and public transport

• MRT: Raffles Place (East-West and North-South lines) and Telok Ayer (Downtown Line) are the two closest stations
• Taxi or ride-hail: ask for OCBC Centre, 65 Chulia Street
• From Raffles Place, the walk to the tower is a short one through the central business district

The nearest MRT exits put you at street level within a few minutes’ walk, which matters more than it used to — the fifth-floor dining room is the destination, and the approach is flat and covered.

Parking at OCBC Centre

• OCBC Centre has a car park, and the restaurant is on the fifth floor of the same tower
• Park, then take the escalator or lift up to level five
• There is no dedicated restaurant valet mentioned in any reviewed source

If you’re coming by car, the practical loop is park → level five → duck salad.

The implication: the route is simple; the only real variable is the reservation.

What is the history of Beng Thin Hoon Kee restaurant?

The origin story reads like the template for Singapore’s oldest restaurants: a migrant cook, a shophouse, and a menu that outlived the street around it.

Founding and early years

Founded: 1949 · Founder: Lim Yew Hoon · First address: Hokkien Street shophouse

Lim Yew Hoon, a migrant from China, opened the restaurant in 1949 in a ground-floor shophouse along Hokkien Street, according to Yahoo Finance Singapore (business news) — the same account that traces the move into OCBC Centre in 1979, with no documented relocation since.

From shophouse to tower block

• The financial district grew up around the dining room, not the other way around
• The move from street level to a fifth-floor tower was the restaurant’s only relocation
• Most Singapore restaurants of that era are gone; this one changed addresses once

The 1979 move tracks Singapore’s own shift from street-level shophouse life to the office towers of Raffles Place. A Hokkien kitchen inside a banking tower turned out to be a durable combination.

Recognition and longevity

Recognition shows up in small recurring ways: a hotel group’s guide to nostalgic food spots in Singapore still lists the restaurant, and a food blog’s 2024 revisit titled its review “Still Great After All These Years.”

What this means: a restaurant that survived the shophouse era has become a fixed coordinate in a district that changes its skyline every decade.

Can you recommend a restaurant in Singapore that serves authentic Hokkien cuisine?

If the question is where to take someone who wants real Hokkien food in Singapore, Beng Thin Hoon Kee is the reference point most reviewers reach for first.

Why Beng Thin Hoon Kee fits the recommendation

• A 1949 founding and a single move since — longevity you can taste
• Duck salad and prawn balls lead every roundup’s shortlist
• The 2024 “still great” review is the kind of verdict chefs can’t buy

Recommendations are only as good as their assumptions. Here, the assumption is that “authentic Hokkien” means the same dishes the kitchen has been frying since the 1940s — not a modern tasting menu with a Hokkien accent.

What to expect when dining

• Hours: lunch and dinner daily, with published start times from 11:00 to 11:30
• Booking: online via inline.app; walk-ins accepted but reservations recommended
• Setting: a fifth-floor dining room inside OCBC Centre

The room is practical, the service is old-school, and nobody pretends the view matters. Diners come for the food and leave with the same verdict year after year.

Other notable Hokkien options for comparison

• The editorial roundup that prices Beng Thin’s duck salad also places it among Singapore’s authentic Hokkien spots
• If you’re comparing formats, hawker-centre Hokkien mee and a sit-down Hokkien banquet are different experiences; Beng Thin is firmly the sit-down kind
• The 2024 “still great” review is a better signal than any awards list

If you’re mapping the wider menu landscape, this guide to Deng Wen Ji’s claypot rice and Hokkien mee covers a different kitchen with a similar loyalty to old-school dishes. And if you want a chain-restaurant comparison point, this Dian Xiao Er NEX menu guide covers hours, reservations, and reviews.

What’s confirmed and what’s still unclear

Here’s the honest scoreboard.

The pattern: the core facts are stable, and the details that move — hours, prices, set menus — are exactly the ones you should verify with one phone call.

What reviewers keep saying

Two voices, one verdict.

“Still great after all these years.”

The Ordinary Patrons (food blog), November 2024 revisit

“Lovely place for Fujian cuisine. Must try are the Duck Salad, Crabmeat Scrambled Eggs with Lettuce, Fried Vegetable and Oyster Omelette!”

Purple Eats blog

A Tripadvisor reviewer’s list of standouts — duck salad, ngor hiang, fish maw soup — overlaps with the Purple Eats list almost word for word.

The pattern: nobody leads with the room or the service. The food is the argument.

The takeaway

More than seven decades is a long time for any restaurant to keep the same dialect of cooking. Beng Thin Hoon Kee has done it from a shophouse and from a bank tower, and the fifth-floor dining room still fills with people who came for the duck salad and stayed for the Hokkien classics. For first-time visitors to Singapore, the decision is simple: walk up the escalator at OCBC Centre, order the duck salad, and let the kitchen make its own case — or keep scrolling through review sites and spend another lunch hour deciding instead of eating.

Frequently asked questions

The common thread across these answers: the restaurant’s details are stable, but the online record around them is not. One call settles everything.