As good as Singapore’s version: Why Australian city Darwin is obsessed with laksa 

DARWIN, Australia – Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory (NT), has all the usual idiosyncrasies you associate with Down Under: crocodiles, vegemite and beaches so beautiful you nearly forget about the danger lurking beneath the water.

Its favourite dish, however, is a bit more inexplicable. Laksa, a South-east Asian soup noodle simultaneously claimed by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, has taken the city by storm. 

Every October, the city hosts a month-long laksa festival, in which restaurants all over Darwin vie for the Golden Bowl, awarded to the city’s best laksa. In 2025, 123 venues across the NT submitted a record-breaking 200 dishes to the contest, up from 54 Darwin-based entrants in 2021. 

Yet no one can really say for sure how laksa got here, or how it got so popular. Julian Mou, 39, a Singaporean who has lived in Darwin for nearly two decades, gets the impression that laksa has always been a part of the city.

“There’s just something about eating laksa in this heat,” she says. Like South-east Asia, Darwin is stuck in a sort of perpetual summer, with temperatures hovering around 30 deg C all year. 

Darwin restaurateur Jason Hanna, 54, does not know when the city first fell head over heels for laksa either, but is not surprised that out of all the dishes imported from Asia, this was the one that truly stuck. “There’s nothing else like it. You don’t expect it to be so powerful in flavour,” he says. “I don’t remember my first pho, I don’t remember my first ramen, but I remember my first laksa.” 

He was 20 and on a date with a woman he met at a bar. She disappeared before he woke up the following morning, returning a little while later with a curious container of rust-coloured gravy. He sat down, took a bite and fell in love. 

“I’ll never forget going: ‘I’ve never had anything like it,’” he recalls. Desperate to taste it again, he scoured the city for that exact bowl, eventually tracking it down at Jackie’s Laksa, a stall in Parap Village Markets that has since been renamed Yati’s Laksa.  

Today, Hanna runs six restaurants in Darwin, including Chow!, which has clinched the Golden Bowl three times and been added to the Laksa Festival Hall of Fame. Though branded as a Vietnamese restaurant, Chow!’s laksa is its hottest dish by far, selling twice as many bowls as pho. Prices start at A$21 (S$19) for a bowl of vegan laksa. 

Once known as an “Asian” city because Chinese residents outnumbered Europeans six to one in 1900, modern Darwin remains deeply multicultural. According to a 2021 census, 36.2 per cent of Darwin’s population were born overseas. In fact, it is closer to Indonesia than it is to Sydney, which is why it has lured so many South-east Asian immigrants across the Timor Sea.

And these immigrants, like Mou, have brought with them the flavours of home. It was a regular breakfast dish for her back in Singapore, so when she opened her restaurant Kopi Stop in 2015, she knew it had to be on the menu. 

Hers is not a family recipe, but an aggregation of all the laksa she has tried and enjoyed over the years. She describes it as more “curry-based” than the Singapore varieties she grew up with. 

“It’s really the consistency that makes it stand out. We make everything from scratch,” says the Le Cordon Bleu (Adelaide) graduate of her star dish, which she developed with her Malaysian chef. It won the Golden Bowl at the 2025 laksa festival and was voted the People’s Choice pick in 2023, 2024 and 2025. 

Live, love, laksa 

In Darwin today, you can find laksa anywhere and in almost any form: topped with chicken or beef, broccoli or bean sprouts, at a market or in a restaurant. You can get it Malaysian-style, Singaporean-style, Indonesian-style, or even with Thai and Vietnamese influences. 

Occasionally, restaurants experiment with regional varieties. Mou put assam laksa on the menu at her other restaurant, Makan Stop, in 2025, though for a limited period of time. 

“It might not be to everyone’s palate, so we need to decide if it’s worth our time and effort because we have only one cook,” she says. 

Hanna, meanwhile, added Katong laksa to his other restaurant, The Gully, in 2025. He first tasted the dish on a trip to Singapore some 15 years ago, and was instantly struck by its umami depth.

Piecing together the basic components of the dish was fairly easy, given the wealth of online resources, but the restaurant, which could not procure fresh blood cockles and had to settle for frozen ones instead, struggled to replicate the briny original. 

Over at Salted Egg Darwin, a restaurant that opened along the city’s waterfront in May, the kitchen sampled different styles of laksa from across South-east Asia for its signature dish – grilled king prawns slathered in a thick and punchy dry laksa gravy (A$29 for three pieces). 

“The rich coconut-based curry laksa of Malaysia forms the foundation, while Singapore’s balanced, seafood-forward approach and Indonesian spice profiles have also influenced our recipes,” says head chef Mark Langat, 32. He wanted to create something that feels authentic to both South-east Asia and the Top End. 

Locals are fiercely devoted to their favourite laksa joints – Mou has customers who order laksa from Kopi Stop two to three times a week – and the topic of where to get laksa and what should go into a bowl is a topic of heated debate. 

Somewhat controversially, Kopi Stop’s laksa (from A$23.50) contains broccoli, for extra crunch and some textural variety. At Chow!, it is topped with tofu puffs, bean sprouts and shallots.

Both Mou and Hanna have their preferences, but are fairly open minded about how laksa should be judged. “There’s no such thing as the best laksa,” declares Hanna. 

For Mou, a good bowl of laksa is a balanced one. “You want to be able to slurp up all the broth. It can’t be too salty or too heavy. It has to be just shiok enough,” she says. 

Laksa cocktails, anyone? 

Alongside the Golden Bowl and People’s Choice awards, the laksa festival also crowns the best dish inspired by laksa, a category that has attracted submissions like laksa lamb shanks and a laksa acai bowl. 

Some of Mou’s experiments have included a laksa basque cheesecake, laksa cookies and a laksa muffin. Though these were offered just for the duration of the festival, she wanted to focus on dishes that could be gifted or consumed on a regular basis, instead of eaten once for novelty. 

“A laksa muffin could be eaten for breakfast or brought to the office and shared. Same with the cookies,” she explains. She has yet to come up with an idea for the 2026 festival, but knows that the process cannot be rushed. “It will just come to me.” 

She is willing to push the envelope, but there are limits to how far she will go. “I don’t think I could bring myself to make a laksa coffee,” she says with a grimace. 

In 2022, Hanna’s entry to the festival was laksagna – a cross between the Italian classic and the South-east Asian dish, cooked by one of his restaurants, Eva’s Botanic Gardens Cafe. Though inventive, he regrets that it was not nearly “laksa-y” enough. 

To him, there is no dish or drink that a bit of laksa cannot improve. He is heartened by how the festival gives young chefs a chance to let their creativity run wild. “Every year, I’m impressed by someone’s inventiveness, which is what you want to see from young people these days.” 

“Laksa has so much potential beyond the traditional bowl,” adds Langat, who is working on a dish for the 2026 festival that celebrates local produce. “My focus is always on respecting the core flavours while presenting them in new ways that excite guests. Darwin has incredible produce, and I think there’s still plenty of room to continue evolving laksa in creative but meaningful ways.” 

Asia vs Australia 

When asked how Darwin’s laksa compares with those he has tried in South-east Asia, Langat, a Malaysian native trained in the kitchens of Kuala Lumpur, replies diplomatically that Darwin has developed its own laksa identity. 

“While South-east Asian laksa is often deeply rooted in regional traditions, Darwin embraces diversity,” he says. “I think that’s what makes Darwin’s laksa scene so exciting – there’s room for creativity while still respecting tradition. It’s become a unique food culture that reflects the city’s multicultural community.” 

Nowadays, Mou finds herself gravitating towards Darwin laksa over Singapore laksa. The latter is just a bit too plain, she says. Tofu puffs and fishcakes are fine, but it could do with a few more toppings. 

Hanna is full of reverence for Singapore’s culinary heritage. “Singapore is the king of laksa,” he declares, but throws down the gauntlet anyway. “Put a team together for the festival and we’ll take you on. We might not have been doing it for as long as hawkers in Singapore, but I reckon that the Northern Territory can put up a good fight. It’s very hard to get bad laksa here.” 

After all, he points out, it is not called the Darwin International Laksa Festival for nothing. 

And if he loses? “I think we can go toe to toe, but even if we can’t, I’d be quite happy losing to Singapore.”