While everyone loves their hawker centres, Auntie and Uncle shops and everything Singapore when it comes to eating out, it’s still nice to find somewhere fancy to eat–if only the price tag wasn’t so expensive. Not everyone has an hour or two to spare when queuing at Michelin-star chicken rice shops and you also want to impress a potential partner with a good meal.
So what’s a local Singaporean to do? Here’s some advice that local foodies and lobang queens and kings have suggested that never fail to get you a large discount when eating out (and not at a hawker centre):
According to a reddit user, this app is basically a “load balancing” app that benefits both restaurants and customers. By giving large flat discounts during off-peak hours, they get more diners even if they don’t get as much profit per meal. They maximize their servers and staff and make sure that they have less food wastage at the end of the day.
Download the app and you’ll enjoy as much as 40% off your lunch if you go a little earlier, and you can even get as much as $20 off your bill if you use the app to reserve your tables several times a month.
Use Chope
A uniquely-Singaporean-named app, Chope used to be a restaurant reservation platform but they’ve started offering discounts and other great deals depending on the day. You can get deals for your credit cards, buy-one-take-one deals and a lot of other promos. While it’s their anniversary, you can basically use points to get discounts at participating restaurants, with the exchange at 100 points for each reservation. If you spend 400 points, you get a $10 voucher, while using 1000 points gets you $30.
Check out Grab
Aside from the discounts you get when using the GrabPay platform, you can also use the small deals for snacks and discounts. Check the Rewards page of your app to see if there’s a nearby restaurant that will give you a discount or a 1-for-1 deal. If you use Grab a lot, then you can use your points to buy coupons or deals from the app that will go to meal discounts or vouchers.
Check out your credit card promotions
You can always check your bank’s socila media pages and their website for the monthly or quarterly promotions, which are usually free food items or outright discounts if you use your credit card to pay at certain restaurants.
Grab a Treatsure box within the time limit
This one is time-sensitive and requires you to pick up your food item from the restaurant quickly. This app lets you buy boxed food items from buffets within 25 minutes of reservation. You choose a box from their menu and you have to get the item within 25 minutes and pay at the store. You can usually get buffet-quality boxes at $10-$25.
Rewards and rebate apps
If you really want to go full pointception, you can get the Shopback app that gives you a very small amount for every spend you have on some of the biggest shopping and restaurant reservation apps online. Just make sure that you’ve linked up your apps to Shopback since the shopping and reservation apps themselves don’t remind you about Shopback.
More apps
There are other apps similar to the ones mentioned above, but these offer limited food choices compared to the larger and more popular apps mentioned above. You can try out Quandoo, Offpeak, and Me Club Feast.
Header image from Shutterstock, Young people eating in restaurant
