How do I eat lunch affordably in malls?
I wanna hear some lunch ideas for those with offices nearby shopping malls, city or CBD area but without hawker center coffee shop nearby.
Lately it has gotten even worse and it’s almost impossible to get lunch under $5. Go into kopitiam food court and Cai png 2meat1veg is now like $5.50, the chicken rice is like $7 and western is like $12. Macs or KFC fast food value meals are nearly $10.
Sometimes I vary with Encik Tan $4.50 curry rice and Saizeriya $6+ items but getting quite tired of always sticking to these options or just spamming caipng.
Used to vary with occasional casual dining like set lunches at pastamania, old street bkt, astons etc but now they are all almost $20 per meal which makes it hard to justify.
Netizens’ comments
- Sadly inflation is here to stay. If you have microwave, packing your lunch seems the way to go. Unfortunately for me, my office have no fridge or microwave. So far I tried to keep my spending down by looking at 50% lunch deals pickup options in Foodpanda or just finding deals from various food apps.
- Buy whole roast chicken and bread from supermarket. Settled for the whole day til dinner liao.
- Meal prep at home then bring to office to eat, or eat at one of those food stalls/courts that are attached to MRT like ananas cafe etc
- If you really want cheap lunch, I used to have just plain bread and home made coffee for lunch for a year to save money to pay off my tuition loan. Won’t recommend it though. But you can look at some of the promotion the mall is having, for example, a couple of weeks back, EATS had a $3 promotion on their Chicken Cutlet Curry Rice at the mall near my workplace. Just follow those places on their social media and keep a lookout for such promotion,
- Personally, I just switched my diet to just sandwiches like how ang moh settle their lunch. Sandwich with 1 fruit and free coffee (I usually get free fruit and coffee from my workplace). I admit I earn enough to eat good meals but I feel not worth eating meals at 10-15 bucks a meal around my workplace at suntec.