Hiap Joo banana cake and the Jalan Tan Hiok Nee heritage walk

Hiap Joo Bakery has been operating out of the same hole-in-the-wall shop in JB's old downtown since 1919, and it's one of the few bakeries left in Malaysia still using a wood-fired brick oven over a century old. The banana cake it produces — moist, faintly smoky from the wood fire, and baked fresh daily — is the reason people build a whole morning around this one street.

The bakery itself

Hiap Joo sits at 13, Jalan Tan Hiok Nee, and opens daily from 7:30am to 5pm. The banana cake is the headline item, but the shop also does a coconut bun worth grabbing if you're there. Because it's baked in batches through the day and is genuinely popular, it can sell out before closing on a busy day — if a specific loaf matters to you, go earlier rather than later, and don't leave it to a Saturday afternoon.

The street around it

Jalan Tan Hiok Nee — the Tan Hiok Nee Heritage Walk — is a roughly 300-metre stretch of pre-war shophouses that's become JB's version of a retro café and street-art district, sometimes called the city's Chinatown. It's a genuinely pleasant 15–20 minute walk even without a food agenda: painted walls, old signage, and a mix of heritage buildings and newer cafés that have moved in.

Building a morning around it

A practical route: start at Hiap Joo when it opens, walk the heritage street for half an hour, then head toward Meldrum Walk a short distance away if you want a coffee shop or an early lunch. If you time it right and are willing to queue, Kam Long's curry fish head is also nearby and makes a natural lunch stop before the curry sells out for the day.

What makes the wood-fired oven matter

Most commercial bakeries switched to gas or electric ovens decades ago, and the difference in a wood-fired oven isn't just nostalgia — the uneven, slightly smoky heat gives Hiap Joo's banana cake a caramelised crust and a moisture that a modern oven doesn't reproduce the same way. It's part of why the shop has kept its process largely unchanged since 1919 rather than modernising for speed: the oven is the product, not just the building it's baked in.

Other stops on the street

Beyond the bakery itself, Jalan Tan Hiok Nee has picked up a handful of newer cafés and small shops selling local crafts and snacks over the last decade, mixed in among the original shophouses. It's worth budgeting extra time to poke into a few of these rather than treating the street purely as a route to the bakery — the street art alone is a reason plenty of visitors come back a second time.

Getting there

The old town, including Jalan Tan Hiok Nee, is walkable from JB Sentral and the CIQ checkpoint, which makes this one of the easier heritage stops for a Singapore day-tripper without a car — no Grab required if you're already crossing the Causeway on foot.

After the walk

If your day trip continues out toward KSL and Taman Century later on, our stall, Apam Balik Jalil at Century Street Food Court, is a different kind of Malaysian street bake worth comparing against Hiap Joo's banana cake — thin, crispy apam balik in more than twenty flavours, a few kilometres and a few decades apart in tradition from what you'll find on Jalan Tan Hiok Nee.

Sources: Eatbook — Hiap Joo Bakery, iPackTravel — Tan Hiok Nee heritage walk, Johor Kaki — Hiap Joo banana cake