The Quality Hotel Marlow, 201 Balestier Road

The Quality Hotel Marlow stood at 201 Balestier Road: a four-star hotel of about 240 rooms with an outdoor pool, a gym, a sauna and meeting space. It has closed. The building was renovated and reopened under IHG as the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Singapore Novena - same address, different hotel, different operator.

What follows is what the Marlow was, why its restaurant outlived its reputation as a hotel, and what the area is like to stay in now.

A solid mid-range business and leisure hotel north of the city centre, of a kind Singapore has fewer of every year as older stock is redeveloped. Around 240 non-smoking rooms, a pool and gym, and meeting rooms that made it a regular for small corporate bookings and for families who wanted space without Orchard Road prices.

It was never a design hotel and never pretended to be. Its draw was position and value - and, more than either, its food.

The coffee house was better known than the hotel. The Quality Café ran a Taiwanese porridge buffet - 台式清粥小菜, plain rice congee with a long spread of small salted and braised dishes alongside it - and it pulled in diners with no intention of staying the night. That is unusual for a hotel restaurant, and it is why the café's own page collected more inbound links than any of the hotel's room pages.

The Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant in the same building had its own following, in a city where good Chinese vegetarian cooking is sought out rather than stumbled upon.

Both closed with the hotel.

The street has not lost its appetite. Balestier Road is one of Singapore's genuinely food-famous roads, and most of what made it so is still trading: bak kut teh, the peppery pork rib soup the road is associated with more than anywhere else on the island, and several long-running chicken rice shops. The Whampoa hawker centre is a few minutes away.

If you came looking for the porridge buffet, the honest redirection is to the street rather than to a replacement: see what to eat in Singapore and the hawker centres, which is where this kind of eating actually lives.

Novena is NS20 on the North-South line: two stops to Orchard, four to City Hall, six to Marina Bay. From Changi it is a change at City Hall or Dhoby Ghaut, about fifty minutes on the MRT, or twenty-five minutes by taxi outside peak hours.

Balestier Road itself has no MRT station. From Novena it is a ten to fifteen minute walk north, or a short bus ride - the 21, 131 and 139 run along it. That gap between the road and the station is the one thing worth knowing before booking anything on Balestier: the address may say Novena, and the walk may still be fifteen minutes in afternoon heat.

The Holiday Inn Express & Suites Singapore Novena occupies the building. It is an IHG limited-service brand, which in practice means smaller rooms than the Marlow's, breakfast included in the rate, and none of the sauna-and-meeting-rooms apparatus the old hotel carried. Whether that is an improvement depends entirely on what you wanted from the Marlow.

Rooms and rates are IHG's to publish and change, so they are not quoted here - a rate written into a guide is wrong within the week.