📌 Burnt Ends is a series that turns F&B operator mistakes into learning lessons.

When Aidan Low and Ho Bing Ru founded Kuro Kare in mid-2023, their plan was to bring the standards of fine-dining technique to Japanese curry at a price that didn’t require a fine-dining budget. Both had come out of Fleurette, the intimate counter-dining restaurant on Rangoon Road, where Low had been a co-founder and Bing Ru had run the kitchen.

Their centrepiece was a 36-hour Japanese curry built from more than 25 ingredients, a long-cooked broth with imported Japanese proteins broken down in-house from scratch. The name translates to “black curry,” and the long cooking time behind it was the key differentiator. Quality at an accessible price was the whole proposition.

When a stall came up at NUS Techno Edge in August 2023, the case for it seemed reasonable: Kuro Kare could tap on a large student population, consistent canteen footfall, and present itself as a concept offering something genuinely different from the stalls around it. What Low and Bing Ru couldn’t fully see from the outside was how tightly constrained price expectations were among the people they’d be cooking for.

What Kuro Kare got right

Operationally, the stall ran well. At peak, the kitchen could turn 50 to 60 customers an hour over a sustained 90-minute window, batching orders in groups of six every ten minutes, with no meaningful bottlenecks in the workflow. Food costs were held between 25 and 30 per cent, which sits within the range Singapore operators broadly consider workable for a quality-focused concept, and the curry fried chicken, which came to account for more than half of all items sold, performed well on both volume and margin.

The customers who enjoyed the curry tended to return, and Low’s read was that the loyalty among those diners was genuine. When concerns about portion size surfaced, the team responded: rice portions were increased by 75 per cent and free refills were added.

These adjustments, though, were working against a more fundamental problem at the location.

What didn’t work

NUS Techno Edge operates with the economic logic of a hawker centre, and the students eating there applied hawker centre benchmarks to everything inside it. Economy rice - a standard set of rice, one meat, and one vegetable - was available in the same building for $3.20, and that anchored diners’ sense of what any given meal was worth paying. Kuro Kare had expected to sell in the $6 to $10 range, the minimum at which imported proteins, in-house preparation, and a 36-hour cook could be justified. The price ceiling that the market actually imposed sat between $3 and $5, and larger portions and free rice refills couldn’t close a gap of that size.

Low described the bind directly: “People don’t understand why our chicken costs more than the processed chicken chop from downstairs. Chicken is chicken to them.”

Part of what made this so difficult to change was that Kuro Kare had no real way of showing customers why the food cost what it did. Ingredient provenance was noted in menu descriptions early on, but customers didn’t read them. Low drew a comparison that was honest about why this was the case: expecting a diner unfamiliar with Japanese ingredient sourcing to pay more for it was roughly like presenting someone who doesn’t follow finance with two stocks and expecting them to know which one was worth more. The information was there, but the context to act on it wasn’t. Cheaper items sold in higher volumes, and as they came to dominate the mix, the margin on each order shrank even as the kitchen got busier.

What really put the lights out

The margin pressure was only part of the problem. Traffic at Techno Edge turned out to be more volatile than the initial assessment had suggested, shaped by blended learning schedules and hybrid attendance patterns that made student volumes intermittent and hard to anticipate. Additionally, dinner service after 5pm yielded almost nothing.

As Aidan points out, a small operator evaluating a new site doesn’t realistically have the capacity to station someone there across multiple lunchtimes over several weeks to build a reliable picture, and the volatility only became apparent once Kuro Kare was already committed.

The more serious structural problem was the semester calendar. When December arrived and the term ended, revenue dropped to zero for an entire month while fixed costs continued accumulating, and the cycle repeated at every subsequent break. Four months in each year, the stall was running obligations against near-zero income, and closing during those periods wasn’t a genuine option since staff had ongoing salary commitments and the kitchen equipment had nowhere else to go. Low describes the first summer break as the moment the decision became clear. “Four months out of the year, you’re losing money,” he said. “You just know it’s time to get out.”

What Low would have done differently

Given everything, Low’s honest answer is that he wouldn’t have opened at NUS at all. Asked what he’d have changed if he’d had no choice but to take the stall, he described a complete overhaul: building the menu around batch-cooked fried rice and noodles with frozen proteins, keeping preparation minimal and staffing to part-timers only, the kind of operation that could realistically turn a profit at $3 to $5 per meal. It would have meant setting aside the 36-hour curry and everything the concept had been built around, and Low was direct that he wasn’t been prepared to do that. “Super down market,” was how he put it. “Frozen chicken karaage, fried rice, that’s it. No need to try to be smart.”

The NUS outlet has since closed, and Kuro Kare continues to operate out of its original SMU location, where foot traffic from the surrounding precinct and a different customer profile have proven a better fit for what the concept is actually trying to do.

📌 House Rules invites F&B veterans to share actionable tips and tricks of the trade, and reveal what really goes on behind the scenes. 

Dominic Yu has spent 15 years working across front and back-of-house operations in F&B, with a specialisation in Japanese dining concepts. He has successfully launched more than six F&B ventures to date, and currently runs LaunchLabs Kitchen helping operators navigate the structural and operational realities of building in one of Asia’s most competitive dining markets.

In our inaugural edition of House Rules, we sit down with him for a three-part series on designing and scaling Japanese F&B concepts in Singapore. In part one, Dominic shares some of the hidden pitfalls that operators commonly overlook.

Q1: How different are the capital and operating requirements between a family diner, an izakaya, and a fine dining Japanese restaurant?

Capital requirements vary significantly depending on the concept. For an izakaya, setup costs are typically the lowest, usually ranging from $200,000 to $500,000 depending on renovation, kitchen equipment, and location. The more successful izakayas tend to focus primarily on guest relations and the overall drinking and dining experience, which means minimal decor is required, and many of the older establishments still use chalkboard menus.

A family diner concept usually requires more capital. These restaurants are typically larger, carry bigger menus, and need more kitchen equipment, with setup costs generally starting at $500,000 and above. There’s a growing range of machinery that enables kitchen automation across both hot and cold functions, from gyoza steam-and-sear machines and timed ramen noodle cookers to sushi rice ball makers and rice mixers. This equipment isn’t cheap, ranging anywhere from $5,000 to tens of thousands per unit, but it meaningfully reduces labour costs and standardises quality across outlets. Some international brands actively prioritise maximising automation wherever possible.

Fine dining Japanese restaurants sit in a different category altogether. With premium ingredients, specialised equipment, interior design, and highly skilled manpower, setup costs can easily run into the millions. Minimalist art pieces, hinoki wood tables, and chinaware priced at thousands per piece are standard at this level. Some restaurants go further still.

One thing many investors underestimate is that setup cost is only the start. Owners should be financially prepared to absorb losses for at least a year, particularly if the restaurant takes time to build a stable customer base. The prudent approach is to have sufficient funds to cover at least six to twelve months of lease payments, total forecasted labour costs, ingredient spend, and any recurring service or equipment fees - before the first customer walks in.

When sourcing a unit, operators occasionally come across spaces available for takeover, where both parties agree on what transfers and at what price. Assignors typically want to sell the business as a whole, including the brand. The incoming party should go in with clear eyes about any existing issues and make a deliberate call on what they’re prepared to absorb: the remaining lease, usable equipment, fittings and fixtures, and existing software such as POS and CRM systems are the usual items on the table. A good takeover is rare, but there are cases where a new operator with stronger capital has picked up a well-structured business that simply ran out of runway, and returned it to profitability within a few months.

Q2: How does ingredient sourcing differ across these restaurant tiers?

Ingredient sourcing varies considerably depending on the level of the restaurant. Fine dining operations typically require the best seasonal produce available, often sourced directly from Japan or through specialist suppliers. A head chef opening their own place would usually arrive with an established supplier network built over years in the industry.

Family diners and izakayas take a more balanced approach, targeting the best achievable ratio of cost to quality rather than absolute standards. Dashi illustrates this well. It’s one of the foundational stocks in Japanese cuisine, and how a kitchen makes it tends to reflect where it sits in the market. In a fine dining restaurant, dashi is typically prepared from scratch using kombu and bonito flakes. An izakaya might use a high-quality dashi pouch, which delivers a meaningful step up from basic instant powders while remaining practical for a busy service environment. Family diners commonly rely on hondashi powder or shirodashi concentrate, which is both efficient and consistent at the volumes a high-cover kitchen demands. The approach at each tier isn’t arbitrary — it’s calibrated to what the operational reality actually requires.

Q3: How does manpower planning differ across these restaurant concepts?

Manpower structure varies significantly depending on the concept. For family diners, scalability and consistency are the overriding priorities. The menu and operations need to be designed for reliable replication across future outlets, and kitchen automation plays a supporting role in making that achievable.

For a 50-seater family diner, a typical team might include a head chef, a sous chef, a restaurant manager, an assistant manager, and between one and three kitchen and front-of-house staff respectively. Since family diners are built around operational efficiency rather than luxury service, QR-code self-ordering systems are commonly used to reduce front-of-house headcount.

Izakayas tend to run leaner. A 25-seater might operate with just a manager, a head chef, and one or two dual-role staff who handle billing, drinks preparation, food service, and occasionally dishwashing within a single shift.

Fine dining manpower depends heavily on the specific concept. A chef-led sushi restaurant like Sushi Sato might run with the main chef, two front-of-house staff, and one or two kitchen assistants. The limitation of this model is that the concept is built around a specific individual rather than a replicable system. You can expand a family diner format across locations. You can’t open a second Sushi Sato without Chef Sato.

Q4: What financial mistakes do new restaurant owners often make?

The most common mistake is underestimating the capital required, and proceeding anyway with the expectation that strong sales will eventually make up the difference. One case illustrates what happens when that logic fails. The director behind a Build-Your-Own-Bowl concept had exhausted most of his available capital during the setup phase, and within three months of opening, the business had run out of funds to continue.

At that point, the options had narrowed to three: take on additional loans and keep operating, find a buyer to take over, or cease operations immediately and liquidate at a loss. The third was chosen. What followed wasn’t a clean exit. The lease was terminated under a writ of possession requiring the premises to be vacated within two days. Software and equipment subscriptions were cancelled with associated penalties. Storage had to be arranged for assets that couldn’t be liquidated in time. Equipment was sold at heavily discounted prices under time pressure. Staff and service providers still had to be paid through notice periods or compensated via early termination fees. What began as a capital shortfall became a cascading set of costly and time-sensitive problems.

Poor fund allocation is a related and equally common issue. Experienced operators tend to be disciplined about spend even on expensive projects, opting for second-hand kitchen equipment when it makes financial sense. Many work with suppliers that carry both new and refurbished stock alongside custom stainless steel fabrication - companies like A&C Technologies, for instance - which allows them to balance cost and quality without giving up too much on either. Some operators also source through Facebook or Telegram F&B groups, where closing restaurants offload equipment at significant discounts, with costs reduced further when buying in bulk. The contrast with first-time owners is consistent: new operators frequently favour brand-new equipment because it looks impressive. That difference in mindset often marks the line between a seasoned operator and someone who hasn’t done this before.

Menu planning is another area where the calculation is more involved than it appears. A common shortcut is to multiply ingredient cost by four to target a 25% COGS figure, but true food cost also has to account for ingredient wastage, disposables like packaging and cutlery, electricity and water consumption, and actual yield after cooking. Each factor seems small in isolation. Left untracked, they accumulate and compound over time.

Q5: What early warning signs should investors watch for before committing to a restaurant?

There are a few practical benchmarks operators use to test feasibility before committing. Rent should ideally stay within 15 to 20% of projected revenue. Labour cost typically sits at around 20 to 25% depending on the concept. Food cost should fall within 25 to 30%, adjusted for the restaurant’s positioning. If any of these figures don’t hold up from the start, the concept is already under pressure before a single cover has been served.

Site vetting is one of the most important steps in the process, and it requires a clear alignment between three things: the concept, the target audience, and the selling price. A misalignment in any one of them creates problems. Opening a pork-focused restaurant in a predominantly Muslim area is an obvious case of concept-audience mismatch. But the errors are often subtler than that.

Japanese concepts carry additional considerations. Customers tend to be more attuned to quality, sourcing, and execution than with many other cuisines, and expectations sit higher as a result. A sushi omakase placed in a location without strong dining culture or sufficient disposable income carries significantly more risk than the same concept elsewhere, because the model depends on trust, repeat patronage, and a genuine appreciation for the craft. Casual Japanese formats like ramen or donburi are more accessible but face heavier competition and sharper pricing pressure.

Price-location fit matters even when the concept and audience are otherwise aligned. A restaurant charging $100 per person in a heartland mall might draw curious first-timers, but the return rate will be low. And when a particular concept type has repeatedly opened and closed in the same location, that track record should be taken seriously. Landlords sometimes offer attractive rental terms to diversify their tenant mix, but if a specific category has failed several times in the same space, it’s usually safer to treat that pattern as a signal rather than an opportunity.

Launching or running an F&B business? Launchlabs Kitchens provides full-service or modular F&B venture services - conceptualisation, menu R&D, visual content, media outreach and more - for F&B operators across all stages. Reach out to Dominic at launchlabkitchens@gmail.com.

The madeleine is a strange thing to build a reputation on. It is a French shell cake, butter-rich and delicate, the kind of thing you expect to find in a patisserie window rather than alongside squid linguine and serious pasta.

At Mervyn’s Madeleines, it sits on the menu as both a signature and a founding document, the product that started everything, still selling years later. Mervyn Chua is 27. He runs the operation mostly himself, cooks the bulk of the food, and is about to open a second outlet. The smell of the madeleine fresh from the oven, he says, still does something to him. “It’s the smell of the very first thing I ever baked,” he says. “It still feels like validation.”

That it took a French pastry to get him here, and not a finance degree, which was the other serious option, is the part of the story worth sitting with.

His father’s path

Mervyn’s father went to Raffles Institution. He played rugby there during what Mervyn describes as the glory years, and he did well. When Mervyn sat for his PSLE, the path was already mostly laid out, and getting into RI through the through-school admission exercise felt less like a choice than a natural consequence of being the eldest son in a family where the template already existed. “I knew going there would be good,” he says. “People look upon you with respect. It goes a long way.”

The same logic ran through the rest of the family. His father retired from a Chinese bank. His mother was an accountant before she stepped back to raise the children. Both sisters went into finance. The unspoken assumption was that Mervyn would follow a similar track and build his career in something that made sense on paper.

Even then, he knew that he hated it. Numbers bored him in secondary school and he couldn’t see how spending four years in university studying them would change that. But he didn’t know what else there was, and so he kept going.

Around the same period, his squash game plateaued. Classmates who had picked up the sport after him were placing higher. His grades moved in the same direction. What he can say is that for the next few years he was going through the motions on a track that had stopped making sense, trying harder without anything shifting, waiting for a silver lining that didn’t arrive.

The switch

Mervyn was 18 and sitting his A levels when Gordon Ramsay opened his first restaurant in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands.

His classmates were talking about it, and Mervyn watched the YouTube videos. He kept watching. For the first time in years he could sit still for hours - a sharp contrast to the restlessness that made studying feel like a physical ordeal.

He started cooking with his grandmother at night after school, working through simple dishes and feeling a pull he had never felt before in any area of study. He started watching Jamie Oliver too, and realised that Ramsay wasn’t an exception, but a way into an entire industry he simply had never been made aware of.

What Ramsay gave him was more than inspiration. It was a proof of concept: here was someone who had earned three Michelin stars and built a global restaurant empire simultaneously. The possibility that you could pursue the craft at the highest level and still build something commercially serious wasn’t something the conventional path offered him. “It showed you what success could look like,” he says. “Something so different from what was available to me before.”

He went into National Service carrying cookbooks, three or four at a time, stuffed into his bag every time he booked in. He was known for it in the bunk. On duty, when there was time, he read them.

After NS, the decision sharpened quickly. Culinary school cost S$7,500 after subsidy, against five figures for a university degree. The comparison sat with him in a practical way: if he tried it and it was wrong, he could just leave after one term.

His course internship landed him at La Brasserie at Fullerton Bay, one of Singapore’s foremost steak restaurants, and the gap between cooking at home and cooking in a professional kitchen became real to him in a way it hadn’t been before. There, he learned what pace actually meant in a commercial setting.

While still in culinary school, home-based business regulations restricted him to pastries only. He considered cookies, then settled on madeleines, which he judged to be more scalable, more distinctive, and better in presentation. He baked batches, gave them away, gathered feedback, and then decided he needed a customer base beyond his immediate circle. So he walked into the residential college common rooms at NUS with a tray of samples and started offering them to strangers, knocking on meeting room doors, approaching people at tables, absorbing the roughly one-in-five interactions that went badly and pushing through to the next.

The move netted him over a hundred followers in three days. No marketing plans, just straigt-up door-to-door with many a madeleine to share.

Bangkok

Opening Mervyn’s Madeleines gave him something he had been building toward for years. It also revealed a significant blind spot that took time and a tough lesson to fully understand.

The first two years were driven almost entirely by research and development. New dishes appeared constantly, and the menu evolved according to his curiosity as much as anything else. He also expended most of his energy on the craft of the food rather than the mechanics of the business. Consequently, items that spread inventory thin and did not justify their margins stayed on longer than they should have. “I was overly chef-driven,” he says now. “I think I limited my own growth because of it.” He was not running a failing restaurant, but the gap between loving what he was doing and building something that could scale was wider than he had understood.

In 2023, he took that gap with him to Bangkok, where he opened a western restaurant of his own. It ran for eight months. The market proved harder to read than expected, a second location never materialised, and by end October he had decided to cut his losses and return to Singapore.

When he came back, the order of priorities had shifted. He did his projections properly. He focused on marketing in a way he had not before. He removed items from the menu that spread inventory too thin and assessed dishes for operational efficiency alongside taste. The chef-brain didn’t go anywhere, he is clear about that, but it needed to run first, to exhaust itself in the early years on iteration and refinement, before the business discipline could be built around what remained. “I got it out of my system,” he says. “Now I have enough dishes I’m happy with. The focus is on growing it properly.”

What comes next

The squid linguine has been on the menu since the beginning, one of the first four dishes he ever served. He encountered the dish first on YouTube, then tasted a version at Jamie’s Italian, and over the six years since it has been revised multiple times.

Mervyn still considers it his favourite dish on the menu, and the reason he gives is not simply that it tastes good. It’s the dish that’s moved with him through every phase of the business, from the early R&D years to the tighter, more disciplined operation that exists now.

His family’s position has also shifted alongside the business. His father, once quietly doubtful, is more assured. His mother helps with the accounting, covers the blind spots he still carries, and he is grateful for it in the way you are grateful for something that held when everything else was uncertain.

Next up is MM Diner, a second outlet at 5A Ridgewood Close modelled after American diners, for which there is already a waiting list.

For Mervyn. the path laid out for him ran in a completely different direction. But somewhere between the cookbooks in the NS bunk and the madeleine trays at NUS and the tough lesson of the first two years, he worked out what he was actually doing here. The craft and the business aren’t always comfortable together, but they’re not opposites either. He just knows now what order to run them in.

📌 Table Stakes examines the broad market trends shaping Southeast Asia's F&B scene. 

Sometime in 2027, a can of Tiger Beer will arrive at a hawker centre in Singapore. The gold will look the same, the roaring mascot unchanged, the lager cold and recognisable. The liquid inside will have been brewed in Malaysia or Vietnam, following Asia Pacific Breweries Singapore’s announcement on March 24 that it would phase out large-scale brewing at its Tuas facility by end-2027. Tiger Beer has been produced in Singapore since 1932, when it debuted as the country’s first locally brewed lager. After 95 years, production is shifting to regional breweries across the Causeway and further north.

Seven days after the Tiger announcement, Yeo Hiap Seng announced 25 retrenchments at its Senoko facility, consolidating can manufacturing to Malaysia. Two of Singapore’s most recognisable F&B names moved operations across the same border in the same news cycle, and both announcements were covered as separate stories. The connection between them received little attention.

What the economics have always said

Heineken’s managing director Kenneth Choo was candid about what drove the Tuas decision. He told the Straits Times that the company had been “at a cost disadvantage in Singapore for some time” and needed to “play catch-up with other importers,” noting that about half of all beer consumed in Singapore is already imported from lower-cost markets like China and Malaysia. The Tuas plant’s ageing equipment would cost as much to replace as building a new facility elsewhere in the region, making the case for staying difficult to justify on the numbers alone.

The cost pressures Choo described are not unique to brewing. Land in Singapore is expensive and finite, industrial leases are competitive, and labour costs have risen consistently alongside the broader cost of living. For manufacturers producing commodity or near-commodity food and beverage products, where margins are thin and volume is the primary lever for profitability, Singapore’s cost base has become increasingly difficult to absorb. The economics that once made local production logical - proximity to the domestic market, lower logistics costs, the practical advantages of making something close to where it is consumed - have eroded as regional supply chains matured and cross-border logistics became cheaper and more reliable.

What makes the Tiger case instructive is how long the company held on before making the move. The Tuas facility had been operating for nearly a century, and the decision to wind it down came only after the gap between Singapore’s cost structure and the rest of the region had widened to the point where the investment required to modernise the plant could not be justified against the savings available by moving production across the border. That timeline suggests the decision was not taken lightly, and also that the structural forces behind it had been building for far longer than the announcement implied.

Tiger is not a special case so much as the most visible recent example of a pattern that has been developing quietly for decades. Yeo’s built its first Malaysian factory in Johor Baru in 1971, responding to policy that encouraged domestic production across the border, and the centre of gravity for its manufacturing shifted to Malaysia gradually over the years that followed. Today, Yeo’s Malaysia serves as the primary production hub for the brand’s global distribution, supplying markets from Indonesia to Australia to Europe and the United States. The Senoko retrenchment last week fits within that longer trajectory rather than representing a sudden change in direction.

The restaurant version of the same story

The same dynamic shows up differently in the restaurant and cafe segment, where the constraint is not manufacturing cost but the economics of operating physical space. Sarnies, the homegrown cafe brand that built its identity in Singapore, now operates two outlets here and eight across Bangkok, where it has also launched a cocktail bar, a Latin American restaurant, and a salad concept. The brand was established and validated in Singapore. The business found room to grow in a market where rents are lower, commercial space is more available, and the margin structure allows for the kind of experimentation that is increasingly difficult to sustain here.

The structural pressures behind that decision are well-documented. Rising rents forced the closure of 3,000 F&B businesses in Singapore in 2024, the highest number since 2005, and the trend has continued into 2025 with monthly closures averaging 254 establishments. The lease renewal cycle is a particular point of vulnerability for operators who have invested years in building a customer base at a specific location, only to face rent increases of 10 to 30 percent or more when their term ends. For businesses already operating on margins of five to seven percent, those adjustments can be enough to make continued operation unviable regardless of how well the food is received.

What makes the restaurant version of this story different from the manufacturing one is that the exit is rarely framed as a structural response to Singapore’s cost environment. When a brand expands aggressively in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur while maintaining a minimal footprint at home, it tends to be presented as international ambition rather than domestic constraint. The two are not mutually exclusive, but the emphasis on opportunity abroad often obscures the degree to which difficulty at home is part of the same calculation.

What Singapore does, and what it doesn’t

What Singapore does well is distinct from what it has become too expensive to do here, and the Tiger case makes that distinction unusually visible. More than 95% of Tiger’s volume is already sold outside Singapore across more than 60 markets, meaning the domestic market has long been a marginal contributor to the brand’s commercial performance. What Singapore provides is something different: a base of operations for the people making decisions about how the brand is positioned, how it is marketed, and where it goes next. Heineken described this explicitly in its announcement, noting that Tiger Beer would continue to be “built and shaped” in Singapore as it grows its presence worldwide.

That role - brand stewardship, strategic direction, creative leadership - is one Singapore is well-positioned to hold. Its workforce is educated, English-speaking, and internationally oriented. Its position at the intersection of Southeast Asia’s major markets makes it a practical base for regional management. And the credibility that comes with having built a brand here, tested against a demanding and food-literate consumer population, carries genuine weight when that brand enters other markets. These are real advantages, and they explain why companies like Heineken continue to invest in Singapore-based capabilities even as they shift production elsewhere.

But the advantages that make Singapore a good place to manage a brand are different in kind from the advantages that once made it a good place to make things. As the region’s manufacturing infrastructure has developed and logistics networks have matured, the practical case for producing food and beverage goods in one of the world’s most expensive cities has become harder to make, particularly for products where the margin for cost savings is narrow and the consumer is unlikely to notice or care where the item was produced. The result is a growing divergence between where Singapore F&B brands are headquartered and where their products are actually made.

A designation of origin

Tiger began in 1932 as a practical response to geography. A locally brewed lager was cheaper, fresher, and more reliable than imported European beer for a trading port in the tropics, and the brand’s early success was built on that straightforward advantage. The origin and the product were the same thing. The beer was Singaporean because it was made here, and it was made here because making it here made sense.

Nearly a century later, both of those conditions have changed. Tiger has grown large enough that its Singaporean origin story travels with it into more than 60 markets regardless of where the liquid is produced, and the cost structure that once made local brewing the obvious choice now makes it the one that is hardest to sustain. The brand’s identity has, over time, become portable in a way that the economics of its production never were. Heineken’s decision to separate the two — keeping the brand in Singapore while moving the brewing out — is in that sense a recognition of something that was already true: that what makes Tiger Singaporean is no longer primarily a question of where it is made.

Yeo’s followed a version of the same arc over a longer timeline, with manufacturing gravitating toward Malaysia well before last week’s announcement formalised the latest shift at Senoko. Both brands remain Singaporean in the ways that are most legible to the world — in how they present themselves, in where their strategic decisions are made, in the origin stories they carry into international markets. What has changed, for both, is that the physical work of making their products has gradually moved to places where that work is cheaper to do, and the brands have remained intact through the transition. That pattern is likely to continue, and it raises a question worth sitting with: as more of Singapore’s most recognised F&B names shift operations elsewhere while retaining their Singapore identity, what exactly does it mean to call something a Singapore brand?

A plate of Hainanese curry rice lives and dies by its gravy. The good ones are rich and layered, with a depth that lingers well after the last bite. At Loo’s, that depth comes from a curry paste made entisrely from raw ingredients, no powder, no shortcuts, ground by hand and cooked in batches that take three days to produce. The recipe hasn’t changed in 80 years. Neither have the vendors.

Dawn Loo joined the stall full-time in 2025. She’s 30, holds a social work degree, and had a civil service job offer on the table when she made the call. She turned it down to be here at 5am, learning how to pack a plate.

The long way round

Dawn didn’t grow up wanting this.

As a child, she avoided the stall whenever she could. F&B felt unglamorous, the work dirty and thankless. The feeling crystallised early, in a primary school classroom, when a teacher asked students what their parents did for a living. Her friends’ parents were bankers, lawyers, doctors. Dawn’s dad was a hawker. Some of her classmates laughed.

She spent the next two decades building a different life. A degree in social work. A stint in academia. A career that had nothing to do with curry rice. It was only in her 20s that she gave the stall serious thought. Around 2023, she went back for a nine-month apprenticeship, mostly on the front line — cashiering, food packing, customer service. “At that time, I was quite certain I wouldn’t take over the business,” she recalls. She needed time to reassess. When she came back, the decision was clear.

She told her father she wanted to take over. He said no.

His reasoning was simple: he’d spent decades in the trade and knew exactly what it demanded. “He doesn’t want me to suffer,” Dawn says. It took persistence on her part, and a knee surgery on his, before he finally relented. By then she’d already secured a civil service job offer. She had every reason to take it. She came to Tiong Bahru instead.

Earning the room

When Dawn returned full-time in 2025, the reception was cautious. The stall ran with a team of older workers, most of them at or near retirement age. Her arrival read as a threat. With six people already at the stall, the concern was straightforward: was she there to replace someone?

She didn’t try to resolve it with words. She showed up at 5am. She learned to cook. She watched and waited. It took about six months before she sensed a shift, and when it came, it wasn’t verbal. “They will start to talk to me, or try to teach me things,” she says. “I can sense the difference in the attitude, the tone.”

The operational side presented its own version of the same challenge. Pricing at the stall had always been done from memory, the same way it had been done since her grandfather’s time. To Dawn, it was messy. To her father, it worked. “Change takes time,” she says. “It’s like, I’m this person who just came in all of a sudden. What’s wrong with you, right?” She knew better than to push.

Instead she started small. PayNow. A QR code for digital payments. Each time, she waited for the sales to reflect the change before proposing the next one. “When my dad sees the sales going up, that’s where he will trust me,” she said. A POS system, her most ambitious idea yet, is already mapped out in her head. The kitchen is too noisy for servers to hear orders clearly, she explains, and a ticketing system would fix that without sacrificing the human interaction she thinks hawker stalls can’t afford to lose. For now, it stays on the backburner. Six months in, two changes implemented. “Maybe when the right time comes, I’ll propose this again,” she says.

The 80-year recipe

Not everything is up for negotiation.

The curry paste is made from raw ingredients, ground by hand, cooked in batches that take three days to produce. The vendors are the same ones Dawn’s grandfather sourced from. The recipe hasn’t been touched in 80 years. “We cannot anyhow tweak, cannot anyhow change supplier, because it will affect the taste and the integrity of our recipe,” she says. “My dad has always emphasised: cannot take the shortcut, cannot choose a cheaper supplier.”

Dawn has made this position her own. Where she’s willing to push on operations, payments, and process, the food itself is a different matter. Cheaper options exist. The choice not to take them is made every day.

It’s a stance that sits uneasily against a broader problem Dawn is candid about: hawker food has been branded as cheap for so long that customers no longer know what it actually costs to make. The sambal prawn draws complaints about its price. The curry gravy draws questions about portion sizes. “They don’t understand the cost,” she says. “It’s all invisible to them.” The irony isn’t lost on her. The very things that make Loo’s curry rice worth eating — the raw ingredients, the three-day process, the refusal to cut corners — are precisely the things nobody sees.

Changing that narrative, Dawn believes, will require more than good food. “We need to start telling that story,” she says. Behind-the-scenes content, she thinks, is probably where it begins.

The next 20 years

Dawn is six months into running the stall full-time. Her growth ambitions are sequenced and deliberate.

Near term, the priority is simple: maintain the standard. “The most important thing right now is to maintain the standard and the quality,” she says. Evening service is a possibility. Food fairs, where she can experiment with more modern takes on curry rice, are on the table. Further out, more hawker stalls. And eventually, 10 to 15 years from now, something more upscale — a restaurant or fine dining offshoot, a completely separate branch that brings Hainanese curry rice into a different context entirely.

The idea she keeps coming back to, though, is food tours. Dawn wants to bring tourists into the stall, walk them through the process, show them why the curry takes three days. It’s partly commercial, partly something larger. Ask most people to name Singapore’s iconic dishes and they’ll say chicken rice, laksa, chilli crab. Hainanese curry rice, a dish that originated here, rarely makes the list. “Nobody will say curry rice,” she says. “I want to change that narrative.”

No tour operator has approached the stall. Dawn knows she’ll have to go looking. She’s used to not waiting to be asked. The goal she’s working toward is 100 years — 20 more than where the stall stands today. It’s an ambitious target, and she knows it. “I will try to make it work,” she says, “because I know what I want to achieve.”

At the end of our conversation, I ask Dawn what gives her the confidence that it’ll all come together. The 100-year mark. The food tours. The upscale offshoot a decade and a half away.

She laughs. “Maybe a bit delusional,” she says. “But I feel like it’s important to be delusional. So that you have the motivation to work towards it.”

It’s a candid admission from someone who has spent the last six months arriving before dawn, learning a trade she once found embarrassing, and negotiating her way into a room that wasn’t sure it wanted her. The delusion, if that’s what it is, has been remarkably well-organised so far.

The operator can’t tell you whether the person who just ordered has ordered before. They can’t tell you whether this customer has been ordering every Thursday for three months, or whether they tried the listing once after a promotion surfaced it. There’s no way to know.

The kitchen is run out of Smart City Kitchens, Singapore’s largest independent cloud kitchen operator. The operators there list across GrabFood, Foodpanda, and Deliveroo simultaneously, and all orders flow into one dashboard. They aren’t locked into a single platform’s infrastructure, the way merchants inside GrabKitchen or Deliveroo Editions were.

They still don’t know their customers.

The pitch

When GrabFood launched Singapore’s first GrabKitchen in Hillview in January 2020, Grab had already mapped the demand before inviting a single merchant in. In-app usage data showed that residents in Northwest Singapore were searching for bubble tea, mala, and Japanese food in far greater numbers than merchants were supplying.

Sai Alluri, then regional head of GrabKitchen, explained the approach in a DealStreetAsia interview: “We leverage customer insights derived from the Grab app across multiple verticals, as well as market research. This helps to identify locations with pent-up demand for cuisines and brands that are less accessible to consumers in an area.”

The second GrabKitchen, in Aljunied, was selected the same way. Grab’s in-app data had identified Japanese, Korean, and Western cuisines as having significantly higher consumer demand than merchant supply in the area.

Merchants who joined found the offer compelling. Fong Chak Ka, Vice-President of PUTIEN, reflected on joining GrabKitchen Aljunied in 2020: “While the cloud kitchen concept is very new to us, we can already see some benefits, such as managing lower overhead costs and having access to insights to what consumers expect from food delivery.”

What PUTIEN received, along with every other merchant inside GrabKitchen, was aggregate intelligence about the broader market. The data about their own customers stayed with Grab.

What the platform keeps

When a GrabFood order comes through, the operator sees a name, a delivery address, and the items ordered.

Grab retains the customer’s full order history across every merchant on the platform. Their neighbourhood. Their ordering frequency, average spend, and cuisine preferences over time. Whether they stopped ordering after a period of regular purchases, or whether a promotion brought them back. All of it accumulates with every order placed on any kitchen in the network.

That’s the same data Grab used to identify the demand gaps in Hillview and Aljunied. Every order a merchant processes adds to it. The merchant contributes to the picture and sees none of it.

Christine Li, then head of business development services at Cushman and Wakefield Singapore, described the situation in a 2021 EdgeProp article on Singapore’s cloud kitchen sector: “The virtual platforms take a substantial cut of the order as commission, reducing profitability. They are the new landlords in the digital age.”

A property landlord charges rent and controls the space. A platform charges commission and controls the customer relationship. Many operators who entered ghost kitchens to reduce their exposure to physical landlords found themselves taking on a different kind of exposure instead.

The first fight

The structural tension between delivery platforms and independent kitchen operators became visible early.

When Smart City Kitchens opened its first facility at the JTC Space in Tampines North in mid-2019, positioning itself as Singapore’s only cloud kitchen operator unaffiliated with any delivery platform, Deliveroo and GrabFood refused to list its tenants.

Shubham Gupta, co-founder of Biryani Box, had been in discussions with Deliveroo before moving into Smart City Kitchens. When the SCK facility launched, Deliveroo pulled out. “Deliveroo was initially working with us to set up, but when I called them, they said they will be pausing because they are not working with Smart City Kitchens,” Gupta told the Straits Times. He said being shut out of a percentage of the food delivery market “would really make it a challenge.”

Raj Group of Restaurants, which already had four outlets listed on Deliveroo, was told it wouldn’t be added to the platform from its new SCK unit, days before the facility launched. The Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore opened an investigation. The blockade was eventually lifted.

Choosing Smart City Kitchens gave operators independence from any single platform’s kitchen infrastructure. Orders still flowed through GrabFood, Foodpanda, and Deliveroo, but the customer data stayed with the platforms.

A re-acquisition trap

GrabFood and Foodpanda charge between 25 and 35 percent commission per order. Analysis of the ghost kitchen sector has put the annual revenue needed to break even - accounting for delivery app fees, kitchen rent, and marketing - at around $650,000.

Each time a customer orders from a ghost kitchen brand, the platform charges commission. When the same customer orders again, the platform charges commission again. If the customer stops ordering and a platform promotion later brings them back, the operator pays again for a customer whose departure they never detected, because there wasn’t a way to detect it.

There’s no notification when a regular stops ordering. There is no direct channel to reach them. The customer’s ordering history with a brand lives inside the platform’s systems, and the operator sees only the orders that come in.

Restaurants with physical premises have other ways to maintain customer relationships: walk-in traffic, regulars who recognise the staff, packaging with a contact number. A ghost kitchen brand that operates entirely within a delivery app has none of these. When the platform deprioritises the listing, order volume drops without any signal to the operator about why.

The scoreboard

According to a 2024 CNA report, the number of ghost kitchen facilities in Singapore fell from 18 at the 2021 peak to 11. Deliveroo closed its last two dark kitchen sites in Singapore in September 2024, citing rising operational costs and reduced demand from restaurant partners. On 25 February 2026, DoorDash announced it was winding down Deliveroo’s Singapore operations. The service ended on 4 March.

GrabKitchen shut down its Indonesia operations in December 2022, citing “inconsistent growth and a shift to an asset-light business model.” The Singapore facilities were never expanded beyond two sites.

In each case, the platforms exited the kitchen business while retaining the order data collected while running it. The years of transaction history from across the network - what customers ordered, how often, from which neighbourhoods, at which price points - remained with the platforms.

What operators are doing

Operators running ghost kitchens or shared kitchen facilities have been responding to the data gap in different ways.

Some have built direct customer channels alongside their platform presence: WhatsApp Business accounts, QR codes in packaging linking to a direct ordering page, small incentives for customers who order off-platform. The order volumes through these channels are modest compared to GrabFood or Foodpanda, but the customers reached this way are ones the operator has direct access to.

Others have prioritised listing across multiple platforms simultaneously. Running across GrabFood, Foodpanda, and Deliveroo, as Smart City Kitchens operators do, means no single platform controls the entire customer relationship. It doesn’t change what data the operator holds, but it reduces dependence on any one platform’s algorithm.

A smaller group has added physical touchpoints: a hawker stall, a pickup counter. These create customer interactions that do not pass through a platform.

Oddle, the Singapore-based online ordering platform, charges merchants 10% commission - roughly a third of what the major delivery apps charge - and routes full customer data to the restaurant after each transaction. “When a customer transacts through Oddle, the data is shared with the restaurant and they have full ownership of it,” co-founder Jonathan Lim has said. Swiss Rosti Corner by Marche Movenpick, operating out of Smart City Kitchens Tampines, lists on Oddle alongside Foodpanda. Oddle’s user base is far smaller than GrabFood’s, so it functions less as a discovery channel and more as a way to retain customers already found through the major platforms.

None of these approaches gives operators the same depth of customer data that the delivery platforms hold. The platforms have been building these profiles since 2018 or earlier, across every kitchen and every merchant on the network. What operators can do is ensure that some portion of their customer interactions stays with them.

Ghost kitchens reduced the cost of entering Singapore’s F&B market. Operators could test a concept in a new neighbourhood without a full renovation, carry lower rent, and run a leaner team. Many built real businesses on the model.

Every order that came in through GrabFood or Foodpanda gave the platform more information about the customer and gave the operator an address and a ticket to cook. Over time, the platform’s picture of what each customer likes, how often they order, and what brings them back became more detailed. The operator’s impression stayed roughly the same.

The platforms have started winding down the kitchen side of the business. The data side isn’t going anywhere.

📌 Table Stakes examines the broad market trends shaping Southeast Asia's F&B scene. 

He was asleep when his phone rang.

A colleague was calling to tell him that The Providore - where he’d worked for more than five years - was shutting down. That morning. He rushed to the Downtown Gallery outlet, where most of the staff had gathered. No one from management was there. A woman none of them recognised handed out forms listing each employee’s notice period and the salary they were owed. They were told the money could take between six and twelve months to reach them. By the time he arrived, the company had already posted its farewell on Instagram.

He told Mothership he was shocked. He said many of his colleagues were angry. Weeks before the closure, he noticed management quietly clearing wine bottles and liquor from the outlets. Outlet managers were called in the night before and told to bring company laptops and devices to the Downtown Gallery location. Nobody told the staff what that meeting was about

On LinkedIn, Bruce Chapman, The Providore’s former managing director between 2012 to 2024, said he did not have the context to comment. SingFire Capital, one of the acquiring parties, said it’d transferred its entire shareholding to Vino Vibe on 30 April 2025 and has not been involved since. Vino Vibe has said nothing. The liquidation company, ClearView Associates, is handling enquiries.

Nobody’s lying. And that’s the problem.

The Same Story, Again

The Providore is not an isolated case. It is the most recent entry in a pattern that Singapore’s F&B industry has been running for at least two years.

Twelve Cupcakes closed on 29 October 2025. About 80 workers were still on shift when liquidators arrived at their outlets. That evening, they received a WhatsApp message telling them their employment had ended with immediate effect. They were told they would not receive payment until liquidation concluded — a process estimated at six months. Rajesh, a 37-year-old Indian national who worked there, described the situation to Eatbook plainly: “I also have a family of six to feed back home. The fact that this came out of nowhere — I really feel that the owners have abandoned us.”

Half of the Twelve Cupcakes workforce were Singaporeans or permanent residents. The other half held S-Pass or work permits. Under Singapore’s immigration rules, S-Pass holders whose permits are cancelled have 30 days to secure new employment before they must leave the country. Work permit holders have seven.

Before Twelve Cupcakes, there was Jollibean. Workers at multiple outlets arrived in late 2024 to find stores shuttered and repossessed, with no prior notice. A 68-year-old part-time worker at the Pioneer MRT branch, who had worked there for five to six years, was told to close up the moment she walked in. The company owed her more than a month’s wages and three months of CPF contributions. She told CNA: “At first, we worked so hard and did not get paid, so we were very emotional. Now I think, just forget it. I will just treat it as charity.” By September 2025, Jollibean’s director had pleaded guilty in court to 34 charges under the CPF Act. The company was fined $68,000.

In each case, the response from institutions followed the same sequence. MOM opened an investigation. NTUC said it would extend support to union members. FDAWU issued a statement. A liquidator was appointed. Workers were directed to file claims with the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management. The machinery moved. Slowly.

Workers are always last to know

Singapore law requires employers to pay final salaries within three working days of dismissal. Employers with ten or more staff must notify MOM within five days of a retrenchment. Both rules exist on paper. What the law does not require is that workers be told what is coming before it arrives.

The result is a system where workers are always last to know and first to absorb the consequences. The five-year Providore employee noticed the stock being moved. The Jollibean worker noticed the store going quiet. The Twelve Cupcakes staff noticed things were tight. Workers notice. They are in the building every day. What they lack is any legal basis to act on what they notice early enough for it to matter.

Ownership transfers make the information gap worse. After Vino Vibe took full control of The Providore in April 2025, the anonymous employee told Mothership that working hours climbed from 44 hours a week to between 60 and 72. Staff gatherings and benefits were cut. Workers stayed — many had mortgages, families, and, in some cases, work passes that tied their right to remain in Singapore to their employer. When the business failed under its new owners, they had no standing to demand answers from a founder who had long since exited, or from investors who had transferred their shares months ago.

What needs to change

Community worker Suraendher Kumarr from Workers Make Possible has pointed to three concrete fixes: require employers to notify unions and workers before closure decisions are executed, not after; make company directors personally liable for unpaid wages; and introduce a statutory fund to support retrenched workers — including migrant workers — while they find new employment.

None of these proposals require new institutions or significant spending. They require political will to prioritise the people at the bottom of the org chart, rather than the creditors at the top.

The man who rushed to Downtown Gallery on the morning of 9 March worked at The Providore for more than five years. He stayed through the ownership change, through the longer hours, through the stripped benefits. When it ended, he was handed a form by someone he had never met, in a building that management had quietly emptied the night before.

He is still waiting to be paid.

📌 Table Stakes is a bi-weekly analysis that examines the broad market trends shaping Southeast Asia's F&B scene. 

Go to Singapore’s Tiong Bahru Market on a Tuesday at seven in the morning.

The wet market downstairs is already three hours in. Fishmongers are wrapping orders. The tofu uncle is restocking. An auntie haggles over kangkong. When she is done, she walks upstairs, takes a seat, and orders her usual kopi. The stall owner already knows what she wants.

That sequence — wet market errand, then breakfast — is how Singapore’s hawker centres were designed to work. It is also what most of the country’s newest hawker centres were built without.

The wrong diagnosis

The standard explanation for why hawker centres struggle covers aggressive rents, soaring ingredient costs, ageing hawkers, and razor-thin margins. All of these issues are real.

But they don’t explain the root of the struggle. Chinatown Complex, Singapore’s largest hawker centre with over 260 stalls, draws long queues throughout the day; Tiong Bahru Market is one of Singapore’s busiest, particularly at breakfast and lunch. The centres that are genuinely struggling are the newer ones, built since 2011 in outer estates like Hougang, parts of Jurong West, and newer towns up north and west.

The problem with those hawker centres follows a very specific pattern. The crowds stream in at lunch, but these joints are virtually dead quiet in the mornings.

Clearly, something is missing from the mornings.

Groceries, then makan

When Singapore’s government built hawker facilities alongside wet markets from the 1960s onward, the pairing was deliberate. The official reason was hygiene — getting street hawkers into regulated spaces. But an economic logic came with it.

The wet market gave residents a reason to leave the flat before sunrise. Buying the day’s fish and vegetables was the first errand. Breakfast upstairs was the second. The two were bundled into one trip. Done often enough, the trip became routine. The same faces at the same stalls, the same kopi order without asking.

This is what the wet market was providing to hawker floors. National Geographic describes the morning hawker scene as seniors gathering to read papers and sip from saucers. Hawkers greet regulars and remember what they order. These people didn’t decide to visit a hawker centre that morning. They went to buy fish, and breakfast came with it.

A breakfast-only stall runs on exactly this kind of crowd. A chwee kueh stall or kaya toast counter has a four to five hour window. Stalls at Tiong Bahru like Lor Mee 178 draw queues from opening until early afternoon, then stop. There’s no dinner service to recover losses. If the morning crowd is thin, the day’s already over.

Since 2011, the Singapore government has opened 14 new hawker centres. Twelve of them have no attached wet market. The official position, stated in parliament, is that new hawker centres will generally not include a market section, given the availability of supermarkets and HDB produce shops. But the supermarket argument only addresses produce access. Two other assumptions appear to underpin how new centres were planned, even if never stated explicitly.

On produce, the official reasoning is that supermarkets will fill the gap. But as Singapore University of Technology and Design Associate Professor Lyle Fearnley notes, supermarkets serve younger working people who cannot shop on weekday mornings — a different crowd from wet markets entirely. NEA’s own data shows most wet market patrons are 60 years old and above, and they come early. A supermarket open at eight in the evening doesn’t produce a breakfast crowd at seven in the morning.

The second assumption is that nearby residents will show up. New centres were planned around residential catchment size. But proximity alone doesn’t create habit. Ci Yuan in Hougang and Bukit Panjang Hawker Centre have both been reported as struggling with low daytime footfall. The wet market doesn’t just bring people nearby — it gives them a reason to routinely leave home in the first place.

The final assumption is that MRT access naturally generates foot traffic. That logic applies for lunch and dinner (sometimes), given that MRT stations deliver commuter spikes during rush hour. On the other hand, wet markets catered to slow, local morning traffic from people who had just finished getting their groceries, and were in no hurry to head off elsewhere. These customers are precisely who breakfast stalls need.

What the exceptions reveal

Tiong Bahru has a wet market below the food centre. Chinatown Complex has one in the basement. Both are among Singapore’s most consistently patronised centres.

Two of the 14 new centres also have wet markets: Fernvale and Bukit Panjang. What happened at Bukit Panjang is particularly instructive.

Bukit Panjang opened in 2015 with a hawker floor and a wet market. Things worked out at first, until Then a minimart on the same floor as the wet market closed in 2018. Within months, wet market vendors reported foot traffic collapsing and sales dropping by up to 50 per cent. Seafood that used to sell out in one to two hours sat unsold at the end of the day. The minimart had been an anchor errand, and its closure cost the wet market spillover traffic that sustained it. Consequently, the hawker floor above felt the same effect.

Kampung Admiralty, a newer centre in Woodlands, had a similar setup: a wet market below the hawker floor, but also complete with elderly housing, a medical centre, a childcare centre, and direct MRT access. The building was designed as an integrated community space, with light flowing from the hawker floor down into the wet market below — a full ecosystem of morning errands for the population most likely to be there before eight. Kampung Admiralty’s success stems from how the centre gives residents multiple reasons to show up before the lunch rush. The struggling centres have none of that.

But wait - haven’t Lau Pa Sat, Amoy Street Food Centre, and Old Airport Road thrived without wet markets? Yes, but the catch is that all three are near the CBD, drawing office workers and tourists at volumes a neighbourhood centre in a new outer estate cannot match. These CBD joints compensate for the weak morning demand with a different pull - decades of reputation, iconic stalls, high-density daytime population. New outer-estate neighbourhood centres have none of that, and the planning framework doesn’t give them a substitute.

A self-reinforcing decline

There are 83 wet markets left in Singapore, and the trend is pessimistically downward. Younger residents prefer supermarkets. Stallholders are ageing — NEA reports the median age of market stallholders is now 63. Operating hours are shrinking.

Singapore’s government has treated wet market decline as a separate issue from hawker viability, but they’ve always affected each other. When wet market attendance drops, so does the morning crowd upstairs. Fewer regulars means the breakfast stall earns less. If it closes, there’s one fewer reason to come to the centre at all. Wet market attendance drops further. The Bukit Panjang case clearly illustrated this relationship.

The breakfast hawker sits at the end of this chain with the least margin for error. Prep starts at two in the morning. Dishes cost two to four dollars. Margins are tightening and so is their operating window. Few pivot to delivery, and none can count on the evening service to make up for weak morning demand. These stalls need the kind of regular, local, unhurried morning crowd that the wet market reliably produced. They can’t survive on transit footfall or passing lunch patrons. They’re already disappearing from centres where the bundle was broken, and holding on in the ones where it remains intact.

Singapore has committed a billion dollars to hawker centre upgrades and new builds. The NEA has acknowledged that footfall and patronage are equally important alongside costs, and that centres in good locations do well. Kampung Admiralty is what that looks like in practice. But good location, in that sense, means something specific: a place with multiple community anchors that give people a reason to be there before noon.

What’s missing from most new centres is a morning anchor: a specific reason for someone to leave their flat before sunrise, do an errand, and end up sitting at a hawker stall with nowhere to be. Without that, breakfast stalls will struggle to find reprieve.

📌 Burnt Ends is a series that turns F&B operator mistakes into learning lessons.

Note: This week's case study is based on a conversation with a source privy to Strait Grains' operations and finances. I've reached out to the founder for comment at the time of writing but did not get a response. As is standard practice, additional sources are always sought before publication, and individuals beyond the primary source will be referred to without attribution.

Singapore has never had a shortage of people who want to eat well, but for a long time, eating well and eating enjoyably felt like two entirely different pursuits.

The push toward healthier eating had been building for years. The Health Promotion Board’s Healthier Dining Programme saw healthier meal sales triple between 2014 and 2017, from 7.5 million to 26 million annually, and by December 2022, 60 per cent of stalls at hawker centres and coffee shops had at least one qualifying option on the menu. By the early 2020s, a growing segment of Singaporeans was going further still — actively tracking macros, reading nutrition labels, and building meals around specific dietary goals, with Euromonitor’s 2024 consumer survey finding that 37 per cent of respondents were managing what they ate specifically to control their weight.

The build-your-own bowl concept had emerged as the most natural commercial response to that behaviour. Daily Cut and Grains & Co. had already built strong followings in the space by the time Strait Grains entered the picture.

Its founder, Elvin, wasn’t approaching this purely as a business opportunity. He had been working through his own weight loss journey and understood something that most people in this space eventually learn: that exercise contributes, but food is where the real work happens, and that staying in a caloric deficit is everything.

Strait Grains was his answer to that — a build-your-own bowl concept that aimed to make eating healthily feel less like a chore, with food that was genuinely tasty and priced accessibly enough for the everyday lunch crowd. The timing was right, the demand was there, and the competition in his corner of the market was thin. What let the business down had nothing to do with any of that.

What Strait Grains got right

Strait Grains understood its customer well. Office workers in Singapore’s knowledge economy are calorie-conscious but time-poor, and they’re willing to pay a modest premium for lunch that doesn’t feel like a compromise. The menu was built around that reality, with bowls priced between $9 and $12 for most configurations and a staff discount that kept the concept accessible to the core audience.

A QR code-based pre-order system through the FMB POS platform allowed the kitchen to begin preparing orders from 10:15am, effectively extending the productive window ahead of the 11am lunch rush. At peak, the kitchen was turning out 25 to 35 bowls an hour, with two staff on the assembly line completing each bowl in one to three minutes. On its strongest days, Strait Grains served close to 200 bowls across a single lunch service.

The location was a deliberate choice, though one with a built-in ceiling. Strait Grains took the shopfront unit within a Smart City Kitchens-operated space at Alice@Mediapolis — a hybrid ghost kitchen and dining concept that paired a private dining area with a shared communal one. Within the five-building cluster of Grab HQ, Infinite Studios, Mediacorp, ST Telemedia, and Alice itself, the only other healthy bowl operator in the immediate vicinity closed right after the lunch service, which meant Strait Grains effectively had the afternoon to itself.

But Biopolis doesn’t draws walk-ins - it’s accessible only by car, or a 10 to 15-minute walk from the nearest MRT station. Shuttle services from the station also required an office access pass. The customer base was, from day one, almost entirely the workers in those five buildings and no one else.

Elvin had planned to mitigate this by running a meal prep operation using the additional kitchen units available at the back of the Smart City Kitchens space. That would have extended the business’s reach beyond the lunch window, but that stage was never reached.

At the same time, not every item on the menu was pulling its weight equally. Pulled beef and sous vide chicken were popular but prep-heavy, with the full brining and sous vide process taking nearly three to four hours per batch. The feta scrambled eggs presented a different kind of problem — customers loved it, but the item couldn’t be batch-prepped beyond 20 portions at a time without being overcooked. Its margins were also eroded by the exorbitant cost of the feta cheese itself.

An insider familiar with Strait Grains’ operations described the broader tension: dishes that appeared profitable on a spreadsheet can be bleeding money in the kitchen without anyone noticing until it’s too late. Strait Grains planned to address this issue , but it never had the time to get there.

What really put the lights out

But as it turns out, what really broke Strait Grains wasn’t operational complexity. . It was financial planning - or the lack therof, and the issue was visible well before the business had served its first customer.

The initial capital Elvin raised was never sufficient to cover what the business actually cost to set up and run. Consulting fees, branding, renovation, and kitchen equipment leasing pushed total expenditure well beyond what he had started with, leaving a gap that could only be financed through loans. A fixed monthly leasing cost began accumulating from day one regardless of how many bowls were sold.

The same company insider noted that Strait Grains’ capital structure had always been precarious, with the operating plan appearing to assume that revenue would cover obligations from early on. That left little tolerance for the softening that almost every new F&B concept experiences once opening promotions wind down. Strait Grains ran a one-for-one medium bowl promotion for its first two weeks, which generated healthy traffic, but when regular pricing took over and volumes dipped, there was nothing to fall back on.

The situation was made worse by how Elvin chose to manage his loan repayments once the deficit began to accumulate. Rather than covering rent, labour, and supplier invoices first, he prioritised paying back his own loans. An insider flagged this as problematic — suppliers, landlords, and employees carry a prior claim that a director’s personal loans do not.

Running Strait Grains alongside a full-time job meant that the monthly deficit, while not catastrophic in absolute terms, began to eat into his personal income. When that pressure became difficult to absorb, Elvin finally made the decision to close.

What they would have done differently

According to a source with direct knowledge of the business, Elvin had been presented with options at each major decision point and understood the risks attached to each, including explicit warnings that the business did not have enough runway to reach break-even. He proceeded anyway. When the moment came that additional funds were needed to keep going, there were none.

It’s a pattern that plays out often in early-stage F&B, where founders who believe deeply in what they are building tend to treat capital warnings as overcaution rather than fact.

Strait Grains built something customers wanted. The food was considered, the operations were lean and competent, and the positioning within the Biopolis ecosystem was as defensible as a concept with a captive lunchtime audience could hope for. What the business could not survive was entering the market underfunded, without the reserves needed to absorb the inevitable dip between opening buzz and sustainable revenue.

📌 Burnt Ends is a series that turns F&B operator mistakes into learning lessons.

When Shaker Lakers first opened at Yishun Park Hawker Centre in 2019, they had a compelling proposition: restaurant-quality burgers at hawker-friendly prices.

The duo behind it, Michael Quinn and Gillian Pua, had met while working at Marche Singapore at VivoCity. Michael, an Irish chef with 14 years of experience in New York City, and Gillian, a Singaporean, brought more than culinary skills to the venture. They brought supplier relationships developed during their time at Marche, including connections to suppliers like Meat Co. that serviced reputable restaurants.

For 4 years, it worked. Those supplier connections and temporary COVID-era pricing allowed them to serve premium ingredients while keeping costs manageable, and customers responded enthusiastically.

But the economics were built on foundations they couldn’t control. When supplier pricing normalized and input costs climbed, the margins disappeared. Add in a harsh physical environment, operational complexity, and a second venue at the Airbus Training Center that couldn’t compensate for mounting pressures, and the fragility became undeniable.

This is the story of what happens when a business model depends on temporary advantages that can’t be sustained once market conditions shift.

What Shaker Lakers got right

Shaker Lakers understood their value proposition from day one: restaurant-quality food at a highly affordable rate. During COVID, this positioning became their identity, backed by the supplier relationships that allowed them to access premium ingredients at manageable costs. The temporary pricing window during COVID made this economically viable in ways it wouldn’t be later.

Their menu focus was customer-driven. When burgers clearly emerged as the hero product, the item people came for and talked about, they tightened the menu around burgers and pasta, cutting tedious items that didn’t move. Gilian recalls the turning point: “It was [when customers kept coming for burgers] that actually made us realize how much everybody loves a burger. Let’s change.” They had started with a full menu, but “burgers really took off, and that really made us famous,” Michael recalled.

The hawker stall model itself was a smart entry strategy. Compared to renting a full restaurant space, the stall represented a lower-risk way to test the concept and build a following without overcommitting capital upfront.

Beyond the food, Shaker Lakers built something harder to quantify: genuine community connections. Michael remembers one of the unexpected highlights: “Seeing these kids for six, seven years from starting, suddenly they’re in secondary school. They’re bigger than you... It’s quite good to be remembered.”

The community Shaker Lakers built hasn’t forgotten them. In one weekend alone, three former customers texted Michael to check in on how he’s doing. It’s a reminder that Singapore’s local food scene, for all its challenges, remains a small, passionate community where people genuinely care about the operators trying to make a living.

What really put the lights out

The supplier pricing window that gave Shaker Lakers their early advantage eventually closed. The lower prices they had benefited from during COVID normalized as the market stabilized, and when the lock-in period ended, input costs rose sharply.

But customer expectations didn’t rise with them. Michael recalls the bind they found themselves in: “We as a hawker, there’s some limitations on hawker prices you can charge. We kind of had hit the limit already, and the food costs kept going up.”

When they increased prices to offset rising costs, some customers didn’t come back.

The physical environment at Yishun Park Hawker Centre became a sustainability problem. The heat and smoke weren’t just uncomfortable for customers, they took a toll on the operators themselves. Michael developed arthritis in his knees from standing all day, and his feet also became swollen from the constant grind. “Some of our customers also preferred to do takeaway because they found the environment too smoky,” he explained.

For Gilian, experiencing the conditions firsthand only convinced her to wind down operations at Yishun Park Hawker Center. After running the stall herself for three days when Michael was away, she made up her mind: “That was the key killer. The environmental issues. After the third day, that’s it. I decided to go. If I can’t take it, I don’t see how [Michael] can take it.”

The operating environment was complicated by Yishun Park’s management structure. Run by Timbre Group under Singapore’s Socially-conscious Enterprise Hawker Centre model, the venue became the subject of controversy in 2025 when food critic KF Seetoh publicly criticized what he described as exploitative contract terms. Hawkers reportedly paid 15% of gross turnover (capped at $2,550 monthly), plus mandatory fees for gas, POS systems, and vector control. Seetoh claimed gas prices ran up to 50% higher than NEA-managed centres, and alleged that an 18-point penalty system imposed $100 fines for infractions ranging from refusing the loyalty app to discussing internal matters publicly. Surveillance cameras were installed in individual stalls.

While Timbre defended its model as risk-sharing that protected hawkers during lean periods, the controversy highlighted the challenging operating environment many vendors faced.

Even when demand was strong, operational ceilings constrained their ability to scale. The stall footprint, storage limits, and workflow bottlenecks meant they couldn’t simply ramp up volume to compensate for shrinking margins. “The busier you get, you need more staff. You need more storage. But you cannot put more than three people. There’s nowhere to put,” Michael explained.

The second venue at Airbus Training Center introduced a different kind of fragility. The first year benefited from strong internal support and steady customer flows, but when management changed and those flows shifted, the second year became a struggle. Halal-only restrictions also meant that pork was off the menu - a hard constraint that meant that the duo could not serve their bestsellers. What had seemed like a stable restart gradually turned into another source of strain.

What they would have done differently

Today, Michael has come full circle. He’s now at Meat Co. Paragon, the same supplier that helped make Shaker Lakers possible. “It’s a chef’s dream to have so many items to play with, and it’s also a foodie paradise,” he reflected. The grab-and-go farm-to-table destination is a space he believes is worth watching - and a must-visit for food enthusiasts.

Looking back, Michael believes that tighter costing discipline earlier would have helped. He acknowledged they should have been more careful from the start: “I will be very, very careful about sourcing ingredients, really looking into every [detail]... sometimes you start to sit down and look and it’s costing so much every month.”

They also recognized that health and stamina needed to be part of the business model from the beginning. “At the end of the day you can cook for passion. Everything is quite fun, fantastic. But I also think you must take care of yourself,” Michael reflected. The physical toll of operating in a hot, smoky environment wasn’t just a minor inconvenience - it became a sustainability issue that affected their ability to keep going long-term.

On the operational side, they emphasized that discipline and standards drive results, not just recipes. Gilian was clear about this: “People think that just by looking at [Michael], I can be a good chef. But how much of a chef are you? I can give you a recipe, but [can you make it in the kitchen]?” She learned firsthand that execution under pressure requires more than knowing the steps: how Michael would time her cooking, and call her out whenever she was close to overcooking them. The relentless attention to detail and speed, while grueling, was what separated acceptable from excellent.

Finally, there was the question of exit timing. Both Gilian and Michael preferred to close while the brand was still remembered positively rather than let it fade into irrelevance or damage its reputation by limping along.

Shaker Lakers built something customers loved, but they built it on foundations they couldn’t control. When COVID-era pricing disappeared and margins collapsed, even a hero product and a loyal following weren’t enough to keep the lights on.

📌 Burnt Ends is a series that turns F&B operator mistakes into learning lessons.


This week's story covers a controversial business failure. At the request of all sources that Commune has spoken to, we have omitted mention of any names and provided only a high-level overview of events. 

When Lime House opened its doors in 2013, most Singaporeans had never heard of Jamaican Jerk Chicken or Trinidadian Doubles. Nestled in Jiak Chuan Street — then an emerging food enclave — the restaurant had to compete for attention in a neighbourhood fast filling with buzzier names.

Those challenges didn’t keep the crew from dreaming big. From 2013 to 2025, Lime House’s menu expanded from a modest 25 to 30 rotating dishes to more than 100, and it also housed one of Singapore’s most expansive rum collections. A regular roster of events, including standup comedy shows, closed-door fashion showcases, live DJ sets, and exclusive bartending sessions, drew in crowds that poured out into the street.

But the good vibes didn’t last. In August 2023, a post on Lime House’s Instagram handle announced the closure of its second outlet at East Coast, citing rising costs as the key reason for the decision. A few months later in February 2024, the flagship outlet at Jiak Chuan Street would also shutter for good.

The truth wasn’t so simple. Beneath the frequent laments of runaway rental costs and manpower shortages is an untold story of management conflict, and how it led to a series of bad decisions that dragged Lime House further away from the features that truly made it shine.

What Lime House got right

Lime House nailed its value proposition from the start: high quality Caribbean fare at affordable prices, in a community that prides itself on genuine hospitality.

Lime House recognized that hospitality and service are two different things, something that most F&B businesses overlook. There was no upselling or hurrying of the guests. Whether the bill was five or five hundred dollars, patrons received the same level of warmth. Some, according to a source that Commune spoke with, got to know the staff so well that they invited them to foreign weddings.

A key component of the brand's initial go-to-market strategy was events. Lime House evolved from a restaurant to a cultural hub, hosting everything from rum masterclasses with Maison du Whisky and Black Tot Rum to DJ-driven block parties, fashion pop-ups with Binary Style, and live events like the Afroheat series and Bumbastic Fridays. One event, claimed by a source who was privy to Lime House’s events lineup, attracted 2,000 people at its height.

This was deliberate. The group was aware that Singaporeans were constantly searching for something new. Small bites were frequently served at events, providing a convenient means of introducing Caribbean cuisine to people with different palates.

Lime House’s adaptability became its greatest asset during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Within 48 hours, the team launched an e-commerce site complete with menus and visuals. Staff took on logistics roles, and for a single corporate event, they delivered 30 meals across the island — each one accompanied by a handwritten note. Between 2019 and 2021, these efforts helped the restaurant double its revenue despite mounting industry-wide cost pressures.

Beyond food, the brand's attention to detail was evident. Bar managers and senior restaurant executives frequently took guests on rum flights, explaining the history of Caribbean rum and its tasting notes.

Where Lime House faltered

As a restaurant that operated in Singapore’s highly competitive food and beverage landscape, Lime House was no stranger to exorbitant rent or the lack of quality manpower hires.

But insiders suggest the real trouble started within. According to multiple sources familiar with the situation, disagreements in operational vision created a leadership divide. What followed were a series of missteps that gradually pulled Lime House away from the very values it was built on.

For one, the relaxed dining experience that customers loved Lime House for was replaced by timed slots. Diners, once entitled to stay for as long as they wished to, were suddenly told to leave once their reserved slot was up. The abrupt shift in concept, according to sources, severely disrupted back-of-house operations.

As ingredient costs surged, management quietly cut portion sizes without adjusting prices or informing regulars. Rather than relying on data or customer feedback, menu decisions became increasingly arbitrary, eroding the trust Lime House had spent years building.

The second outlet expansion also drove another nail into Lime House’s coffin. Despite the flagship branch’s popularity, Lime House still did not have a stable customer base that could smoothen out any drastic changes to its bottom line. The second outlet also increased staffing and rent costs, straining the business further. Sources that Commune spoke to declined to comment on exact figures.

In the end, Lime House didn’t close because Singaporeans weren’t ready for Caribbean food or because rising costs made it impossible to operate. It closed because, somewhere along the way, it lost sight of what made it special. What had once felt like a gathering among friends slowly became a business trying to keep up, and in the process, something essential was lost.

📌 Burnt Ends is a series that dives into F&B business failures and examines the causes behind them. 

Monan Pork: how bad timing and location proved too much for a winning recipe

45‑year‑old Liew Chuk Kee wasn’t your average hawker.

A seasoned F&B veteran, he built franchise empires for established Asian brands like BreadTalk and Bake Cheese Tarts. At the height of his corporate career, he oversaw operations at hundreds of stores worldwide.

He recalled, “I had felt like some sort of hybrid, going from a very high‑level perspective of the industry to what had felt like the lowest rung of the value chain.” If franchise operations had been a neat playbook that he simply needed to follow, being a hawker meant rewriting it from scratch.

But why enter a trying industry when he was already cruising smoothly? Chuk reckoned it had been partly an act of self‑actualization—having had the privilege to chase his entrepreneurial dreams and the ability to act on them. His wife’s encouragement had also sealed the deal.

In December 2019, he finally took the leap of faith. Fresh from the National Environment Agency’s Hawker Incubation Stall Program, Monan Pork Soup welcomed its first customers at Singapore’s Chinatown Complex Food Center and, within just six months, caught the attention of Singapore’s leading food bloggers.

The centerpiece of Monan’s menu was its signature pork soup—a local spin on classic Vietnamese pork broth, complete with unique offerings like egg sausage (which, by Chuk’s account, evoked comparisons to Hakka and Thai culinary heritage) and thick‑cut meat cakes. It was not quite your usual pig‑organ soup; it was a blend of regional flavors familiar to the Singaporean palate, all for an economical S$3.80.

But the good times didn’t last. The initial momentum generated by media mentions vaporized when COVID‑19 circuit‑breaker measures hit Singapore in 2020. Chuk recalled having to shutter the stall “every two to three months,” which destabilized his nascent customer base. Even after the pandemic subsided, foot traffic in Singapore’s Chinatown district languished far below post‑COVID levels. Labor costs and high rent—persistent ills in Singapore’s F&B industry—dealt the final blows.

For Chuk, Monan Pork’s story ended on a bittersweet note. The business did not turn out the way he had expected, but he’s satisfied that customers still remember the product fondly. At the time of writing, the stall held a 4.8‑out‑of‑5 rating across 175 Google Reviews.

Here is how Monan Pork rose so quickly—and the larger reasons for its eventual demise.

What worked well

Chuk believes in leaving nothing to chance. In corporate F&B, he saw the importance of personally reviewing the entire process. “I’ve been through every step: store design, operations, staff training, process documentation … those experiences shaped the way I ran Monan,” he explained.

Everything about Monan was about clarity. He conducted a landscape analysis to identify market gaps, timed procurement perfectly for succulent pork cuts, designed pre‑packed mixes to scale production with demand, and kept preparation steps well defined and minimal.

To ensure consistency, Chuk deliberately limited his menu to six or seven pork‑related dishes. Each configuration could be prepared quickly using the same ingredients. All components were made in‑house, with meat cakes and pork cooked only upon order.

Monan’s simplicity belied an unrelenting commitment to perfection. Unconvinced that the broth required eight hours, Chuk and his wife devised a compression‑cooking technique that delivered the same mouthwatering results in just two hours. He took hundreds of photos to get each sample shot right.

Every aspect of Monan’s signature pork soup—timing, texture, consistency—underwent rigorous blind tasting. “My sample size for the blind tests was about 400, including existing F&B operators,” he said. He had learned from his time running franchise operations for Bake Cheese Tarts that an 80 % approval rate would have signaled success—Monan’s pork soup had scored 90%.

Chuk added that there was a need to get assurance from his consumers before he actually started selling, even for add‑ons. “If you don’t do preliminary testing first, you end up compromising the consumer experience,” he warned.

What didn’t work

Despite Chuk’s comprehensive SOPs and market testing, Monan Pork never regained its footing after COVID‑19 struck.

Monan had opened in December 2019, mere months before Singapore’s 2020 circuit‑breaker measures. Chuk recalled having to shutter the stall “every two to three months,” a disruption that destabilized his emerging customer base and squandered the early media buzz. By the time day‑to‑day foot traffic recovered, much of Monan’s momentum had evaporated.

At the same time, Chinatown’s daily patronage remained depressed. Weekday patronage at the tourist-reliant location remained weak for an extended period due to a slump in tourist traffic, and aging facilities also discouraged potential customers.

While the stall location was situated close to an escalator exit - an area with typically high footfall in a multi-story hawker center - Monan Pork was also tucked between established local names like Shanghai Xiao Long Bao and Heng Ji Chicken Rice. Chuk estimates that on most days, Monan attracted only about 10 % of passers-by. Conversion rates languished far below what Monan’s novel concept demanded, and he found himself unable to break out of a niche.

Monan’s second branch at Toa Payoh achieved good returns in its first four months—10 % to 20 % profit on average—though demand eventually tapered off.

Chuk attributed this trend to local habits at hawker centers. “Customers only tried something new when they couldn’t get their usual fare on any particular day,” he reflected. For a dish as novel as Monan’s pork soup, customers often knocked only when they had grown tired of their staples. “The vast majority of Singaporeans still stuck to their staples,” he added.

Although Monan broke even most months, rising labor costs and strict regulations made it exceedingly difficult to secure reliable help. On several occasions, new hires left after just a few days.

By March this year, the triple threats of bad timing, a locational disadvantage, and stagnant sales growth proved insurmountable. After five years, the numbers didn’t added up, and Chuk made the hard call to close Monan Pork Soup.

What Chuk would have done differently

Chuk closed this chapter without regret, though he admitted he would not have opened the second outlet so quickly. “For a novel product like what we offered, we should have firmly established a strong customer base first,” he said.

Ultimately, Monan Pork remained a novelty in Singapore’s hawker scene. Chuk aspired to create a new-age Singaporean staple that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with classics like Hainanese Chicken Rice and Laksa, and reality fell short of his expectations. Time was his greatest obstacle - Monan simply never had the runway to build a strong brand - and a poor location compounded its effects.

Fresh out of the Singapore Hotel Association Training and Education Centre (SHATEC), he spent years in Michelin-starred French establishment Bacchanalia - later rebranded as Vianney Massot - mastering sauces and precision plating. But all that changed after a highly successful popup at Almost Famous craft beer bar. The buzz around his rice bowls was real. People loved the concept.

That moment was the validation he needed to sink S$15,000 into a coffeeshop stall on French Road in 2021. It was a bet on low overhead, a lean team and pure instinct. After several twists and turns, Nice Rice is now a lunchcrowd favorite at China Square, where every bowl carries the quiet conviction of a chef who trusts his gut but never abandons method.

First Principles, Not Dogma

At first glance, Mandel’s kitchen resembles a workshop more than a hawker stall. Clear plastic tubs and metal containers line the shelves and counter, each with a designated purpose. Here, nothing is guesswork, even though Mandel will tell you that the whole menu grew “out of trial and error.”.

Both the space and the food are testaments to Mandel’s strong foundations working under Vianney Massot and later lessons learnt during his time with Wrap Bstrd and 8ASH. But at Nice Rice, Mandel asserts that he rewrites the rulebook. His sauces are not riffs on French or Japanese staples; they are built from scratch. Every sauce begins as a blank canvas: acids for background, a dash of umami or sweetness for body, and light saltiness as the finishing touch.

In practice however, that means painstakingly testing each batch of Taiwanese pearl rice in chicken stock made from real bones, no powder shortcuts. Singaporeans, Mandel claims, often wrestle with acidity and salt. “They can’t tell good food from ‘nice’ food,” he laughs. “They read a review and parrot it back.”

Every ingredient gets that treatment, even something as basic as onions. Mandel once timed himself peeling one in two seconds flat. “Why waste three extra seconds?” he asks. “Those seconds add up over a lunch rush.” Critics might call it neurotic, but Mandel swears that these little tweaks are what makes Nice Rice tick.

“Prep work is critical in [running Nice Rice], without good prep work the rest of the flow will crumble,” he reflects. Prepare well and service steadily hums along; let it slide, and everything else unravels.

Good prep work doesn’t necessarily mean following established practices. To Mandel, the way “things have always been done” should be taken to cautiously. “If an old-school cook claims to have a better method, others would have bought it and scaled it by now,” he insists.

Vibes Backed by Numbers

But Mandel never lets spreadsheets override good vibes. When rent increases or a renovation forces a temporary closure, he trusts his instincts as much as his ledger.

Case in point: after shock developments forced Nice Rice to relocate twice in two years, Mandel’s decision to take on the CBD lunch crowd came when a regular customer tipped him off to the new unit at China Square. Mandel checked the rent—about ten percent higher than AMK’s—and noted the stall was thirty percent smaller. He crunched the numbers: moving costs of around S$7,000 against more reliable CBD footfall.

“In the heartlands, my customers tend to come at odd hours and it makes scheduling prep work very difficult,” Mandel observed. In the CBD however, demand fluctuations were easier to predict. Nice Rice goes full throttle during lunchtime, and in the afternoons Mandel has time to also work on his private dining project. December to January also gives Mandel and his crew some respite from the everyday humdrum. That clarity also lets him forecast how much ingredients to prepare, minimizing food wastage and optimizing procurement.

That balance between precision and “the chills” also shaped Mandel’s R&D process. The core menu came together quickly. After that, every new dish was designed to complement the backbone, not overshadow it. He would carefully tweak sauce viscosity, noting customer reception as he went along. All of it balances his love of spontaneity with a professional’s eye for efficiency.

High Standards, Shared Success

For all his intensity, Mandel isn’t a lone genius.

His chefs fall under a strict regime; no part-timers are hired unless a big catering order hits. Training, he claims, is wasted on staff who won’t stick around - and on hires that don’t have the right aptitude. “If someone is stuck at 30%, that’s all the skill you’re going to get,” he claims.

In spite of his high standards, Mandel knows he doesn’t get it right all the time. In fact, he actively welcomes feedback from his crew. If a team member discovers a more efficient way to prepare the broth or slice ingredients, he readily implements it.

On the side, he hosts private-dining experiments. Some afternoons, he shuts the stall early to prepare tasting menus for small groups, pushing himself to “go crazy” with flavors. Those sessions remind him why he became a chef in the first place: to surprise people.

Mandel’s story feels classic: the professional chef who traded linen jackets for T-shirts and jeans. But it’s more than a trope. It’s a lesson in balance. He runs on instinct, but never ignores the data; he values tradition, yet he refuses to be bound by it. In Singapore’s hawker scene, where corners are cut and standards slip under cost pressures, he stands apart. Nice Rice is the product of a chef who insists on doing things his way—clear, efficient, and unmistakably delicious.

It’s totally anathema for someone whose job was to give someone else a stage to stand on, to now take their turn on the stage. Sure, I’ve had several chances at public speaking, but even now it still feels … weird.

But then I remember my past conversations with startup founders. Most recently, I recall what Sandai Fishball’s Delonix shared with me: it’s not about selling, but telling a story and building trust.

Personality goes a long way in building a business, but I also ponder about the what-ifs when personality is taken too far. When the success of a business hinges on the reputation of a single person, it can be a rocketship - or a nosedive.

In this issue, we look at:

• Tastemakers: Sandai Fishball’s Delonix Tan and his personal branding strategy

• Better bite: How Asian F&B leaders think about personal brands

Making legacy fish balls cool again: Delonix’s Sandai Fishball

It’s 1.30 a.m. on a Sunday. At Kim Keat Palm Market, elderly men and women quietly prepare their stalls for the day ahead, the silence occasionally broken by the sound of shutters or shuffling feet.

Among them is 26-year-old Delonix Tan, a third-generation fish ball maker at Sandai Fishball, and his father. Like clockwork, the father-son duo carefully grinds fresh yellowtail fish into a fine paste – the key ingredient behind their signature fish balls. Brine is gradually added to the mix, and the duo begin to work their magic.

This reel is one of more than 140 TikToks that Delonix has posted on the stall’s official handle since 2021. From raw perspectives on running a family business to behind-the-scenes footage, his best-performing shorts have raked in nearly 320,000 views and landed him new opportunities to grow his business. Styling himself as a Gen Z artisan, his personal brand has also become a critical element of the business.

Here’s how Delonix reinvented Sandai Fishball, and the insights his journey offers for traditional market stalls looking to digitize. His playbook could offer some insights into supporting Singapore’s ailing wet markets.

Getting the ball rolling

The original Sandai Fishball concept was a hawker stall that briefly operated at Singapore’s Amoy Food Center in 2020. Delonix had secured the stall under the National Environment Agency’s Incubation Stall program, but COVID-19 measures forced him to permanently shutter it in August that year.

Delonix then pivoted his focus towards digitizing his father’s fish ball business. The stall already enjoyed a reputation for authentic, freshly made fish balls, and the main hurdle was scaling distribution.

“The play was to create more sales channels,” Delonix reflects. Going digital could allow the business to reach customers outside of nearby residents, especially since nearly 60% of Singaporeans discover new food products or restaurants through social media, according to a 2023 Rakuten Insight study.

To do that, Delonix adopted two strategies: repurpose Sandai Fishball’s social accounts to establish the fish ball stall’s digital presence and set up a pre-order service to cater to customers who do not patronize the stall during regular hours.

Keeping the Sandai brand was also a calculated move, as the name’s catchiness struck a chord with younger consumers.

“90% of our customer base is still largely customers from the immediate locale, but we’ve noticed that there is a growing number of new customers [who are part of a younger demographic]”, Delonix notes.

Since going digital, demand for Sandai Fishball’s products has become more consistent. “More and more of our patrons are returning customers, and a fair share of new customers also get to try our product,” notes Delonix. Sandai Fishball’s Instagram handle now has more than 20,000 followers, while its Facebook and TikTok accounts have over 10,000 and 8,000 followers respectively. Without spending a dime on marketing, the stalls’ pre-order slots, which now include most weekdays, are also filling up faster than ever.

A “mini celebrity” of the trade

Sandai Fishball isn’t the only wet market stall going digital, but what sets them apart from the competition is how central Delonix’s personal brand is to Sandai Fishball’s visibility.

For one, Delonix’s identity as a rebellious youth – turned - young wet market stall operator is undoubtedly unique. In a sunset industry largely overseen by older business owners, youth alone is a standout feature.

How he puts his identity across TikTok is more pivotal. On the platform, Delonix makes sure to keep interactions genuine. “The aim is to build trust and let it snowball over time,” he adds. There are no sales pitches in any of his TikToks. Instead, one finds deeply personal stories that emphasize relatability and transparency – key values that appeal to the Gen Z consumers.

Part of Delonix’s playbook is to also constantly deliver valuable content to his audience. In several videos, Delonix also positions himself as a fish ball making expert and community advocate. He offers practical tips such as handling overcooked fish balls and explains the economic constraints that fish ball sellers face today. He also opines on the latest developments affecting Singapore’s wet markets, and mulls over their future prospects.

A solid social media presence has opened many opportunities for Delonix to grow Sandai Fishball. In March 2025, Sandai Fishball bagged a two-month collaboration with Lau Wang Claypot which generated “record sales” for the latter. Delonix adds that Sandai also generated “significant revenue” from the initiative. A second collaboration with Singapore-based claypot chicken stall 8889 Claypot Chicken also generated “considerable revenue” for Sandai Fishball. Delonix declined to reveal exact figures.

A playbook for saving Singapore’s wet markets?

Delonix’s strategy of tying personal and business branding together has paid off for Sandai Fishball, but his approach is not without its share of challenges.

For one, convincing the older generation to buy in can be difficult. Digitization is often anathema to workflows that the older wet market stall owners – as well as hawkers – religiously abide by. The more technology disrupts their routines, the more difficult it is to convince them to embrace it.

Faced with his father’s initial opposition, Delonix initially drove Sandai Fishball’s digitization efforts solo. To film his TikToks, he initially made use of his smartphone and a simple camera stand tucked away in an obscure niche of the stall. He also single-handedly managed the pre-orders to minimize any additional burden on his parents. “Fundamentally nothing has changed … as long as my plans did not interfere with day-to-day operations, he was mostly nonchalant about them,” he adds.

Delonix’s experience is not unique. A 2024 study on key reasons that elderly hawkers gave for resisting digital payments included a lack of digital literacy, poor eyesight, and a fear of inconveniencing customers while they struggle with devices.

Another reason why resistance towards digitization in hawker centers and wet markets remains substantial is also because many of these stall owners cater to a regular clientele that is more inclined to pay in physical cash. But as Sandai Fishball shows, it’s viable to grow a customer base beyond the immediate locale by building an online presence.

A more significant challenge lies in manpower constraints. Demand for Sandai Fishball’s products has certainly grown since Delonix took the business online, but they have not been able to scale production volume high enough to take advantage of this growth.

“Nobody will come down [to the stall] at midnight to slog for you,” notes Delonix. Manpower shortages also translate to ingredient shortages, and while purchasing pre-processed fish meat can fill this gap, doing so will erode Sandai Fishball’s competitive advantage.

While challenges persist, Delonix believes that his approach can be reasonably emulated by his peers. Calling social media a low-hanging fruit for hawkers and wet market stall owners, he suggests that every business needs to be a media company, and anyone can be a mini-celebrity in their own trade.

“Keep it authentic, be genuine, and above all, have a good product,” he adds.

How F&B founders build personal brands across Asia

In a dinner conversation hosted by F&B marketing and commerce platform BentoBox several years ago, three American culinary heavyweights weighed in on the importance of chefs having a personal brand.

For New World cuisine pioneer Allen Susser, a chef had to have a story. “Without a point of view, you’re just cooking,” he reflected.

Thai-American chef Ngamprom “Hong” Thaimee’s goal was to ensure that people were “not eating Thai food but eating [her] food.” She suggested that authenticity isn’t about any specific cuisine but about who you are as a person.

Over in Asia, personal branding becomes much more nuanced.

This is a region that is perceived to revere humility and eschew self-promotion. A broad survey suggests that many Asian culinary leaders still speak through their craftsmanship rather than direct self-promotion. Yet, the success of several culinary mavericks fly in the face of stereotypes that paint building a personal brand as distasteful.

Take Japanese sushi chefs Jiro Ono and Hiroki Nakanoue, for example. Ono appeals to the traditional image of sushi chefs as shokunin, artisans dedicated to perfecting a single dish over a long period of time. Sushi Jiro mostly kept a low profile, with Ono focusing solely on craftsmanship and the quality of his products. On the other hand, Sushiyoshi’s Hiroki Nakanoue came into sushi as an outsider. He did not fit the typical shokunin mould, but came into his own with a striking visual identity that comprised dyed hair and a western-style chef’s outfit – a strong signal of his experimental approach towards sushi.

Spinning a personal brand in South Korea takes a louder, more media-savvy approach. Here, it is common for restaurateurs to take to mass and social media to humanize their business.

Perhaps nobody exemplifies this norm better than South Korea’s Paik Jong Won. Before his fall from grace, Paik grew his F&B empire on the back of his personal brand. Styling himself as a business-savvy, yet modest mentor, Paik came across as “an elite without elitism”. His ability to communicate recipes easily to a mass audience also won him public acclaim, so much so that when Paik’s company TheBorn Korea went public in November 2024, Hanwha Research Center hailed him as the “Korean version of Gordon Ramsay.”

Back home in Singapore, local celebrity chefs have taken diverse approaches to building their personal brand. Jereme Leung, who runs the show at Yi and formerly helmed the prominent Whampoa Club in Shanghai and Beijing, does not have a discernible digital persona. Both Local master chef Bjorn Shern and celebrated chocolatier Janice Wong, on the other hand, have a strong social media presence. Shern was formerly a judge on MasterChef Singapore and often appears as a host for food-related documentaries.

These various, albeit selective, experiences suggest that within Asia’s diversity of dining cultures, chefs in this part of the world navigate a dual imperative: to honor time-tested artisan traditions, while carefully introducing unique brand elements that emphasize themselves as participants in an ongoing narrative. Chefs that stand out all have a story to tell, but how they choose to tell that story still varies significantly in Asia.

📌 Smorgasbord is a one-stop section that lists offline/online events, readings, and resources for anyone building in F&B in Asia. 

This week’s events

• Nothing noteworthy this week. Stay tuned for updates!

This week’s reads

• As home-based cafes proliferate in Singapore, some F&B owners are calling out the trend for skirting regulations. The bigger issue: whether home-based businesses should be treated as commercial establishments.

• Vietnamese tea franchise Phuc Long has launched its Phuc Long Hospitality, an in-house luxury hotel chain. The move is part of a trend of homegrown local brands moving beyond food and beverage retail into experiential travel.

• Over in Seoul, Global fashion house Zara has also opened a new cafe in Myeongdong district. This follows a going trend of fashion leaders opening cafes in the South Korean capital, with Ralph Lauren and sneaker brand Golden Goose operating cafes in the city since September 2024 and July 2024 respectively.

The rejoinder comes from personal experience, and also the countless stories of founder fallouts.

Picking the wrong business partner can be especially painful if they’re family, as so many food family feuds reveal. But business is business, the stakes are high, and blood does not always run thicker than water.

But when family does come together to make it work, the result is magic. Across Southeast Asia, thousands of family-run food stalls continue to hawk their dishes today. Some have grown into household names, others into international brands.

Maybe Dominic Toretto says it best: family isn’t about blood, it’s about who’s willing to hold your hand when you need it.

Come what may, here’s wishing you and your family a harmonious 2025 😌

This week, we look at:

• Tastemakers: Ono Ramen’s delectable Javanese-Japanese dishes

• Hot Take: What family food feuds tell us about authenticity

Putting a Javanese spin on a Japanese favorite: Haris’s Ono Ramen

Good ramen relies on five key elements working in harmony: broth, tare, noodles, toppings, and oil. Of these, the broth is the foundation, revealing the ramen’s unique character most clearly.

In Ono Ramen’s bowls, the broth tells the story best: bright citrusy and sour notes regularly slice through its savory base, striking a masterful balance between classic Japanese techniques and rich Indonesian flavors. Layered within these flavors are spice blends borrowed from treasured family recipes, adding to the ramen’s distinct personality.

Launched in September 2024, Ono Ramen’s bold experiment infuses traditional Japanese ramen with an Indonesian twist, making them truly one of a kind. This novel reinterpretation of ramen is the culmination of director and co-founder Haris Ahmad’s seven-year culinary journey.

My first encounter with their Gulai chicken broth challenged my expectations, yet its creamy, savory profile quickly won me over. The Garang Asem bowl, my second try, showcased a more pronounced Indonesian influence—surprisingly delightful alongside toppings like fried shallots, spring onions, and nori seaweed.

Perhaps what makes this place stand out even more is how customers aren’t simply drawn by novelty. Each dish extends a warm invitation, and Ono Ramen’s strong sense of community keeps patrons coming back for more.

Where do these community vibes—or “kampong spirit,” as we call it in Singapore—come from? I wager it starts with Ahmad’s family. Every detail reflects their unique traits and talents—“Ono,” meaning “to have” in Javanese, is a nod to Ahmad’s mother from Semarang—and it all comes together seamlessly.

Here’s how Ahmad’s culinary experiments grew by leaps and bounds, his strategy behind his growing restaurant business, and how Ono Ramen intertwines family with passion.

Small steps in a big play

Ahmad’s journey into the culinary world began early.

During his childhood, he learned valuable cooking techniques by helping his mother in the kitchen. Visits to the market further expanded his knowledge of Indonesian staples, such as ginger and galangal.

These formative experiences likely fueled his dream of running a restaurant, but Ahmad had no formal experience in Singapore’s food and beverage scene. “So, the plan was to develop a concept in three phases, … starting with a stall for a year to keep experimentation costs low,” he recalled.

In August 2018, Ahmad took the leap. He dropped out of the Singapore Institute of Technology after one semester, secured a stall at Singapore Polytechnic with a friend’s assistance, and opened IndoJava—an Indonesian concept specializing in Bakmi (Indonesian dry noodles).

IndoJava’s success exceeded Ahmad’s expectations. “Business was so brisk that our landlord offered to extend our lease, but we decided to stick to our guns,” he said. Balancing a part-time business degree with IndoJava’s dinner service proved demanding, but Ahmad managed both.

After a year of experimentation, IndoJava closed in July 2020, and Ahmad launched KULON that same month.

This Phase 2 focused on refining what worked and discarding what didn’t. “We identified things to improve in terms of taste, smell, and texture,” Ahmad explained. KULON delivered elevated dishes with “improved aesthetics” and carefully chosen toppings that “addressed market needs,” while also expanding the menu based on customer feedback.

KULON also tackled challenges Ahmad had encountered with IndoJava—chief among them having to constantly introduce customers to Bakmi. By positioning itself as the pioneer of authentic Indonesian Bakmi in Singapore, KULON emphasized the dish’s origins, drawing customers in with its cultural roots as much as its flavors.

KULON also met with success, and Ahmad saw the signal to move on to the next phase, but manpower constraints made opening a new concept unfeasible. It would take Ahmad until 2024 to finally consider moving on to Phase 3.

That decision finally came in May 2024. Ono Ramen’s Indonesian-Japanese concept would push the boundaries of Ahmad’s culinary expertise, and put years of refinement to the test.

The novelty of Ono Ramen’s dishes meet a currently underserved gap in Singapore’s culinary scene, but it also re-introduced the challenge of growing customer awareness. “It’s like going through the whole IndoJava experience again,” Ahmad chuckled.

Moving the needle is never easy, but Ono Ramen appears to be doing just that: as of December 2024, 60% to 70% of its customers are return customers; Ono Ramen’s bowls are priced similarly to regular offerings, and the restaurant’s profit margin has been growing since launch, though Ahmad declined to provide exact figures.

There was, however, a noticeable slowdown in customers over Ono Ramen’s third and fourth months in business, though Ahmad attributes this to seasonality. “December, traditionally, is a low month for food and beverage businesses [in Singapore],” he observed.

Ultimately, Ahmad is sanguine about Ono Ramen’s prospects. “It’s a test of patience, like planting a seed, and painstakingly making sure that it grows well,” he added.

Systems thinking

Nurturing a new venture can feel like a gamble, but Ahmad knew KULON would only thrive with scalable systems in place.

“This was our first physical store, and we needed time to understand Singapore’s F&B landscape,” he explained. That meant carefully assessing kitchen facilities, streamlining food preparation workflows, and establishing clear customer service protocols.

These processes were put to the test under the initial COVID-19 measures introduced by the Singapore government. Yet despite pandemic-related challenges, KULON not only weathered the storm but also turned a consistent profit between 2020 and 2022.

These battle-tested strategies provided Ono Ramen with a robust foundation. “We have complete standard operating procedures (SOP) that staff rely on, which allows me to leave the restaurant on autopilot,” Ahmad noted. These SOPs also ensured flavor consistency, and provided instructions on training every staff on the soup preparation process.

These guidelines were critical to Ono Ramen’s success, given that rempah paste, which gives each bowl its distinct Indonesian flavor, and the base soup are made in-house. Both require several hours of painstaking preparation.

Beyond SOPs, hard-won lessons running IndoJava and KULON also refined Ahmad’s cost management, profit forecasting, and project planning approaches.

Ahmad’s deep familiarity with Indonesian flavors accelerated Ono Ramen’s R&D phase to just three months. Because he and his family already knew the base flavors so well, Ahmad could devote his efforts entirely to perfecting the ramen concept.

KULON and Ono Ramen also now support each other in terms of staff training and ingredient sourcing.

“Since certain ingredients can be used at both restaurants, ordering them in bulk also lowered their cost,” noted Ahmad.

Ono also currently doubles as a central kitchen that delivers vacuum-packed bags of spices and ingredients to KULON. Ahmad credits this idea to conversations with veteran restaurateurs among the Rasa Indonesia business community, and specifically mentioned prominent multi-generational restaurant Rumah Makan Minang as a close advisor and “great source of information and operational knowledge.”

Still, there are some challenges that even robust systems can’t entirely resolve. “Manpower is an issue you can never truly fix,” Ahmad admitted. “It’s an ongoing problem that only ever finds temporary solutions.”

For now, Ono Ramen prioritizes staff retention by supporting team welfare and maintaining open communication channels. Some employees have even stayed with the brand for three to four years.

Chasing the dream with a dream team

Ahmad had another advantage: his family, who supported his vision from the start, pitched in their strengths to grow the business.

Today, they all remain actively involved in Ono Ramen. Ahmad’s father, a retiree, works the counter as one of the restaurant’s waiters. His mother, the mastermind behind Ono Ramen’s secret recipes, is in the kitchen preparing delicious bowls of ramen alongside Ahmad and the kitchen staff. Although Ahmad’s sister doesn’t work at Ono Ramen, her graphic designs, blending Indonesian and Japanese motifs, decorate the otherwise plain walls.

Working with family brings its own set of challenges, but Ahmad’s experience has been smooth-sailing so far. “There’s no friction at all, working together all the time,” he recalled. He added that his parents could choose not to participate, yet they still regularly drop by to help.

“Everyone always had a mature mindset from the start, and we all understand that there are goals to meet,” Ahmad said. “When conflicts arise, we handle them like a business and resolve them professionally.”

Ahmad also credits part of his culinary success to his parents’ unwavering support - and their receptiveness to trying new things. With Ono Ramen’s experiment just beginning, that mindset is a winning factor in Ahmad’s playbook.

When asked about his next move, Ahmad is focusing solely on Ono Ramen. “We already have a few offers to expand the restaurant, but we want to carefully manage our current processes, so there’s no rush,” he said. For now, everything is working in harmony at Ono Ramen.

Food family rivalries: when flavors diverge, is there still a “real deal”?

Does “original” really taste better? It’s a somewhat moot question, but reality TV shows like Food Wars, Food Feuds, and their global counterparts have repeatedly explored this by pitting contenders for the culinary throne against one another.

The frustration of proud proprietors and the ensuing chaos provide ample entertainment value; at the end of each episode, a verdict is reached, and a “clear” winner emerges.

These showdowns aren’t purely about chest-thumping. As the long-standing feuds covered in Singaporean docuseries On the Red Dot: Food Feud (ORD) often reveal, it’s also about authenticity - “getting history right” - and branding.

What made the showdowns on ORD stand out even more was that they stemmed from conflicts between family members or former coworkers. Consequently, the competitors were—or still are—selling dishes based on the same original recipe.

One episode, in particular, stood out to me. When asked about his early days helping at his father’s Teochew pork noodle stall with his brothers, Mr. Tang Chay Seng, the proud owner of Singapore’s Michelin-starred Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodles, recalled that signboards were nonexistent during his father’s time.

Ergo, people didn’t care about the stall’s name; they flocked to it because the noodles tasted better than anywhere else.

But we’re not in the 1950s anymore, and we all recognize how powerful branding can shape food experiences.

Consider this: if competitors who came from the same source are labelled inauthentic for making changes, how can the original be considered authentic when it also tweaks the initial recipe?

In this case, the authenticity of the dish isn’t substantive - it doesn’t have any basis in reality since the original stall no longer follows its original recipe. It’s simply performative, and plays on the premium that consumers place on brands when they recognize them as genuine.

The higher that premium, the more important protecting that “authenticity” becomes. In the Tai Hwa Pork Noodle feud, things came to a head in 2010 when Tang Chay Seng sued his nephew for trademark infringement. Tang had actually consented to his nephew’s use of the name “大華” - the likely crux of the problem, as the presiding judge found, was that his nephew misused Tang’s awards to promote his stall.

So, while the original might not always taste better, being the “real deal” is, well, a real deal. Flavors come and go, but a brand etched in history endures a little longer.