It’s a full-circle moment for Gwyneth Ang, 30, as she sits on a bar stool in front of the open kitchen of her new restaurant.
She started out as an intern at a Michelin-starred restaurant, where she shadowed chefs and took notes.
Now, she’s leading a team of five chefs at her own restaurant.
One Prawn & Co is an 80-seater restaurant in New Bahru, a trendy new shopping center in Singapore built in a former high school. The restaurant has a modern vibe, with limewashed walls, metallic blue tiles on the open-kitchen backsplash, and hanging lamps to provide a cool mood lighting.
Almost 10 years ago, as a final-year student at the Culinary Institute of America in Singapore, Ang remembers having to find a restaurant for her internship. When Dave Pynt, the chef-owner of Australian-inspired barbecue restaurant Burnt Ends, visited her school for a guest lecture on wood-fire cooking, she was intrigued.
“I felt that if there’s one skill that I want to learn, it’s definitely cooking with wood fire,” Ang told BI.
She didn’t apply anywhere else. “I knew I wanted it,” she said. “So I went and got it.”
When she graduated later that year, she continued to work under Pynt. Burnt Ends is based in Singapore and has one Michelin star. In March, it was ranked No. 15 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list and No. 68 on the global list.
She worked her way up from being an intern to managing the wood-fired oven.
But after two years of working in a fine-dining kitchen, Ang was ready to move on.
Shifting the focus to local cuisine
As a Singaporean, Ang has always taken pride in the country’s local food culture. However, she felt that prawn noodles — a dish that can be served dry or with soup — was one that could be improved. She decided to develop and sell her own version based on the way she cooked it at home.
She knew she had to start small. A hawker stall seemed like the perfect sandbox to test her ideas without spending a lot on overhead costs.
She partnered with a friend she had met at Burnt Ends to open a hawker stall in 2019. They invested 60,000 Singapore dollars, or around $47,000, into the venture. Ang did not share the name of her partner with Business Insider.
It was a vast change from the restaurant scene to a hawker stall. But despite the long hours, cramped working conditions, and slim profits, Ang said she always remembered something she was once told: If you can survive in Burnt Ends, you can survive anywhere.
“The training was very intense. You learn to understand heat and fire in the most primitive way,” she said.
The challenges of running a hawker business
Three years in, the hawker stall had just managed to earn back its capital.
“I needed to move out of hawker because there was a price ceiling,” Ang said. In Singapore, the average price of noodle dishes in hawker centers ranges from around SG$3 to SG$5, data from the Department of Statistics in Singapore show.
Amid rising ingredient prices, she was fighting expectations that local food should cost less than SG$6. “The store was too small to contain our ambition.”
So, in 2021, she expanded to a full-service open-air restaurant, first named One Prawn & Co and later renamed Zhup Zhup.
Leaving the hawker center allowed Ang to price dishes at a slightly higher price point.
In addition to selling local fare like hokkien mee and pao fan, they serve prawn noodles for SG$14 a bowl and SG$20 for their Supreme Prawn Noodle, which is served with pork ribs, tobiko prawn balls, clams, and pork slices.
Typically, prawn noodles have a clear, pork-based soup. Ang’s noodle broth is prepared with almost 40 pounds of prawn heads and over 60 pounds of pork bones, then boiled for more than 20 hours. The dish is served in a clay pot.
“The broth is so umami,” Darren Ang, a customer in his late 30s, told BI. What makes their prawn noodles stand out is the variety of ingredients, he said.
In 2022, the casual eatery earned its first Michelin Bib Gourmand, a rating that recognizes establishments that serve quality food at lower price points.
Returning to the restaurant scene
Early last year, Lo & Behold Group, a hospitality group in Singapore, offered her team the opportunity to open a restaurant in the new mall.
Each tenant at New Bahru is an independent local brand. A representative from Lo & Behold Group declined to comment to BI on how Ang was selected.
On returning to a restaurant kitchen after working in a casual setting for almost six years, Ang said the biggest difference was finally using chef terms like “emulsification” and “caramelization.”
“I can finally talk like that!” she said with a laugh.
But most of all, Ang is excited to create new dishes. The restaurant serves modern Asian grilled seafood at night and prawn-broth ramen during the day, she said. As a callback to her Burnt Ends days, the seafood is grilled or baked using wood-fired methods.
Ang credits her ability to develop recipes to the training she received from Pynt.
Pynt told BI that Ang was a headstrong chef with great talent.
“She had very high standards that she was able to follow through with,” he said. He had mixed emotions about seeing her go. With good people, you always want them to stay, he said.
“But on the flip side, you also want to see young chefs spread their wings,” he said.
Inspiring the next generation of hawkers
Singapore’s food and beverage industry is not easy to thrive in.
Teo Kay Key, a research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore, told BI that hawker food has traditionally been viewed as a cheap source of good and hearty meals priced for the masses.
However, this can affect stall owners, who must balance rising operational costs with customer expectations to earn a living.
“Consumers might not even want to patronize if they do not think it is reasonably priced based on their own evaluations,” she said.
As a former young hawker who defied these expectations, Ang hopes for young entrepreneurs — especially hawkers, to follow her lead.
And she’s in good company: Cherry Tan, 29, left her dream job as a flight attendant at Singapore Airlines to set up a hawker business selling Taiwanese-style teppanyaki with her husband.
As a hawker, she estimates that she took a 50% pay cut and had to work longer hours. Still, she feels that it was worth it. “The hawker lifestyle is challenging, but I think if more youngsters are willing to go through this process, it’s rewarding,” she told BI.
Similarly, Shanice Lim left the fine dining scene at 25 to run a hawker stall. “The hawker culture is dying. I wanted to put my brand out there so everyone could have good nasi lemak,” Lim told BI.
Although she charges at least SG$5 for her dish, which can cost as little as SG$3 at other stalls, she has won over skeptical customers, Lim said.
Ang agreed that young hawkers should not give up on their pursuit of quality and charge the appropriate prices.
“And feed yourself. You’re not doing charity,” she added. “There will always be people who appreciate the quality you want in your food.”
Her next goal is to “reach for the stars.” In her case, the coveted Michelin stars.
“It will definitely be an honor to receive an award from Michelin,” she said. “But we will continue putting out the best that we can.”
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