Singapore’s Cooking Lessons for the Post-Lockdown World

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- As the restaurant world from New York to London and elsewhere reopens in fits and starts, Singapore is a microcosm of both problems and solutions. Within the compact city-state of 5.6 million people are white-tablecloth Michelin-starred establishments, long-running family-owned eateries, pizza parlors, Mexican takeout, the world-famous hawker culture of small specialist stands—a miniature foodie universe. The pandemic struck them all.

The food scene—from highbrow to popular to inexpensive—suffered dramatically. Vianney Massot, a one-star Michelin restaurant run by an alumnus of the late French superstar chef Joël Robuchon, announced it was ceasing operations while it looked for a new home, because its location on Hongkong Street “is no longer compatible with our vision” in a post-Covid-19 world. Founder Bak Kut Teh, which has been serving the pork bone soup that’s part of its name for more than four decades, issued a public plea for customers, saying sales had fallen by more than 85% and if things didn’t turn around in the next two months it would need to shut down.

Government assistance has helped others survive. These measures included rent-payment relief and the Job Support Scheme that protects local employees’ wages. The rental waivers “really helped a lot to pull us through,” says Nancy Koh, the “lady boss” of 328 Katong Laksa, which has multiple outlets that serve one of Singapore’s signature dishes.

But creativity and innovation—and sometimes just sheer desperation—were crucial as well. When the time came to reopen, the diminished supply chains also had to be replenished. Gibran Baydoun, the founder of Lucali BYGB, realized that pizza boxes couldn’t easily be sourced within Singapore. “Even [the original] Lucali in Brooklyn was struggling finding boxes, but I found a wholesaler in Las Vegas,” Baydoun says. “They probably got them from China.” There was also opportunism: scavenging through the remains of restaurants that had closed down. Says Baydoun, “How else are you going to get glassware or 250 forks?”

Social media and the web proved to be instrumental in getting business back. “We started by posting on Facebook, and our delivery became an overnight sensation,” says Ong Ka Yi, a manager at Mini Star (HK) Fermented Beancurd, which operates in the Geylang neighborhood to the east of the still mostly shuttered central business district. “We never anticipated the demand to be so huge and popular.”

“It was a double-edged sword,” says Nick Pelliccione, the culinary consultant at communal-dining Mia Tavola. “There were more people online trying to get people’s attention, but the number of people online looking led to more demand. Getting eyes and getting attention when everyone is online makes it more challenging as to how we differentiate ourselves online.” But, he says, “we certainly got more customers because of this.” Right now, Mia Tavola is largely delivering its specialty, tiramisu.

Ryan Clift embodies the roller-coaster trial-and-error learning process. The chef-owner of Tippling Club, a buzzy restaurant/bar on Tanjong Pagar Road in Singapore that holds the No. 17 spot on the list of Asia’s 50 Best Bars, watched others in the industry start to offer delivery menus, many of them trying to deliver exactly what they would serve at their restaurants—and trying to look precisely the same way, as conveyed by the photos on social media, even in takeaway containers. His innovative dishes—among them, A5 wagyu with kampot pepper, spinach, and pomme gaufrette; black lime sorbet with garlic oil and coconut; a foie gras cheesecake with blueberries, yoghurt, pine nut, and walnut—were difficult to perfect and wouldn’t survive cardboard delivery boxes. “I would have loved to be able to do what I serve in my restaurant, but we realized that wasn’t going to be a possibility,” Clift says. “So we went back to our roots in classic gastronomy.” That meant sandwiches, salads, desserts, Sunday roasts, and even his mother’s leek and potato soup.

Tippling Club had enough money in the bank to get through bad months, but a pandemic was something else entirely. Clift made the call to ask most of the staff to take a leave right at the start. “I was very emotionally broken in the first week and a half, because I really didn’t see how we were going to get past it,” he says. “Knowing what’s in the bank, knowing how much my labor and rent and everything else is, I thought we’d be closing.”

Clift huddled with head chef Ayo Adeyemi and head bartender Andrew Loudon to figure out the way forward. While he and Adeyemi were in the kitchen planning dishes, Loudon worked out a web platform to do delivery. They’d reached out to online takeout services weeks before lockdown, Clift says, having foreseen the catastrophe. But he hadn’t gotten responses. So they went on their own. “Our first week of doing delivery was a f---ing disaster to the point where I was breaking plates and being quite vocal in the restaurant,” Clift says. It was just the three of them running day-to-day operations, down from a staff of more than 20.

But it got better. By the fourth week, the entire staff was back at the restaurant to help. Clift had already gotten rental assistance from his landlord, and the government provided some as well. Liquor companies helped, too: Tippling had partnerships with or sponsorships from the likes of Rémy Martin, Rémy Cointreau, Beam Suntory, Pernod Ricard, and Bacardi.

The delivery cocktails were “huge,” Clift says. Tippling added a giant ice cube with an order of drinks like a Negroni. It also revived a specialty, the Happiness cocktail, with alcohol-containing gummi bears. “The gummi bears? Seven hundred orders in two months, for a bag of f---ing gummi bears, and people paid $10 to have them delivered.”

The restaurant did some special events. May 31 was a Virtual Tattoo Party, where guests got a bag including tequila, chips, dip, and a T-shirt sent to their homes before a Zoom event that included margarita making and even rounds of trivia. On June 5 and 6 it was a sake master class with a food demonstration, and July 4 brought a truffle dinner. Bartender Loudon did several virtual events.

Clift kept the costs down by not charging for things provided by sponsors. “The virtual dinners, we could have charged a lot of money for some of those. You’re getting a bottle of Maker’s Mark or a truffle—all this crazy shit, but all that was sponsored, and I never mark up stuff that was sponsored,” he says. “I just charge for the overall experience.”

Tippling Club broke even.

Now, Singapore has allowed dine-in operations again as of mid-June, part of a phased reopening—always with the threat of Covid-19 surging again. Things still aren’t back to pre-pandemic normalcy, as masks are required for people out in public (though they can take them off if they’re eating or drinking), and restaurants are required to use social distancing in their seating arrangements. “We worked our asses off. We did our own website, our own planning, but we pushed to still be here also,” Clift says. “I’m so happy for the support we got from customers.”

He says the restaurant actually won a new audience during the shutdown, what the government called the virus circuit breaker. People who discovered Tippling via delivery or the events are now coming in to eat at the restaurant. He cut off web orders for a couple of weeks because the staff couldn’t physically handle both running the restaurant location and the online platform. But he’s back online with a small selection of cocktails and nonperishable goods.

“I would not say that things are exactly back to normal now,” says Nancy Koh of 328 Katong Laksa. “Even though dine-in services are allowed, there are currently still restrictions on the number of customers we have in our shops due to social distancing between each customer. And with the uncertainty and the current economy situation, a lot of consumers would surely be more careful on their spending as well.”

Clift is concerned for Singapore’s once-flourishing bar scene, much of which remains closed due to the circuit-breaker restrictions. But he’s optimistic about Singapore’s dining sector going forward. He predicts there will be some big changes in the next six to eight months. “There is definitely a group of established chefs and aspiring chefs that I think have listened to the market and have actually spent the last couple of months formulating some ideas that are cool. Some might work, some might flourish, some might be franchises all over the world,” he says. “There is going to be a little burst of some really interesting things that happen.”

“In the end,” he says, “the restaurants that are strong and creative can pivot and will do just fine. It’s almost inspiring to roll with the punches.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.