From Trading Desk to Noodle Stall: A Singapore Success Story

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A decade ago, Watson Lim thought he was on a glide path to a career in finance. Just a few years out of college, he was brokering equities at Singapore’s second-largest bank, poring over earnings statements and prospectuses to pitch trades and investments to clients. It was the sort of generational advancement his father had envisioned, a big step up from the grueling hours he’d spent cooking prawn noodles at one of the city-state’s storied hawker stalls.

After stints at Citigroup Inc. and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., Lim had earned enough money to take a yearlong break and travel the world. Then in 2017, as he was preparing to return to his career in finance, he got devastating news: His father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

With nobody to run the stall, Lim took his father’s place in the kitchen. “I just decided I’ll do it as long as I can,” he says.

His father died the following year. Today, Lim is still manning the stall his dad opened in 1966, specializing in the same dish: noodles with pork ribs and shelled prawns in a savory-sweet broth, which delivers both rich flavor and the calories that working-class Chinese immigrants wanted in Singapore’s early years.

While banking is hardly casual, running the street stall is on an entirely other level of demanding. Previously, Lim would get to work at 9 a.m., take a lunch break at noon, and knock off around 5 p.m. Now he wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and doesn’t close the stall until 3 p.m. He’s open six days a week, and there’s no letup on the seventh day, because that’s when he has to clean the stall and prepare for the following week.

“I really didn’t know how important time was until I started doing this,” he says.

Things got off to a rocky start when Lim had trouble figuring out the distinctive flavor his father had mastered in his signature dish. The key is the broth—simmering pork bones overnight to draw out their savoriness, then adding the prawns to balance it with a hint of sweetness. Although it’s more work, Lim turned his back on modern processed ingredients in favor of freshness. The results seem to be paying off: His father’s regulars have stuck with him, and a line snakes out onto the street nearly every morning.

Singapore has more than 13,000 hawker stalls, housed in massive government complexes and smaller corner coffee shops. The stalls have won global acclaim and Michelin stars, and last year they were recognized by Unesco as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The stall Lim’s father set up prospered, and so did Singapore. By the time Lim was born in 1988, the city-state had become so wealthy and educated that running food stalls was no longer something most of his generation aspired to. Lim remembers resenting being forced to help out as a teenager, giving up Friday nights with friends to be at the stall first thing Saturday morning.

He’s still fascinated by finance, but these days he invests sparingly because he can’t find the time to run a deeper analysis of securities. And while his banking background helps him keep the books, Lim has shied away from doing the one thing he would have wanted to see as an investor—scale up the business. Instead, he’s focused on maintaining his stall’s quality and trying to deliver the same flavor his father once did.

“Being a broker, getting a good sales number or a good commission was an achievement for me,” he says. “In comparison, though, hands-down, I’ll take a customer compliment any day now.”

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