Hard knock life: How 4 S’pore F&B players bounced back from a dreadful 2025

SINGAPORE – Partnerships that did not work out, rude surprises, diner apathy – to be in the food and drink business in Singapore is to get a doctorate from the University of Hard Knocks.

This has proven to be a devastating year for the Singapore food scene.

There were 42 one-Michelin-starred restaurants here in 2024, but the number is now 30. Two factors contributed to the drop.

The first is that

fewer restaurants made the grade or got promoted

– there was only one new addition to the list in 2025, Omakase @ Stevens; and only one restaurant, Sushi Sakuta,

garnered a second star.

The second reflects the wave of restaurant closures in Singapore:

10 restaurants in the 2024 list

have closed, Terra Tokyo Italian lost its star and Rhubarb dropped off the list because it reinvented itself as a casual restaurant, Encore by Rhubarb.

By year’s end, another one-starred restaurant, Esora, will have closed, leaving Singapore with 29 one-starred restaurants.

Bad business has hit every kind of food business. It has not spared Chinese restaurant stalwarts such as East Ocean,

which will close on Dec 28 after 33 years;

chains such as Prive and The Manhattan Fish Market; and heritage brands such as Ka-Soh.

But there is grit among those in the trenches. Here are four stories.

Hard reset

Where: Maxi Coffee Bar, 64 Club Street
Open: 8am to 4pm (Tuesdays to Fridays), 9am to 4pm (Saturdays and Sundays), closed on Mondays
Info: @maxi.coffeebar on Instagram

The Instagram post in mid-June came from out of the blue. Maxi Coffee Bar, the always-crowded-but-still-chill coffee place in Ann Siang Hill, announced it would be closing. In two days. The post hinted at the cause of the closure, but was also cryptic.

On Oct 18, Maxi, which has been around since 2018, reopened, just up a tiled walkway across from where it used to be. The cafe is bigger, with some 30 seats, including a five-seat filter bar. It is still chill, still filled with cool people on a wet Tuesday morning.

Behind that vibe though, there was drama. There were letters from lawyers, a sudden visit from the landlord.

Co-owner Denise Lum, 35, says the cafe had shared the space with a now-defunct bar, which was the main tenant she paid rent to. For five years, that arrangement worked.

She says: “We had a relationship with them. Our teams saw each other every day, more than we see our own families. There was still that relationship and trust. We would have thought that if something was really going to go wrong, we would have been given the heads-up.”

The bar closed in May and she found out that the rent she had been paying for four months had not been passed on to the landlord. Talks started, to persuade the landlord to allow the cafe to stay open until she could find a new space. Ultimately, these broke down, Ms Lum says, and after that last weekend of service, the team had to pack up and vacate.

She had started looking around for alternative spaces in the area before the troubles began, but had not found anything suitable. In the wake of the closure, however, the community rallied around Maxi.

A regular customer offered her space in his office building across the road, which she took up. Crowdfunding yielded $12,000, with people buying credits they are now using up at the new space.

That community is why she was adamant about reopening in the area.

“I believe that for coffee, your regulars and your community are based on the terroir of the neighbourhood,” she says. “You can have a bar and you can be anywhere and people would still go to you after work. But for us, the faces that we see are people who work here and live here. It was very important that we stay in the same place.”

The four months it took to reopen the cafe were spent on renovations and getting permits from various government agencies. Now, customers walk up to what feels like the back porch of a home, with a canopy shielding them from sun and rain. There are more seats inside, about 10 more than the old place.

Because the 600 sq ft space is bigger, she can do more. The cafe offers five kinds of beans for filter coffee, up from three before. There are also plans to run coffee workshops.

She also plans to grow the retail business for Maxi’s coffee beans, which it roasts in a co-roasting space; and its canned filter coffee, priced at $7 for a 250ml can. She is looking to supply other restaurants too.

Customers have a larger menu to choose from, including more sandwiches. Among them are Aubergine And Fennel and Tuna Melt, priced at $15 each. The Madeleines with citrus curd ($17), baked to order; and the Iced Cereal Milk Latte ($8) – offerings from the old place – are still on the menu.

Ms Lum, who also owns Wildcard, a wine bar at Furama RiverFront hotel, says: “It’s not about food and drink these days, it’s about experiences. People remember how you made them feel.

“So, of course you should have really good coffee, really good wine, really good food and drink. But how can we, as F&B spaces and being in the business of people, make people feel a certain way? Because that’s what will keep them coming back. Otherwise, what’s to stop them from buying the same bottle of wine at half the price and drinking it at home?”

A new path

Where: Qin Restaurant & Bar, Levels 4 and 5 The Clan Hotel, 10 Cross Street
Open: Noon to 2.30pm, 6 to 10pm daily (restaurant); noon to 10pm daily (bar)
Tel: 6980-3535
Info:

qin.com.sg

The writing was on the wall. At Path, a modern-Asian restaurant at Marina Bay Financial Centre, chef Marvas Ng saw a drop in business.

People were still working from home at least two days a week, and corporate entertainment, which made up 70 per cent of the business, took a hit as a result of smaller budgets and fewer bookings. Diners were also spending less each time they came in.

He dropped prices by 10 to 20 per cent for his set lunches, tasting menus and a la carte offerings. That was not enough to save the restaurant, part of the 1855 group, which closed earlier in 2025.

“I wanted to find something else after four years at Path,” he says. “I thought it was time to move.”

Now, the 39-year-old chef, who left Path in August, is heading Qin, the 80-seat restaurant and bar at The Clan Hotel in Cross Street. A friend told him of a job opening within the TungLok Group, which runs the restaurant.

Chef Ng says of the conversation with his friend: “I told him I wanted to do more casual food, comfort food, heritage food, and to see my guests more often. I wanted to build a community, rather than have a restaurant that is for celebrations.”

After meeting Mr Andrew Tjioe, who runs the group, he joined the restaurant in September 2025.

“This is not marketing, okay,” he says. “I would dine at TungLok restaurants with my family at Chinese New Year. I think it’s a good brand. I talked to my parents, and they agreed with me.”

While at Path, his food had Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese accents. At Qin, he has shifted his focus to food he grew up with and which he ate while working for more than 12 years in China and Hong Kong.

Since he joined, he has revamped the menu. The only dish he has brought from Path is a steamed soya bean curd dish topped with hairy crab roe and brown crab, a favourite with diners.

Some 90 per cent of the ingredients – sea bream, threadfin, chicken, pork, salad greens – come from Singapore or neighbouring countries. The short distance from farm to table means the ingredients are fresher, he says.

He is talking to a prawn farm here to grow tiny glass prawns, to deep-fry as a snack for the bar or to work into his cheong fun or steamed rice rolls. Another potential menu offering is baby tilapia, each the length of a pinky finger. For Chinese New Year, he might offer a vegetable slaw made with sprouts and baby greens grown here.

Some of his current offerings include Sarawak Pork Ear Terrine “Qian Ceng” ($22), Straits Line Caught Local Threadfin “Qing Zeng” ($42) and Cameron “Nai Cha” ($12), a dessert inspired by the bubble tea his seven-year-old daughter loves.

The menu is a la carte, although there are lunch sets priced from $38 for a two-course meal. The sets come with rice and salad.

He says: “I want my guests to be full and to feel happy.”

The offerings are also free of the sort of “luxury” ingredients some restaurants lard their menus with – caviar, sea urchin and the like. Instead, at dinner, he has sharing dishes such as Hokkaido Pork Belly “Har Cheong” ($20), his take on prawn paste chicken; and 5 Day Dry Aged Local Kampong Chicken ($32 for half), served with housemade ginger-scallion and Teochew chilli sauces and romaine salad.

With these hearty offerings, filtered through his French culinary training, he hopes to build a loyal following. He saw how it worked when collaborating with chefs at Path.

He says: “Some of them have customers who have followed them for 10, 20 years, and some of their best dishes are not made with expensive ingredients. It would be things like beef hor fun, ee fu noodles, fried kailan. Those were the dishes the chefs put on the four-hands menus, because those were the things that their regulars like.

“These are the types of guests I want to have.”

Tasting a life

Ethos Gelato Lab
How to order: Go to

ethosgelatolab.com

or @ethosgelatolab on Instagram. There is a minimum order of $39 and a delivery fee of $10 for orders below $90

After building his gelato brand, Tom’s Palette, and running it for 17 years, Mr Chronos Chan, 50, walked away from it.

To grow his business, he had brought in an investor in 2022. They did not see eye to eye. Nine months later, he left. All traces of his involvement in the business have been scrubbed from the brand’s website – he wanted it that way, he tells The Straits Times.

In May 2025, he debuted Ethos Gelato Lab, with the unusual flavours his regulars know him for. He makes the gelato in his HDB flat and sells it online.

Before Ethos, however, he needed to “reset my mind”, acknowledging that he was not in the right mental frame to start something new. So, he gave himself about six months, during which he went for runs, swam and meditated.

Later, he did consultancy work, taught gelato-making classes and ran exhibitions for Italian company Carpigiani, which makes gelato and ice cream machines, in Singapore and overseas.

Ethos came about because old customers of his wanted to taste his gelato again, and he reasoned that he could fit making gelato at home in between his other work.

The self-taught gelato maker has a degree in mechanical engineering, and worked for an electronics brand doing research and development on freezer compressors for five years before quitting. He says he enjoyed tinkering with machinery, and became fascinated with ice cream.

In 2005, he and his then-fiancee and now-wife, Ms Eunice Soon, started Tom’s Palette, named after a friend of his. Mr Chan and Ms Soon, 48, have a 12-year-old son.

At the time, the only other local ice cream brands were The Daily Scoop, Ice Cream Gallery and Island Creamery, he says. Customers started discovering the store at Shaw Tower in Beach Road, and by 2006, it had started offering unusual flavours for that time – Salted Caramel, Salted Egg, Parmesan Cheese & Cream Crackers and White Chocolate Nori.

By 2008, it had built enough of a following to take up two neighbouring units in the building. Social media was gaining traction at the time. But he got onto Instagram only in 2015.

He says: “I asked myself whether I should focus more on social media or R&D. I decided, if our product is good, our customers would come back.

“I didn’t expect social media to make such an impact. New ice cream brands were coming out. I started to realise that my customers were the same group that had discovered us when they were in school. We lost out on attracting the younger crowd. I got onto social media too late.”

He has wised up with Ethos and is on Instagram (@ethosgelatolab). He makes about 25kg of gelato a week and offers 10 flavours, including Chrysanthemum, Mint Mosaic and Tau Sar Piah Tribute ($24.80 a pint each), and The Corn I Remember ($19.80 a pint).

For Christmas, there are three flavours, all priced at $24.80 a pint: A Slice Of Christmas, inspired by mince pies; Citrus Snowfall; and Nutty Black Forest.

He thinks a person’s life story, with its ups and downs, can be turned into a gelato flavour.

“I’ve gone through depression,” he says. “I’m a person who likes keeping things to myself. I’m trying to find ways to let go. There are people like me, who want to let go of their feelings, so they won’t be so depressed.

“I hope ice cream is something that can help. If everybody can tell me their story, I can convert that emotion into flavour. And people can understand that person better.”

On a roll

On July 31, just seven days after the launch of the 2025 Singapore Michelin Guide, one-starred Euphoria in Tras Street, known for its French-style, vegetable-forward cuisine, closed. It was unexpected.

The timing was no coincidence. Chef Jason Tan, 43, who opened the restaurant in 2020, garnered his star in 2022 and kept it for three years, wanted to go out on a high note. This year also marked his 10th time being on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list, first at Corner House and then at Euphoria.

“I was thinking about doing something different, not putting 100 things on a plate,” he says, adding that he had been toying with the idea of closing the restaurant for a year. “The market is getting worse and worse.”

His plan was to take a long break.

“And after donkey years, to celebrate Christmas one time,” he adds. “Every year, my friends would have a Christmas party. I can go only after work when they are almost done. I’d get there close to midnight and eat leftover food. And they are already wrapping up. But it’s natural for our job, and I respect that.”

Will he get to celebrate Christmas in 2025?

The “break” has not quite materialised. Soon after he closed Euphoria, he started getting asked to do consultancy work. Instead of travelling for pleasure, he has been travelling for work. Recently, he was in Bangkok to talk to entrepreneurs looking to open a restaurant there.

He has also completed a project in Kuala Lumpur and one in Singapore, where he drew up menus, sourced ingredients, trained staff and set up operating procedures.

He is working with a hotel group here to improve its food and drink offerings, and is consulting on the menu for a newly opened casual restaurant, Cloudfields, in Tan Boon Liat Building. In the new year, he will be in Tokyo to create the menu and train staff for a French bistro there.

For Chinese New Year in 2026, he is collaborating with Legacy, a local gourmet bak kwa brand, to put out a bespoke flavour.

Although he seems done with fine dining, he does not rule out opening such a restaurant in Vietnam or Indonesia.

He says: “The restaurant scene in Asia is saturated. Like in Singapore, there are too many restaurants. When I opened Corner House in 2016, it was the first fine-dining restaurant that had opened in many years. But you see, so many have now opened, and our market is not ready for this.

“If you ask me to open a restaurant of my own, I don’t think Singapore would be my choice. I would do it overseas. Vietnam and Indonesia, not a lot of competition. Manpower, rental, everything is cheaper. What you pay for one staff here, you can get three or four elsewhere.”

He and a friend are also thinking of selling wallet-friendly Western food in foodcourts, offering chicken chop, roast chicken and affordable steaks.

“This is just casual brainstorming,” he says. “I think the food can reach out to more people. It’s good food at real foodcourt prices. Some foodcourt and hawker food is getting very expensive.”

He thinks fine dining is not his future, at least for now.

“How long can I do it for?” he asks. “Until I’m 50, and I’m still in the kitchen yelling and doing super-detailed food with tweezers? Can I still do that when I’m 55 years old?”