Multi-generational F&B families: How S’pore food brands like Nya Nya and LiXin carry heritage forward

SINGAPORE – Two family-run heritage food brands are navigating succession in a changing food and beverage scene.

At Wisma Atria’s Food Republic foodcourt, Nya Nya – which opened on Jan 1 – covers three generations, from founder Lilian Tan, 79, who started cafe Nonya Delicatessen in Bukit Timah back in 1980, to her son Damian Lim and his wife Lynne Chong, both 56, and their children.

LiXin Teochew Fishball Noodles, which began as a pushcart in Kempas Road in 1968 under founder Lim Lee Seng, 79, has grown to 19 outlets and is managed by his son Eddie Lim, 55.

For both businesses, the ongoing challenge is to modernise operations while protecting recipes built on decades of hard work.

Heritage and origins

Nya Nya’s origins stem from Nonya Delicatessen. Madam Tan had started with a home-based business preparing tiffin lunches for students and office workers. She recalls waking in the wee hours to cook with the help of three small rice cookers. Her children peeled 120 eggs each day, shelled prawns and cleaned up before school. Her husband delivered the lunches in a Mitsubishi station wagon.

When a shop unit at Bukit Timah Plaza was offered at a rent of $1,500 a month, Madam Tan and her younger sister took up the space and moved operations there, churning a profit within the first month. Recipes came from her Melaka-rooted Peranakan heritage. 

The brand name Nya Nya, chosen by her grandson Daryl Lim, 26, refers to mother in Peranakan. It is a brand extension of Nonya Delicatessen, aimed at a wider base of diners while retaining the essence of its predecessor.

In the early days of LiXin Teochew Fishball Noodles, Mr Lim Lee Seng and his wife worked a punishing routine.

Mr Eddie Lim recalls his father going to Jurong Fishery Port at 3pm, after the stall served its last customer for the day, to buy fish. From 5pm, Mr Eddie Lim, along with his parents and grandmother, spent the evening scraping meat from the fish skin with metal spoons.

After dinner, his father went to bed by 9pm and woke at 2am to head to the stall, where he would make fishballs and fry sambal chilli and pork lard, all on his own. 

“He was so strict about quality, he didn’t allow anyone to handle the main food preparation and cooking,” Mr Eddie Lim says. “He cooked everything by look and feel.”

The family moved the business to the Kempas Road hawker centre in the 1970s, then to Kim Keat Palm Market & Food Centre in Toa Payoh in 1990, where the elder Mr Lim still helms the stall with two helpers.

Passing the baton

Nya Nya’s Mr Damian Lim grew up learning about Peranakan food as his mother cooked it daily for their family meals. He started helping out at her eatery during his secondary school days. He became a flight attendant for three years, but quit to join Madam Tan, eventually taking over Nonya Delicatessen in 1997 when she retired.

He introduced the first operational change by cutting the number of items on the menu so she could scale back on labour-intensive dishes such as popiah, which involved cutting vegetables by hand.

He continued running the shop while raising his children, literally in the kitchen. He has four sons – aged 20, 22, 26 and 28 – and a daughter, 14.

Chores for the children included cleaning the floor and washing dishes. As they grew older, they learnt to cut fishcake and tofu, peel eggs and shell prawns. Later, they learnt to handle noodles and master timing and temperature. The children followed their parents to the shop from a young age, with roles assigned gradually as they showed more interest.

At LiXin, the handover took longer.

Mr Eddie Lim helped out from age nine, washing dishes and serving customers, but the experience pushed him away. “Since a young age, I told myself I would never want to be a hawker. I hated everything about it, from the long hours to the smell of fish lingering on my clothes.”

He remembers smelling of yellowtail daily and taxi drivers asking if his mother was a fishmonger.

He returned only in 2006, after 12 years in the car trade. At 36, he decided it was time to try running a business.

“When I quit the car trade, my dad was 60. Business was booming at his stall. I thought to myself: How hard can it be to do what my dad did?”

Mr Eddie Lim decided to learn his father’s trade and grow the business. His father welcomed him to help at the stall. 

He spent nine months working side by side with his father, observing processes that had never been written down.

The first and critical change he introduced upon joining Mr Lim Lee Seng was investing $8,000 of his savings in a fishball-making machine to ease the strain on his father, whose wrists hurt from decades of preparing the fish paste by hand.

Early attempts to use the machine failed. “The first few days, we had to delay the opening hours of the stall by two hours. Customers scolded us,” he says. But once the family mastered the process after two weeks, it halved production time for 20kg of fish paste.

In 2012, he convinced his father the time was ripe for setting up a central kitchen. By then, LiXin had expanded to four outlets and the duo pooled $500,000 to set up centralised production at a 2,000 sq ft space in Woodlands Loop. The central kitchen allowed the brand to safeguard recipes, strengthen consistency and support expansion.

But there were attempts at modernising the business which his father disagreed with, such as the use of a sauce-dispensing machine prototype. The elder Mr Lim felt staff training was a better option than relying on a machine to blend the sauce for the noodles; a six-month trial of the machine proved the elder Mr Lim right. 

Other changes which worked included Mr Eddie Lim’s introduction of bak chor mee to the menu a decade ago, which earned them 20 per cent more customers. In July 2025, LiXin launched a further refined version with braised mushrooms.

He also implemented self-ordering kiosks at standalone outlets such as the one at ESR BizPark @ Chai Chee.

Over at Nya Nya, Mr Damian Lim says his children contribute largely in areas relating to the current digital landscape and social media. His eldest son, who has his own career in a non-related field, gives ideas for content creation and budgeting. 

At present, Mr Daryl Lim, 26, and Mr Daniel Lim, 22, work full time at Nya Nya helping with food preparation and taking orders. Their youngest brother Damian Lim (Junior), 20, helps out casually while waiting to enlist in national service. Their sister, in Secondary 3, handles the brand’s social media accounts.

Mr Damian Lim says: “We don’t give them job titles, they’re called ‘Towkay Kia’. At the end of the day, ours is a family business and we don’t run it like an organisation. They are my children, children whom I love dearly, so I won’t want to label them or put them into a role.”

He adds: “The bond with our children has always been strong. Whenever our children step forward to help and lighten the load, we feel very touched. As they grow older, we can see that they understand how hard we have worked to raise the family and we are grateful that they are willing to play their part.”

At Nya Nya, disagreements are resolved through direct conversation. “If you’ve done something wrong, just apologise and move on. And if anyone feels that they have been wronged, they can speak up, explain and we can discuss,” Mr Damian Lim says. 

Mr Daryl Lim quips: “Of course I do get scolded at work, and we do have talks about the business. But my parents and I communicate a lot and are always transparent with one another.”

For LiXin’s Mr Eddie Lim, the difficulty came in getting his father to trust him with the process of making the fishballs. “He would allow me to watch, but not actually make the fishballs with him.”

His father had neither written recipes nor set up standard operating procedures (SOPs).

This led to issues when the younger Mr Lim invested $100,000 to set up his own outlet in Old Airport Road in 2007. He says: “I had to keep calling my father on the phone because the fishballs would not set properly. The ones I made were either too mushy or too hard.”

Six months later, his father told him to shut down the business as it was floundering. 

Mr Eddie Lim recalls: “I was more relieved than upset. I had been working at my stall for 15 hours daily.”

But he learnt lessons from the setback, which he applied at the next outlet they opened at Ion Orchard in 2009. This time, he took down his father’s recipe and set up SOPs. His parents also temporarily stopped operating their Toa Payoh stall for a year to work alongside him, ensuring operations at the new outlet ran smoothly.

Remuneration

At Nya Nya, Mr Damian Lim adopts full transparency with his children. “I always give them what is fair to them,” he says. He believes passion must drive the work. The family agrees that satisfaction comes from building something meaningful together rather than corporate-style compensation.

When LiXin’s Mr Eddie Lim joined his father 20 years ago, he lived on his savings for a year as his father did not pay him. “I had no income,” he says. He funded machinery purchases himself and swallowed losses at his Old Airport Road stall.

At the Ion Orchard outlet, he worked from 5am to 11pm for three years before he drew a salary of $2,000 to $3,000 a month. At times, when he was short of cash, his father would give him some money to tide him over.

Looking ahead

Nya Nya offers 27 items, including signature dishes Mee Rebus ($6.90) and Curry Noodles ($8.90), made using Madam Tan’s recipes. Mr Damian Lim handles the bulk of the cooking, while his wife prepares the kueh and desserts. 

He hopes Nya Nya can eventually reach five outlets, one for each child, before he turns 60, and that the fourth generation continues the legacy. 

He adds that it would be “lovely” if all his children took over together, but does not see succession as an obligation.

“At the end of the day, it is important that they pursue what they want to do and what their heart wants,” he says. “If it’s passion, it’s not work. It must not be a chore. If it’s a chore, it will not last a mile.”

Since 2017, LiXin’s Mr Lim Lee Seng has left business decisions to Mr Eddie Lim, while he focuses on running his Toa Payoh stall.

The stalwarts of the brand are Fishball Noodle ($6.30) and The Folks’ Favourite ($9.20) – which comes with a large crispy wonton skin, soft-boiled egg and minced meat.

The younger Lim, who has a 19-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter, does not expect his children to join the business. His son has been working part-time at a cafe since January and has shown no interest in joining LiXin.

“I did ask him to help out at LiXin when he finished his junior college studies, but he feels it is not cool,” he says.

Mr Eddie Lim is now focused on training promising young employees with succession in mind and plans to improve product quality and service in 2026. He says: “It is time to take stock and really see what customers are getting from us.

“We want to build awareness that our fishballs are made from 100 per cent yellowtail and not surimi or fillers like flour.”

On expanding to 19 outlets, Mr Lim says: “I ask myself if we are on the right track. Are we losing the quality? Are we doing justice to the brand? 

“It was at Ion Orchard that we decided to use my father’s name as our business’ brand name. There is this pressure to make him proud and not let him lose face.”