It turned out to be the right decision - despite the pandemic, Mentai-Ya’s first outlet broke even “in four months”. He invested around $30K back then with another partner, who has since parted with the biz on good terms. Keat Hwee opened Mentai-Ya Japanese Cuisine’s first outlet mid-2020 at a Bukit Panjang kopitiam “which was lacking in Japanese food around the area”. “It was do or die and a leap of faith,” he shares. This included donburi drizzled with mentaiko (spicy cod roe) mayonnaise. So he decided to scale down popular dishes from his now-defunct Japanese restaurant and make them more affordable in a hawker setting. My family just couldn’t afford it,” he shares. “I love Japanese food a lot, but it was always luxury food for me as I came from a low-income household. He saw an opportunity to resume his dream of running a Japanese F&B biz (he had cleared part of his debts by then). Then the pandemic struck, and demand for cab rides plummeted. Wanted to sell “affordable Japanese food that you can eat every day” Those two years were dark days for me, and I was kind of hiding away from the world,” Keat Hwee shares. “I was driving 12 hours every day just to make repayments.
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In order to pay off his debts of around “$120K”, he decided to work as a Grab driver instead of returning to his previous engineering gig which would’ve required him to relocate to Jakarta. We lost quite a bit of money and failed miserably.” “We tried for a while after but soon closed down.
“ closed shop when we were told to remove our outdoor seats, which made up 60 percent of our seating capacity ,” he adds. Not bad, considering the ex-sales engineer says his first F&B business, a restaurant named Tenryu Japanese Dining and Teahouse that operated from 2015 to 2018, “failed badly”. No part of this story can be reproduced without permission from 8days.sg Previous F&B venture a failure Īll photos cannot be reproduced without permission from 8days.sg And especially in this case, since Sunshine Place’s food court has been closed for more than a year.” Which is why the Japanese-themed brunch and dessert eatery serves a wide-ranging menu, including coffee and chirashi, along with Japanese-accented sandos, breakfast plates and gelato. He explains: “Choa Chu Kang is a place that lacks great cafe food.
Enter two- month-old Coffee & Chirashi, a 28-seater cafe tucked away in Sunshine Place shopping mall at Choa Chu Kang. When he’s not running Mentai-Ya Japanese Cuisine – a popular modern rice bowl hawker chain with five outlets across Singapore – he’s searching for new locations and untapped markets to explore.
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