Young hawker values forming bonds with elderly customers, even attends their wake: 'It's heart-wrenching'

When it comes to challenges at work, most hawkers would lament about rude customers, the increase in costs and low footfall. 

However, for Jimmy Teo Jiun Ming, something that pains him more is hearing the news of a customer's death. 

The 33-year-old owns a bak chor mee stall, Huang Da Fu, at Commonwealth Crescent Market and Food Centre. 

As the residents in that area are mostly elderly folk, this happens very often, he told AsiaOne when we visited him one afternoon. 

On several of such occasions, he'd first notice something is off when one of his regulars hasn't visited the stall for a few days. 

He'd later learn of their passing from their relatives or friends. 

"It's very heart-wrenching. These are very real stories that hawkers experience on a day-to-day basis," he told us during our conversation. 

And because he's formed such a special bond with his customers, he also ends up attending their wakes. 

"I think on an average basis, I attend a wake of a customer every month," he revealed. 

As this happens quite frequently, he's learned how to be more neutral with his emotions. 

"Otherwise, if you go in and absorb these emotions each time, you're going to be very affected. People come and go," he shared.

The rat race wasn't for him 

Prior to becoming a hawker, Jimmy was an office worker like many of his peers. 

After graduating from Ngee Ann Polytechnic with a diploma in accounting, as well as completing his national service, Jimmy found a job doing corporate communications. 

He initially chose this path because a few accounting internships made him realise that he didn't enjoy the industry. 

But after three years in an office-bound job it struck him that this wasn't the line of work for him either. 

"From my second year of work onwards, I got very jaded because there's a lot of office politics," he told us.

"I spent a lot of time replying emails, delegating work and explaining things. And I realised that was something I didn't want to do for the rest of my life."

So, at the age of 25, he quit his stable office job to dip his toes into the world of entrepreneurship. 

But some research made him realise that startup costs were very high, and as he had only worked for three years, he didn't have a lot of savings, which limited his options. 

Jimmy didn't lose heart and eventually discovered via a little Googling that the most affordable way to start his own business was to become a hawker. 

There was one problem though: Jimmy could only cook two things — fried egg and rice. 

While that didn't deter him, he decided to give himself a deadline to see whether the hawker life worked out for him. 

"I told myself that if this didn't work out by the time I turn 30, I'm going to quit my hawker job and go back to the office," he recounted. 

"Because if I cannot make a living out of this, I shouldn't be doing this forever."

But it's evident that things have worked out for him because eight years later, he's still whipping up slurp-worthy bowls of bak chor mee. 

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There were some people who were sceptical about Jimmy's decision, such as his mother. 

When he first started out as a hawker, he moved out of his family home and rented a room next to Commonwealth Crescent Food Centre so he could save on travelling costs.

However, she wasn't happy with his decision, and the two had not been on talking terms for almost a year. 

"Initially, she wasn't very supportive about the idea because her generation has the mentality that an iron rice bowl is very important," he revealed. 

"She couldn't understand why I left a very stable industry to take on something so risky." 

1.5 months of eating nothing but bak chor mee 

There are hundreds of different kinds of hawker food out there but out of the lot, Jimmy decided that he wanted to specialise in bak chor mee. 

Why? Because he feels that it is Singapore's "unofficial national dish". 

"Almost every other dish that you can find in a hawker centre setting, there is a Malaysian or Indonesian variation, be it chicken rice or wanton mee. These are not exclusively Singapore foods," he explained. 

"But bak chor mee is something that Malaysia and Indonesia don't have their own version of." 

After deciding on that, he learned how to cook it with his limited cooking skills. 

It didn't help that there aren't many recipes readily available online for him to refer to either as these are usually passed on from one generation to another. 

Eventually, he picked up the necessary skills from scratch but admitted that "the learning curve was very steep". 

So, how did he learn to cook the dish? By eating hundreds of bowls of bak chor mee across a span of one and a half months. 

To do so, he compiled a list of recommended bak chor mee by food bloggers like Ladyironchef and Danielfooddiary. 

He would then visit each stall and taste their noodles, noting down what he liked and didn't like about the dish. 

"The highest number of bowls of bak chor mee that I ate in a day was 10," he confessed. 

At night, after stuffing his face with bak chor mee, he would go to the common kitchen of his rental flat to try and come up with his idea of the perfect bowl of bak chor mee. 

And finally, after weeks of toiling, he felt ready enough to open his own hawker stall and he did so in 2016. 

"Towards the end of it, I had spent so much time with bak chor mee that I got a phobia of it," he laughed. 

It wasn't just him — his sister can't look at the dish the same way either because she spent weeks taste testing Jimmy's food. 

In fact, she hasn't eaten a bowl of it for eight years. 

"She has a lifelong phobia," Jimmy said with a chuckle.

Now, his recipe knowledge has expanded beyond just two dishes. 

"So right now, I can cook bak chor mee, fried egg and rice. Nothing else," he said with a laugh.

The ups and downs of F&B

Business for Jimmy was so good that in 2019, he managed to purchase the unit one stall down from Huang Da Fu and expanded to sell you tiao and dim sum. 

At the peak of running his business, both stalls were open 24/7, and Jimmy and his staff were divided up into three eight-hour shifts. Jimmy himself would often take on two of these shifts. 

Jimmy shared that he would sometimes even sleep in his stall on a foldable chair because he had no time to go home. 

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, he also managed to tide through because of the foresight he had about food delivery. 

Several years back, food delivery services weren't as ubiquitous as it is today and many hawkers, especially the elderly ones, thought it was a "scam", according to Jimmy.

But he wasn't fazed. 

"I did my homework. I worked on the map despite people around me not being very supportive. And my food delivery service worked out very well," he recounted.  

And this ended up saving the business during the first year of the pandemic. 

"By the time Covid-19 hit, I already had a very stable base of customers."

However, in 2021, he found that fewer people were opting for food delivery and footfall at the hawker centre was low, so Jimmy had to shutter the stall selling you tiao. 

He also decided to reduce his opening hours to 12 hours a day and eventually decreased it further to eight hours a day, six days a week. 

"At the age of 30, I realised that wasn't the lifestyle I wanted to have. It was very damaging to the body." 

And with this change in operating hours, Jimmy has had more free time to spend with his family and to pick up hobbies like bouldering. 

"People have the misconception that hawker life is bad and all about suffering," Jimmy said. 

"There are hawkers who suffer. But it's a choice and you can have work-life balance."

So, does Jimmy regret taking up this line of work and spending his youth on it? The answer is no. 

"I would have regretted it more if I didn't do it," he said.

He did admit that, occasionally, whenever he sees his friends hanging out and going for events that he is unable to attend, he would feel a little left out. 

But focusing on his business will always be a priority. 

"I came from a generation where people say, 'you only live once' (yolo). So I believe in living life to the fullest with no regrets," he shared. 

"I want to look back at my life and say that I don't have any regrets. And that I have tried everything that I've wanted to try. To me that is more than enough."

Trying the food

When we asked Jimmy which stalls impressed him the most during his one-and-a-half month bak chor mee marathon, he brought up big names like 58 Minced Meat Noodle and Hill Street Tai Hwa Pork Noodle. 

We were curious to see if his noodles lived up to those standards and ordered a basic bowl of his Signature Bak Chor Mee Pok ($4). 

The noodles, which were tossed in a savoury homemade sauce, were springy and al dente. 

While it was the smallest option on the menu, the bowl came loaded with a generous amount of minced pork, sliced pork and pork liver. 

And the sliced pork was tender and decently juicy. 

So while it may look like a regular bowl of bak chor mee, taste-wise, it was one of the better ones that we've had. 

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melissateo@asiaone.com